Free Marketing Audit

Archive for email marketing

Build Your List With Pippity

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

pippity-iconIf you are anything like me, even though you’ve heard popup forms can help you grow your e-mail list, you’ve resisted using them because we hate being interrupted by them right when we are trying to figure out if a site has useful information or not. Now there is a plugin that can help you build your list without aggravating your website visitors.

The Pippity WordPress plugin not only makes it super easy to create great looking popup forms, it also give you tons of control over how that popup behaves.

Creating a popup form is dead simple. You pick a template, customize it by following the steps in the wizard, hook it up to your email list provider and you’re good to go. While it’s simple to get up and running, you can still get fairly sophisticated with your design.

Pippity has built in support for the following email list providers:

  • Aweber
  • Madmimi
  • MailChimp
  • Constant Contact
  • 1ShoppingCart
  • Get Response
  • Campaign Monitor
  • Graphic Mail
  • iContact

Is your email provider not on the list? Not to worry, you can cut an paste your sign up form html into Pippity and it will take care of the rest (this is method I used to set up Pippity to work with Infusionsoft).

Once you create your form you can control when it displays. You can specify the time before it appears, whether you want to wait until someone gets finishes reading an article, and how many pages someone views before they see the popup. You can set filters to exclude the popup from certain pages. You can also control whether a popup shows depending on the page or post category.

Pippity also track analytics so you can see how well your popup form (or forms, you can create as many as you like) are performing. If you create more than one popup you can compare analytics between any two forms. You can even to A/B testing with Pippity forms.

Pippity’s pricing is incredibly affordable, starting at $49 for a single site. You can get a 5 site license for $87, and if you are a developer you can get an umlimited license for $164

You can learn more about Pippity by viewing the 30 second video on the homepage of their website.

Comments (0)
Categories : Marketing
Tags : , ,

3 Tips To Avoid The Mobile Trash Can

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Monday, November 21st, 2011

trashcanMany of us try to keep our email inboxes under control by periodically checking them using a phone or other mobile device. Many people are using their smart phones as their primary “computer”; they do not have a laptop or other computer at home. As this trend continues, marketers need to pay attention to the details about their messages if they want to reach their target audience. Here are three tips to help you keep your messages out of the mobile trash can:

  1. Create crystal clear subject lines – When people use their phones to quickly check their email, they are often quickly scanning to decide whether to delete or save for later reading. If they don’t recognize you or they can’t tell why they should read your message from the subject line, chances are your message is going in the delete pile. Stay out of the trash bin by writing subject lines.
  2. Create plain text and HTML email versions. While most devices render HTML well, some email clients default to displaying plain text. Make sure your emails are easy to read in either format. Most email marketing programs, like the ones you use to send out email newsletters, make it easy to create a text version of the “pretty” version of your message.
  3. Write descriptive alt text - Alternative text is the text that displays in when your image doesn’t render. Many people will not display images on their mobile devices, so make sure to include descriptive text that communicates the same message you are trying to convey with your image. Don’t forget the alt text for your email header (if you are using one).
Comments (0)
Categories : Marketing
Tags : ,

Seeing Spam with Yahoo! Mail Visualization

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Yahoo! recently released the Yahoo! Mail Visualization tool. The tool shows how Yahoo! routes billions of emails every day. It also gives us some insight into how they filter spam.

Here is a quick screen shot of the Mail Visualization map (click on the image for a larger version)

yahooVisualize

Click on an area of the map zoom in and provide you with additional data of emails in that area.

Clicking on the green “Trending Keywords” box on the left will show you the top keywords in email subject lines for the geographic area you have selected. The “Reveal Blocked Spam” green button on the bottom gives you an idea of how much spam is being blocked. For example, this morning 4 spam messages are being blocked for every good email that is delivered.

You will also notice that when you click on the Reveal Blocked Spam, you can also see the spam keywords show up in the trending graph as well as the word cloud. The spam words are color coded gray.

keywords

Spend a little time with this tool and you may be surprised to find that many words that people have told you are spam triggers (like “Free”) show up as “Good” keywords in the visualization tool.

Comments (0)
Categories : Marketing, Web/Tech
Tags :

Quality vs Quantity in Your Marketing Database

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

5279081393_b2b74320d1_mWhat makes a good marketing database or list? Do you tend to favor quantity or quality?

Lead generation is often viewed purely a numbers gain – the more eyeballs you reach, the greater number of leads you will acquire. This approach points to an obvious goal, build the biggest list that you can. If a list with 2,000 is good then one with 5,000 is even better.

But is it? What if, rather than focusing building a bigger funnel, we focused on getting the right people into the funnel? Personally, I believe this is a better approach for professional service firms and is one of the reasons we in Duct Tape Marketing spend so much time talking about narrowing your focus and having a well defined ideal customer profile.

I believe this approach also applies to building your referral network. If you take the “more is better” approach, then you may spend a lot of time attending various networking events, collecting lots of cards, and perhaps drinking lots of coffee. But the larger your referral list, the harder it becomes to stay in touch and build relationships with everyone on your list.

Everyone’s business is different – would yours benefit more from having a list of 1,000 potential referral partners or 20 people that really know, like, and trust you and make an effort to help you grow your business?

photo credit: Kheel Center, Cornell University on Flickr

Comments (0)
Categories : Marketing
Tags : ,

60 Day Free Trial of Constant Contact Plus Consulting During Global Entrepreneurship Week

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

email_300x250_Email Marketing by Constant Contact® is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your customers, clients, or members. You’ll create high-impact, professional-looking emails—quickly and with no technical expertise. And, most importantly, you’ll build strong connections with your audience that lead to referrals, repeat business and loyalty.

With Email Marketing by Constant Contact, you can:

  • Choose from more than 400 easily customized email templates—or create your own from scratch.
  • Create highly visual, professional-looking email newsletters and promotions in just minutes.
  • Drive more traffic to your website with focused, targeted email communications.
  • Build and manage your email list: import existing customer lists, add names individually, or capture contact information from website visitors.
  • Measure your email campaign results instantly-check click-through rates, review new subscribers, and see who opened and clicked on each link so you can tailor your follow-up communications.
  • Send automated communications to new sign-ups via our Autoresponder tool.
  • Communicate with your audience with confidence, knowing that Constant Contact will take care of getting your email delivered and keep you CAN-SPAM compliant.

You can try Constant Contact free for 60 days and if you sign up during Global Entrepreneurship Week, I will throw in a complimentary 45 minute consulting session to help you get the most out of your email marketing activities.

Comments (0)
Categories : Marketing
Tags : ,

New Drip Marketing Program – Beta Program Saves You Big Bucks

By Bill · Comments (0)
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Drip Marketing With Swiftpage

I mentioned in a previous post that I am part of a partnership with ACT! and Swiftpage

I am very excited about this partnership. I have spent most of my career automating business systems to make them reliable, consistent, cost effective, and measurable. I really like what Swiftpage brings to small business.

Swiftpage helps put your sales and marketing initiatives on cruise control. With it, you can build and deliver multi-step marketing plans that use different media (phone calls, letters, postcards, fax, and e-mail).

A strong drip campaign can operate like a sales rep or customer service rep for a fraction of the cost.

You can even send messages based on the recipients actions – send one message to the people who opened your e-mail and a different one to the people who didn’t.

Drip Marketing Beta (or Pilot) Program

I have put together a new program to help small business get up and running as quickly and effectively as possible with Swiftpage. Since this is a new program, there will be a beta phase as we work out the normal bumps that are part of a new service. The good news for you is, you can save some big bucks. Here’s how it works:

I will work with you to design your drip marketing campaign.  Together we will plot out the objectives of the campaign, what each step will consist of, the look and/or copy of each step and to whom it is going to go to and when.   

I will then set it up for you in SwiftPage. I will also work with you to follow up, evaluate, and make adjustments to your campaign as necessary.

The beta test investment is $899 and in exchange you agree to excuse any lumps and bumps in the process and be willing to give us feedback on the program as well.

After the beta period, this service will be competitively priced between $2500 – $4500, so this is a sizzling hot opportunity. 

If you are interested in participating, please contact me so we can have a short discussion to make sure that this program is right for your business.

P.S. SwiftPage works great with ACT! If you own ACT!, I’ll show how the two work together to create a great small business CRM system. If you don’t have ACT! but want to set it up, we can price that separately for you and get you up and running quickly.

Comments (0)
Categories : Uncategorized
Tags : , , , , ,

5 Tips For Less Annoying E-mail Marketing

By Bill · Comments (1)
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Does this ever happen to you?

I receive 3 or 4 e-mail “offers” a week that make me think “why in the world are you sending this to me?”.

These messages are what I call semi-personalized (they use my name and maybe my business name) but I don’t know who they are. It’s as if a total stranger walked up to you on the street, called you by name, and started telling you about the wonderful things they have to solve your particular problem.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I get one of these offers, a lot of thoughts run through my head. None of them related to buying.

“Who the heck is this?”, “Why are you sending this to me?”, “Why do you think I need that?”. Those are the thoughts that I have. If I remember the sender at all, I’ve attached the “spammer” label to them, whether the message is technically spam or not.

So how can you make sure that your e-mail marketing messages are not creating these type of reactions? Here are a few tips:

  1. Always invite people to join your list. Just because we belong to the same Chamber and my e-mail address is in the directory does not mean you have my permission to add me to your mailing list.
  2. Communicate on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter how friendly your e-mail message is, if I only hear from you every 3 or 4 months and it’s only to sell me your “limited time special”, well that’s not friendly – it’s fake. Your prospect's B.S. filter is stronger and more efficient than any spam filter.
  3. Be relevant. Talk to me about something that I am actually interested in. This is easier to do if you are inviting prospects who meet your Ideal Customer Profile to join your list.
  4. Make it clear who you are. People build relationships with other people. Don’t make me guess who you are.
  5. Don’t make every conversation a sales pitch. Related to #2 above, balance your communications between information and sales offers. How many people do you hang around with who try to sell you something every time you talk? Exactly, I avoid them too.

Being the person that helps and gives good advice is always more profitable than being the one who annoys.

Comments (1)
Categories : Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Tags : ,

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Newsletter Subscription

Explore

Connect Socially

Twitter Facebook LinkedIn email