How to Start Engaging Your Customers Using Email

For many small businesses, nothing beats email marketing for effectiveness, convenience and affordability. According to Salesforce.com, more than 90 percent of consumers use email on a daily basis. Although email is on the downswing as a personal communications method, it’s still the number-one digital way to stay in touch with friends and family, topping texting and social media.

And for receiving marketing messages, email puts other methods to shame. In fact, more than three-quarters of consumers prefer email for permission-based marketing communication, and that number has risen by 5 percent since 2008.

To make the most of your email marketing communications, it’s critical to take steps to truly engage your customers. Here’s how.

Set clear expectations

Most consumers these days are quite protective of their email addresses, and the last thing they want is more spam clogging their inboxes. Before you ever get to the point of sending email marketing messages, you must provide prospective subscribers with good reasons for opting in — such as the promise of timely, valuable content — and create clear expectations about what you’ll be sending and with what frequency.

Welcome new subscribers

This is a great way to get off on the right foot and set a positive tone for future communications. Express appreciation that new subscribers or customers have selected your company, and include helpful information like key contacts and links to informative resources.

Let subscribers know you’ll be contacting them periodically, and provide an easy way to opt out if they’ve signed up in error or change their minds. This is easily accomplished with a good email marketing automation software package.

Segment your audience

One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to email marketing. As Mashable notes, indiscriminately bombarding your subscribers with irrelevant content is a big no-no — and a good way to end up with a pile of “unsubscribes.”

Your clients may span various industries, interests and other unique identifiers. Break subscribers into groups that make sense, and target email content accordingly. It’s fine to send a monthly newsletter to all subscribers, but you’ll need to personalize at least some of your communications for your various segments.

Make it about them, not you

Many small business owners are excited about their companies, and rightfully so. But filling email marketing communications with tales of your greatness won’t work. Customers care about your company or its products only to the extent that it benefits them. To engage your customers with email, you need two common threads: how your product or service benefits customers, and why they choose you instead of the competition.

Be current

Email messages that reference pop culture and current events often strike the right note in customer engagement, Mashable notes. Staying on top of what’s trending can be a lot of work, but it can pay off with engaging email messages that customers share with others. If you know key events are coming up — for example, the Super Bowl — create different versions of your email for the different possible outcomes.

Make subscribers feel like insiders

Everyone likes to feel like VIPs. Create this feeling by sharing “secret” information that your subscribers get to see first. Sharing exciting news or asking subscribers for their input makes them feel included in your company. It also sends the message that you care about their opinions and that you’re providing them with premium access that not everyone receives.

Don’t just email — engage

Whether you’re a pro at email marketing or you’re just getting your feet wet, engaging customers is key. Creating emails that include consistent, well-crafted, valuable information will strengthen your relationships with customers, retain their business and even persuade some to sing your praises publicly.

How to Start Engaging Your Customers Using Email

Top Tricks To Keep Your Customers Happy

According to Horst Schulze, President of Ritz Carlton, “unless you have 100% customer satisfaction…you must improve.” By that measuring stick, virtually every business in America can stand to improve, especially when it comes to keeping customers happy. Although 100% customer satisfaction is not realistic, aiming for that is imperative. But, how do you keep your customers happy?

Well, we are glad you asked.

Under Promise and Over Deliver:

To best illustrate this point, consider the act of setting deadlines. If you overestimate how long it will take you to complete a project and then get it done earlier, you look like a hero. Conversely, if you over promise and don’t fulfill your lofty goal, you look bad. Thus, it is wise to always overestimate the time it will take you do something. Then, surprise your customers with faster service.

Another way to look at this is to provide an extra service and/or product in addition to whatever the customer has bought. This could include throwing in a coupon for a discount on their next purchase, or could include giving a set of knives to customers who buy a kitchen appliance. The point being, give your customers something extra. Something they didn’t expect (even if it’s small), and you will keep them happy.

Offer Something Different:

Walt Disney was a pioneer and visionary in his day. In fact, it’s hard to image the world today without Disney’s influence. A world without Mickey Mouse, Goofy or Donald Duck would be a sad existence indeed. To say nothing of the beautiful, magical princesses he helped bring to life, and we can’t forget his world renowned amusement parks. In 1955, after years of planning, Walt Disney opened Disneyland Park. Walt Disney World Resort opened its doors in 1971.

The amusement parks of Walt Disney are more than simple amusement parks. They are instead a land of magic and family fun. This was Walt’s vision. He wanted a place that would delight children and adults alike. As a result, he hit on an untapped market. He created something that was unheard of at that point in history. Today, even though there are thousands of amusement parks across America, Disney World and Disneyland still stand above them all. Why? Because, they still something no other amusement parks do, a magical, inclusive, fantasy-like experience.

Walt’s success was a result of his tapping into an unmet need. You can do this too. All you have to do is think outside the box and look for ways to alter your business so you are offering something that no one else is, and you will garner loyal, happy customers.

Follow Up:

After you have performed a service or provided a product to someone, follow up. Ask them how they like the product or if their service was satisfactory. This will give you the opportunity to fix any problems that might have occurred. It also shows your customers you care about their satisfaction. They are more than a paycheck. People love feeling valued, especially in today’s society where customer service is rare.

The list of tricks for increasing customer satisfaction is vast. Other ways to keep customers happy include offering new products/services regularly, giving loyal customers rewards for being such, asking customers their opinions and putting their suggestions into practice and making sure to always go the extra mile for your customers. When you perfect all these elements and those listed above, you will be rewarded with happy customers, who will tell their friends and family about your business. Walt Disney summed up the art of customer service best when he said, “Do what you do so well that they (customers) will want to see it (or buy from you) again and bring (tell) their friends.”

Top Tricks To Keep Your Customers Happy

Turn Website Visitors into Leads and Sales

Every day, your site gets hits and attracts visitors. But how many of those turn into leads and sales? If you’re not sure — of if you know that your conversion rate could stand improvement — take advantage of these best practices to start building relationships and maximizing revenue through your site.

Attract the right customers

You’re likely using the latest search-engine marketing techniques, pay-per-click advertising and other promotional strategies to attract visitors to your site. (If you’re not, you should be.) But what happens once your promotions pay off and the traffic starts pouring in? Even with a huge influx of visitors, you need conversions to leads and then sales to be successful.

Did you know that 98 percent of visitors to B2B sites won’t ever convert — or even join your mailing list? You need visitors who really are looking for your specific product or service; make sure your off-site messaging in ads and SEO campaigns is targeted correctly.

Connect immediately with clear messaging

Don’t make visitors wonder what your site is all about. As Inc. magazine notes, fully 85 percent of prospective customers abandon sites within the first five seconds. That means they’re either at the wrong place, or they’re not finding what they’re looking for immediately. You only have a few seconds to keep your prospects’ attention, so make your words and images count.

Make sure your site is functioning properly

You don’t want your visitors encountering broken links or pages that just don’t work as intended. Make sure your web team is testing on a variety of platforms, browsers and monitors to ensure that everything looks good and works well. Make sure to build in methods for capturing leads — and make sure it’s easy for visitors to contact you without hunting around.

Track, track, track

You should have Google Analytics or another reliable tracking program installed, and your team should review the data frequently. Review information on your visitors like geographic location, browsers and operating systems used, whether they’re visiting on a mobile device, what pages they visit, how long they stay on the site, referring pages and exit pages from your site. Use the information to continually improve the browsing experience on your site.

Optimize conversions

Getting visitors to your site, engaging them and keeping them there all move you toward the ultimate goal: conversions. The number of visitors who perform a desired action on your site versus your total visitors is your conversion rate. Desired actions can include completing and submitting a contact form, requesting a proposal, signing up for a free trial, making a purchase and others.

About Money offers advice on calculating your rate. For an online store, the formula might look like:

Number of orders / Number of visitors x 100 = Conversion Rate Percentage

Improving the conversion rate is critical for boosting sales without the need to also increase site traffic.

Follow up effectively

Even more important than what happens before a conversion is what happens afterward. To turn one-time customers into loyalists for your brand, implement favorable return policies, make it easy to contact customer service, make your security and data-use policies transparent, and ask for feedback. Use email marketing automation software to keep customers engaged with compelling content and special offers.

Turning visits into leads and sales

Getting visitors to your site is just the first step. To convert them to leads and sales, you’ll need pinpoint targeting, an attractive and highly functional site, clear messaging, effective tracking and favorable conversion rates.

Turn Website Visitors into Leads and Sales

5 Reasons to Giveaway Relevant Content to Generate Leads

Your audience expects it. They want valuable relevant copy that informs and inspires. The best thing about giveaways is that it can make them reconsider their perspective and look to you as an authority within the field. If you are doing business today online, giveaways are an essential marketing tool to generate interest and keep prospects clicking.

Reasons to Giveaway Content

1. Build Interest

Content can establish a need to know motivation that drives engagement. If we are talking about better time management, a short ebook can give them some useful tools and perspective about the topic. However, clients come to realize that there is much to know about time management and how much easier it would be to turn to an expert for additional support and resources. This content is useful to the needs of your client.

2. Demonstrate Leadership

Quality content establishes authority. Those in new and emerging businesses can use content to demonstrate their expertise within an area and showcase the benefits of establishing a relationship with the company and brand. Being considered a leader within a field is one way to differentiate your business. Show them what you know.

3. Get more views

Giveaways can be shared. The audience that is interested in your material knows others within their sphere of influence that could find the material useful. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms allow people to share material with a click of a button. Old-school individuals can forward the email and attachments to others and print it out for reference. The initial audience reached is only the tip of the iceberg of the potential out there.

4. Generate a Reputation

Content establishes trust. Those without a well-known brand need to work smarter to have others see them as a reputable and reliable business. Good content giveaways show that the business cares about the interests of customers and does research to specifically address the needs of customers.

5. Prep for Purchase

Giveaways get prospects ready to buy-in. When selling services or products, it is generally known that it takes 3-7 touches for people to engage with your company prior to making a purchase. A giveaway helps to educate consumers and offers information during the decision-making process. When they finally call, they are ready to buy.

What to Giveaway

1. Video

Videos are the number one marketing tool to provide for free. Psychologically, people tune into movement and the emotions expressed on video. This is part of man’s psychological makeup. Invest in creating some quality video to post on websites, link to within emails and upload onto YouTube. Use visual channels to draw more interest.

2. Freebies

Free stuff is always appreciated. People love something that is useful and free. They may have to share an image with a special embedded code or make a purchase beginning at a minimum amount to qualify. Individuals love receiving something extra in the mail.

3. Written Content

Ebooks and pdf downloadables are useful for qualifying leads. Checklists and written content help customers get a feel for your voice and the type of materials that you can offer to help them meet their needs. Remember that your business is only there to help customers find a solution to their problems. This material helps to “touch” prospects and establish a relationship with them prior to their purchase.

Giveaways generate more awareness of your company and its associated products or services. They provide exposure to more leads and help to qualify them en route to making a purchase. Begin strategizing your giveaways today.

5 Reasons to Giveaway Relevant Content to Generate Leads

RocketResponder now Integrates with Zapier

We’re excited to say our integration with Zapier is now complete! Zapier is a service that allows you to connect over 400 apps together, to do really cool stuff you couldn’t do before. And, it’s incredibly easy!

For instance, you might already be using Google Forms to collect survey results from customers. Now with Zapier you can add those customers to your RocketResponder list automatically!

RocketResponder now Integrates with Zapier

Why Your Blog Should Line Up With Your Email Marketing Campaign

One of the best ways that you can advertise your business is through an email marketing campaign. Almost everyone today has an email and reaching them via it can be a great way to draw attention to your business sand the services you offer.

That being said, email marketing should not work alone. After all, who has ever simply used email as a way to reach their consumer base? Not many have, because it is not the “be all end all” of marketing, although it can be a great start. One way that you can boost your email marketing campaign and make it better than ever is through blog content. Here is not only why you should be doing this but some of the ways that you can.

Why Blog Content?

Internet blogs are a fantastic way to get information out to consumers in a short and easy to digest fashion. Almost everyone follows some type of online blog and many will admit to being suckered into buying products and services based off of blog posts and blogger recommendations; whether it was content created by the business itself or not. IF your blog is connected to your email marketing that takes your ability to bring in consumers to an entirely new level. By lining up your marketing to your blog content, you have successfully brought together two aspects of your business. If you can correctly and successfully bring these two part of advertising and marketing together you can create a highly successful model that top business and companies use to bring in their consumers and clients.

How Can I Do This?

Bringing together your email marketing and your blog content does not have to be difficult. In fact, all you really have to do is line up the messages and find a way to feature both of these marketing techniques within each other. Some ways you can do this are:

Link To Your Blog in Your Newsletter

Do you have a weekly or monthly newsletter you put out? Does it have a lot of relevant information? If this is something your consumers enjoy consider linking them to your blog within the email. This will take your consumers from passive to active and give you a better chance of gaining more traffic. If you do not yet have an email newsletter consider opening polls on your blog to gauge interest levels of current consumers.

Use Post Magnets

Your blog should do more than just service those who already have an email subscription; it should entice new ones! Older posts can be just as popular as newer posts and having lead magnets on your more popular posts can lead to more email subscribers. For example, a beauty bog has a review that has bene getting a lot of traffic and the owner wants to use the traffic to gain email subscribers who are often the ones who buy her new products. Even though this post was form before she had a subscription service she went back in and edited the post so that it include a paragraph about email subscription and how it is the best way to contact her and stay involved in the community. The post is still garner traffic and this has increased her chances of picking up more subscribers.

Create A Blog Signature

You don’t just need to use your blog to promote your email, you can use your email to promote your blog. Whether it is a casual email to consumers or a business email between yourself and another source, consider creating an ever changing email signature. Link to your most current bog post at the end of your signature, no matter what email it is. This will spread your new posts throughout your contacts and lead to more traffic.

Email marketing and blog content go hand in hand. Although email marketing is a great way to help your business get started, linking your blog to your strategy will just make you that much more relevant.

Why Your Blog Should Line Up With Your Email Marketing Campaign

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs an Email Marketing Service

Email marketing is an integral part of your communication with clients. From a new, informative blog post to the debut of a new product, it’s important that you keep your customers informed about your business.

If anything, a successful email marketing campaign reminds existing and potential clients that you are there, and your services are relevant in the industry. In today’s online marketing scene, it’s regarded as highly unprofessional to send subscribers a mass message via a standard email account. In fact, there are a number of mistakes you may be making that cause a promising campaign to go south. If your email marketing is failing, ask for help. Using a reputable marketing service can help you increase your successes but also track your failures, leading to overall improvement in your advertising efforts.

1. A professional company and their provided software can vastly improve the visual design of your emails.

Regardless of how informative and catchy your email copy is, research shows the incredible impact of even the slightest change in a page’s visual design. When you seek consultation on minor advertising nuances like the color of a button, size of text, or placement of an image on the screen, you’re given information only privy to the most advanced data-miners in the industry. A quality software program provides templates proven to maximize audience response.

Still, a visually stunning email may not be enough when a business is trying to achieve a certain goal with their subscribers. If the easy-to-use interface of your service’s program comes up short, live help is always a quick call away.
2. Compelling copy and call-to-action lines are important, but personalization is key.

Customers like to feel acknowledged, and when they sign on to your mailing list, it’s important to address them by name as opposed to “subscriber.” Sophisticated marketing programs do the tedious work for you, determining the user’s first name and personalizing emails each and every time. Research shows that a customized greeting line among other appearances will drastically improve your campaign efforts.

Business owners should also seek help in producing segmented email lists. Software can help you target specific groups of people depending upon their age, gender, expressed interests, and more. Many campaigns fail because advertisers blast messages to the wrong people. Varying your approach to individual clients can enhance your campaign outcomes, and marketing services will advise you on the best practices.

3. Using a professional software service eliminates silly mistakes often made by non-technical users.

Everyone is human, but for busy professionals, mistakes are the rule–not the exception. Many people thwart their marketing efforts due to minor mistakes they never even realize they made, and by then, it’s too late. Your reputation is everything when you’re selling a product or service, and the visual, grammatical, and other aspects of your messages should always exude professionalism.

One common error is failing to update your users on a regular schedule, as email frequency is just as significant as the content of their messages. A reputable marketing service can help optimize your email schedule. They can also ensure no embarrassing mistakes slip, such as copying your entire email list in the “To” line, effectively violating subscribers’ privacy. No matter how little you know about HTML or other technical aspects of your online messaging, a complete software program can help you garner professional respect.

4. Quality autoresponders increase communication and save you time.

It’s nearly impossible to manually track the behaviors and facts about individual customers, such as how often they buy your product, when they subscribed, and the kinds of services they tend to seek. Failed marketing campaigns make poor use of autoresponders, timed email messages that trigger upon a particular event such as an initial subscription, birthday, upcoming appointment, or service renewal date. These preprogrammed notes also thank your customers and provide them with information tailored to their online activity with your company.

Technology can help improve your campaign by meeting the personal needs of each and every client. It’s smart to seek help from an email marketing service. They provide important outcome data on advertising practices, and if you’re struggling, they have valuable advice for sophisticated autoresponse.

5. A reliable marketing software company will make sure you comply with email laws.

Companies with their eye on a financial prize tend to forget there are complex laws set in place regarding advertising practices. If you want peace of mind that your campaign complies with regulation, an email marketing service does the tedious research for you. From violating SPAM laws to failing to honor people’s requests to unsubscribe, many otherwise brilliant campaigns are ruined due to ignorance.

You’ll boost customer satisfaction and trust by using a professional service that’ll keep you up-to-date on all the legal and other ramifications of your communication with clients. Advanced software can help you project experience and expertise as a seasoned company in your field, impressing clients and leading to successful conversions.

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs an Email Marketing Service