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Email Marketing – How Often Should You Send Your Newsletter?

Tara Jacobsen — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:57:42 +0000

Email marketing is much less effective then it once was. I hate to say that, but it is true! Think about your inbox…when email first came out you got that message that “you’ve got mail” and bam, you were ready to open it right away.

Today you have a million messages, 20 texts, voicemails and SO many other things to distract you from your work or your family that emails seem like they are just another imposition on your time. When was the last time you got an email and thought, “great! I was hoping for this!”

Well I can tell you I do that with some emails. A few that come to mind are Geoffrey Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine and Chuck Green’s Ideabook. So why do I like these so much more than the rest of the “stuff” that I get in my inbox?

How Often Should You Send Your Email Newsletter?

Gitomer’s comes out once a week and I tend to read about half of them, depending on how crazy busy my day is when they show up. Chuck’s comes once a month and I KNOW I have to budget a couple of hours to go through all of the information that he packs into them.

Another fellow sends almost daily messages BUT he has writers on staff who scour the web for useful information and I generally find great tidbits in them, I read about 1 in 7 of these.

I have heard NUMEROUS theories about how often you should send your newsletters:

If you don’t send them every day, your list will forget you!
If you don’t send them every day, your list will buy something from someone else
Weekly is perfect, your list won’t forget you and they will still open your messages
Monthly is too long between them and your list will not pay attention

So does this mean you should send a weekly newsletter? Um, maybe! Do you have relevant, AMAZING information to send to your list on a weekly basis? Do you have time to prepare great stuff? Is sending your newsletter stressful or fun. Do you have a plan for why you are sending so many emails? Can you sell to your list or will they get fatigued and unsubscribe?

Email Open Rates In 2012

So I did a search for email open rates for 2012 to write this article and found A LOT of data from a 2010 study (SERIOUSLY? That was 2 YEARS ago and there is a whole lot more distraction now so that data is irrelevant as far as I am concerned). What I did find was this great info from The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report:

Across all industries the average results for UK SME email marketing campaigns were:

Open rate: 18.35% – last year 18.21%
Click-through rate: 2.95% - last year 3.29%
Unsubscription rate: 0.15% – last year 0.22%

This seems to show that the open rates (how many people receive the message and actually opened it) is pretty stable. Now, there are some REALLY big mitigating factors to this number as some email readers show as an open even if it just popped up in the preview screen before hitting the delete button. It also shows that click through rates (clicking on something in the newsletter and going to an outside link are declining pretty drastically. In the good news department, unsubscribe rates are dropping, but I have a theory that is because fewer people are signing up in the first place, being TOTALLY gun shy about adding themselves to an email list!

Email Marketing From The Trenches!

So how often should your messages go out (for heaven’s sake woman, get to already!)

If you are a internet marketer, networker, event promoter, daily deal site, etc. you can send a message out anytime you have something interesting to send. Your list is going to know that this is the kind of thing they signed up for and, though you might have a higher than average unsubscribe rate, you will get results!
If you are a prolific writer and enjoy sending out great content (NOT SALES MESSAGES) every week, you could probably get away with it. I have noticed that the ones who send weekly GREAT emails tend to have a staff.
If you are the normal small biz owner who is on my list, you can fudge a weekly newsletter pretty easily by sending out a synopsis of your blog posts to your list. For example, I publish 3 blog posts a week so I could send out a newsletter with a paragraph about the article and then a link to my website to finish reading it. This is a nice way to re-use your content and get people from email to your website.
A monthly newsletter seems to be the most appreciated kind. It keeps you in the mind of your clients or list and is not onerously hard for most small biz owners to produce.

So what got me to thinking about email marketing and how often you should send your newsletter? Somehow I got on a list for a lady in the next town over. I noticed she sent 2 marketing emails to me Monday and went to unsubscribe from her list but saw that she had the option to pick only Colorado related information and I though, GREAT! Maybe I was just getting everything and I would now get relevant information. Sigh… The next day, two or three more emails and I had to opt out entirely. Seriously, I get THOUSANDS of emails a day and even if she is selling gold bricks for a dollar, I do not have time to read 3 marketing messages a day!

So what are my numbers? After I got done writing this, I thought it would be fun to take a look at my last mailing and see what my numbers looked like!

Average Open rate: 18.35% – mine 26%
Click-through rate: 2.95% - mine .9%
Unsubscription rate: 0.15% – mine .7%

Sooooo…that tells me that the people like to read my emails but that I did not give them a compelling reason to continue the story by clicking through! In case you are looking for a great email database and CRM, I use and recommend Office Autopilot if you are going to be doing professional work or Constant Contact if you are going to be a monthly sender!

Small Business Marketing – Layering Your Marketing Message

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:49:44 +0000

Small business marketing is all about getting prospective customers to notice you. I KNOW, you think that small business marketing is about getting them to BUY from you, but first they have to know you exist!

The easiest way to get people to notice you is to show up everywhere they go, from in person, to their mailbox, online at social media and in their email inbox. This process of being everywhere is officially called layering and should be part of a planned structured marketing campaign.

LL Bean is stalking me. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the LL Bean gang! They have American made clothes (I am from the rust belt near Pittsburgh so this has always mattered to me). Their clothing is unbelievably high quality and they have a no questions asked return policy. Seriously, you can wear your shoes, clothes or coats for YEARS and if something goes wrong, they will make it right, no questions asked.

Years ago I got on their mailing list and they have continued to send me catalogs, even though I have not ordered in quite some time. Sort of nice, but did not compel me to buy.

Social Media Marketing

So today I opened my Facebook and they had posted a message about extreme weather clips on the LL Bean Facebook page. Not a picture of their product with a link (although they have them too!), a video from the weather channel about terrible cold weather.

Small Business Marketing Tip – So NOW I am thinking about cold weather in conjuction with LL Bean! They have snuggly warm coats and slippers in case it snows like that here.

Email Marketing

After cruising the Social Media and noticing the LL Bean clip (I didn’t watch the video but got the gist and the association stuck). I popped open my inbox to delete messages (I mean read my email…hehehe). What showed up there? An email from LL Bean!

Now I am in marketing so I tend to notice when things happen like this, but I am also human and the urge to buy something from LL Bean is getting greater and greater!

Direct Mail Marketing

So, as most of you know I am an internetty kind of gal. I get leads from the internet, teach internet marketing classes and have every whiz-bangy kind of appliance needed to access the internet at my disposal.

That having been said, I rarely BUY things on the internet. I go to stores and look at catalogs (doh, I just happen to have an LL Bean catalog handy!). Sending me a catalog will definitely make this layering marketing work better for the Bean!

How To Do Layering For Small Business Marketing

So you are a small business owner or entrepreneur and you are thinking to your self (in a really snarky tone, I can hear you) that you do not have the millions of dollar advertising budget that LL Bean has! That figuring out all that technology is going to take time and money you don’t have.

Here are some easy ways for small business owners to capitalize on what we have seen here today!

Direct mail marketing – There are two ways to do direct mail marketing on a shoestring. Print dinky postcards on colored paper, 4 to a sheet or buy them from Vistaprint for pennies on the dollar. I checked yesterday and the cost for a postcard stamp is 29 cents so the cost to do a 100 piece mailing should be less than 50 bucks total. I am getting ready to send a 100 piece dinky postcard mailing this week and will let you know what the response rate is!
Email marketing – if you are not using an online database like Constant Contact or Office Auto Pilot (the one I use) yet, start today. Figure it out and start building a list! Send them informative emails. I KNOW, you are all clamoring about what to send, send something that is related to your business!
Pick up the phone – Call them to see if they got what you sent! Your mailing made this a much warmer call.
Social Media Marketing – Post something about this on your social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn. Be careful not to be too salesy, just something good and interesting for them to enjoy that is related to your business.

With my coaching clients, I recommend that we have “theme months” where we pick a theme and market to that using multiple sales channels. I can’t stress enough that you should pick a theme for this month RIGHT NOW, set up some of these layered sales outlets and get started bringing in more prospects and sales!

– — –

If you would like to find out more about my Small Business Marketing coaching programs today, give me a call 727-415-9165.

How To Send Free Video Email – Eyejot

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:35:58 +0000

Lots of my customers ask how to send free video email. Because my peeps know they can email me anything marketing related to review, I have been getting a glut of “should I buy this video email program?” questions. The ones that are the current MLM (multi level marketing) darlings are quite pricey, with setup fees up to 500 bucks and hefty monthly payments.

So what if I told you there is a FREE VIDEO EMAIL?

Well, I was teaching my 100 Free Marketing Ideas class the other day and did a whole bit about how to use video email for sales and the attendees were astounded that there was a way to send video emails for free using a safe, reliable service! Eyejot.com – a free video email service! aff link

What Is Video Email?

So, one of my favorite friends and clients, Brian P. Forrester of the Mortgage Communication Spot, does video email better than anyone I have seen. He has compiled a list of Realtors who have an interest in changes in the banking industry and when something happens, he sends a translation email of what those changes actually mean in English! He also uses them to promote his events (as you will see at the end of this email).

How To Send Video Email That Works

So, as with any “new” technology, video email has some great applications and the ability to be used as a spamming machine. Make sure you are using your video email for good, not evil!

Follow up to an interview or sales call – image if your salesman from yesterday “remembered” just one more thing to tell you and sent a little video email over with a message that he or she would be calling later in the day to see if you have any questions. I guarantee that you would probably get a pretty warm reception from that prospect!
Keep in touch with past clients – one of my bestys is an Irish Realtor and don’t you know she sends out a video email to her entire database for every St. Patricks Day. Why stop at that? I would do something every couple of months at a minimum! Note – unless you are going to have VERY entertaining video emails, if you send out a happy Valentines, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Groundhog, the effectiveness will drop off dramatically.
The video DOES NOT need to be embedded in the email to be effective. I know of people who pay exorbitant rates for video email because they believe having it play from inside the email client matters. Technology rarely matters! I check out Brian’s messages because I know, like and trust him, and am not bothered by the fact that it does not automatically play when I open it!
Branding and the ability to post on a blog or website – one thing I DO like about Brian’s emails is that they are branded with his information. As the “premium” cost for the branding upgrade is between $29.95 and $99.95 A YEAR, this is a great price point for being able to snazzy them up a bit AND I like the fact that you can try it for free first to make sure you will actually use the service!
It doesn’t have to be perfect! Seriously, none of us like to see ourselves on camera and if you wait for a perfect moment, take, hair day, you will never send anything. Just jump in and do some!

Seriously, if you are willing to learn how to send free video email, you will SO set yourself apart from the crowd!

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Small Business Marketing – Common Email Marketing Mistakes

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:02:04 +0000

Small business marketing has MANY shiney objects to chase and it may seem like the latest and greatest new gizmo is the most important. Today we are we are going to talk about what may seem a little antiquated (smile) email marketing and some common email marketing mistakes!

I see A LOT of mistakes out there with small business owners who are using email incorrectly or who have not even thought about how or why to set up their email marketing in the correct manner. This post is going to go over common mistakes and what to do to fix them. Sorry to my friends who, as always, know that they are loved and who will be my goats for anything that makes me crazy!

Common Email Marketing Mistakes

Not having a professional email address

If you are still putting a gmail, aol, road runner, comcast or other free or obviously system emails on your business cards or handouts, people notice and assume that you are not professional (at the very least they will assume that you are WAY behind technology-wise, which in this day and age is not cute or funny, it is a red flag to potential customers!)

Using your company email address

While I understand there are some situations that you need to use a corporate email address, this is a SMALL BUSINESS BLOG. Most of us do not work for IBM or Lucent, we have a little more flexibility with our personal branding. So, why SHOULDN’T you use your company email?

One of my friends, who shall remained unnamed, Brian P, has changed his email address no less than 4 times since I have known him. It started with BrianP(at)homebank.com and went to BrianP(at)countrywide.com and then BrianP(at)tricountyfl.com and finally today, BrianP(at)VanDyke.com. The worst part of it is, he had a website about mortgage banking and could have used BrianP(at)mortgagecommunicationspot.com the WHOLE TIME!

I will tell you, most people are not hiring the company you work for, they are hiring YOU and Brian has to have lost some people who would have worked with him again but they are two or three email addresses back and don’t know how to get a hold of him.

Not Having An Email Marketing List

This is a biggie. I talk to many people who network often who have said they have stacks and stacks of business cards on their desk and have not put them in a list yet. Arggg. This means that all that networking is for naught. You HAVE to follow up with an email newsletter or some other followup method you are missing the boat.

If you are not using a service like Constant Contact or Aweber, you CAN email easily by just having an excel spreadsheet with First Name, Last Name and Email. You can then cut and paste the addresses into most email clients and send your message (NO MORE THAN 50 at a time so it is kerfuffly BUT it WILL work). The nice thing about doing it this way is that when you ARE ready to do your real email newsletter, you will already have your list ready!

Free Resources From Past Posts

Email Newsletters – Email Marketing – Good Email Subject Lines and Super Duds
Email Marketing – Email Newsletter Marketing Topics and Ideas

Marketing Artfully University Resources

NEW – Setting Up Your Email Addresses Effectively
How should you grow your contact list
Secret Email Marketing Strategies

find out more about small business marketing help at MAU! The cost is low, there are over 82 posts with videos and there is a small one time fee to join!

Email Marketing – Good Email Subject Lines and Super Duds

Tara Jacobsen — Thu, 12 May 2011 16:23:22 +0000

Email subject lines seem to be the one topic everyone is interested in, and rightly so! You can write the best email, newsletter or online communication ever, but if no one opens it because it does not have a good subject line, the time was wasted!

If you want to know more about my obsession with email subject lines, check out my previous post, Email Marketing, Writing Great Subject Lines.

I receive about 600 emails a day during the week and about 400 a day on the weekends. I spend A LOT of time deleting emails without having ever looked at their content. One of the best things that happened to me recently was that Gmail set up a priority inbox so I can usually see Clients, Friends and Families at a glance. I assume other email programs have this same kind of feature.

So what effect does sorting have on your email open rates? When you are laboring over your newsletter, auto-responder or followup emails, it is easy to anticipate that the person at the other end will be happy to open it! I think that is EXACTLY wrong, I think they are looking for a reason to be able to skip it and hit the delete key. A strong, compelling subject line makes it impossible for them to hit delete without at least taking a peek!

One More Thing To Consider – The First Line

There is one more thing to consider when you are crafting your emails – the first line of text. Most email programs allow the user to see at least part of that first line. If you have a strong subject line and a compelling first line – BAM, you are sure of an open!

Good Email Subject Lines

Alert. All-Inclusive Beach Escapes w/Air from $549* – If I was in the mood to get away, this would get me to look. I have to say that I am in conflict about the “Alert.” but have to feel that it did help catch my eye as a human being!
Save 63% on Our New Personalized Products & Get 10 Free! – From entertainment direct, a great discount and free stuff, okay!
Mind bending Facebook stats, and a dirty little secret – OF COURSE the emails from Perry Marshall have great subject lines, he is a master!
Apple’s Market Cap in 1997 was 2.2 Billion today it’s….. - Really big numbers are interesting and there is a cliffhanger!
Can I Send You Tons of New Prospects for Your Business? – New Media PR Expert, Rebekah Welch, sent this one! Just tempting enough without being come-onny.

Sorta-Kinda Good Email Subject Lines

Pissed Off? – Not so sure that this would have drawn me but the start of the email (which I see about a half a line of in Gmail) was compelling! “Gurus, bad actors and even lap dancers all trying to sell you the…
Homes.com Newsletter: Optimize your social media strategy – Did they really have to take up some of the subject line with their URL?
Please Join Us – Tampa Exadata & Exalogic Seminar – May 25 – Does have the Date and the name of Oracles product in it so that people in the know would recognize it, BUT what is it to me? Their email list is not great if I, a lowely marketer, are getting hard core programming information.
[HubSpot] New Webinar: Science of Analytics – Not sure about this new trend of putting your company name in the subject line – the sender is HubSpot anyways. This webinar is free, I would for sure have put that in the title (may use “complimentary” to help avoid some of the spam filters).

Super Duds

“NEW – Viral Facebook™ Traffic-Getting Software!!” from Gabor and NEW – Viral Facebook™ Traffic-Getting Software!!” from Pat – notice anything strange about these two emails? It is the same damn thing!!! If you are going to spam people with affiliate links, at least take two seconds to change the subject line a little! This is also a problem with Avon ladies and the Scentsy gals, because they use the automated systems within their company, I get multiple copies of the same email. Now, you would think that would compel me to open at least one of them BUT it just annoys me so I don’t open any of them. Delete, delete, delete.
Tara, From the Desk of Stephen Pierce – Are you kidding me? Unless this guy is my lawyer or accountant, this is a total non-starter. I SO do not care about Stephen’s desk or what is on it!
Auction – REALLY?!?!?! Date, time, location, land, antiques? Honestly, would it take 15 seconds to write a little bit more to tell me why I should open it?
Activate your Tipmeet widget (first line – We are happy to announce our new widget feature for personal websites.) – I did not request this AND it is totally self serving.
Re: Notification Of Payment Received – I HATE this little “trick” of putting “Re:” like he is responding to something I sent to him. If you learned any email marketing “tricks” from so-called gurus and you are a real business, forget them now and start acting like a grownup. These guys BURN through email lists and don’t care if you come or go. Your clients will not think these “tricks” are cute and will ask to be removed from your lists!
Tara, Big News on May 8, 2011! – Big news about what? It may be big news for them but I am busy and this is not tempting.
Get Your Gift Card Today! – this was a teaser to visit a webinar, for which, they would give me a gift card. My time is worth more than they can give me on a gift card so I would rather have great content and no gift card! PLUS I don’t know what I am getting a gift card for.
Charlie Sheen said what??? – are you kidding me? This was a webinar notification for making money online. Are these guys brain-dead or what. The “cute” thing is really not effective with me!

So there you have it! Another round of email marketing, the bad, ugly and good email subject lines. If you have some that ABSOLUTELY rocked the open rate, please feel free to post as a comment!!! Tara

Burning Your List – Mobile, Email, Twitter or Facebook

Tara Jacobsen — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:30:47 +0000

Burning your list means that you oversaturate your message to a group of people. I am here to tell you that a list of people who have said you can contact them on a regular basis is a beautiful thing to waste.

Years ago we all had a rolodex of people we could call or send a holiday card to. Today we have MANY different types of lists, phone numbers, email, Facebook, Twitter, even people who follow us on Digg or other bookmarking sites. When you have a list, your responsibility is to treat it with respect.

Mobile List Burning

When I saw that the internet marketers were pushing mobile marketing I thought, OH NO, here we go again! I worked in the telemarketing industry in the early 1990′s and saw what constant phone calls where doing to people who were eating dinner or getting their family ready to head out the door. Marketers could buy a list of phone numbers and incessantly call until legislation stopped that practice.

Now mobile marketers are using my cell phone to call, text, send push notifications and perform other horrific things that I did not specifically say they could. For example, Gowalla asked me when I downloaded a geotargeting app if I would accept push notifications AND that I could turn them off in the settings. What they did not tell me what there is no GLOBAL turn off, I have to go into each and every person and turn it off manually. I feel lied to and have decided to stop using the service.

Now my stopping using Gowalla is not going to be their death knell BUT I do teach many classes on marketing and I will be promoting FourSquare instead. A blip on the radar, but you get enough blips and you are out of business!

Email List Burning

When you set up your “real” email list, you should have explicit permission to send them out through asking the person when you take their card or having a double opt in feature on your list. So what about all these “new” list building techniques where you have multiple lists and feel that you have more permission to spam some of them than others (I KNOW – you got them through a free offer but that DOES NOT give you permission to send them content every day for the rest of their lives).

I LOVE the internet marketers. These are the guys and gals who are making things happen and who portend new online marketing trends. Those of you who are internet marketers email lists are probably aware of their “launches” where they send out a dozen emails and their friends all send you a dozen of the same emails. Well these marketers have hit a wall called “launch fatigue“. Their list members have basically said that they are not going to keep buying $1,000 products every week, no matter how many emails they get about it.

On a smaller level small business owners and entrepreneurs can burn their own lists. By changing the frequency of your mailings from 1 per day to 3 per week to 1 per month back to 1 a day, you will confuse your readers. They will not know what to expect and will become disenchanted with your marketing. Keep it consistent and try to avoid sending totally self serving messages more than a couple times a year.

Social Media List Burning

Your friends and followers are on lists too! Now these lists are the property of Twitter and Facebook BUT you have access to talk with these people on a regular basis. The worst thing you can do to these lists is burn them out with a repetitive marketing message.

On Twitter you can be more marketing-y since no one sits there and reads all of your posts BUT if your feed is nothing but affiliate links or sales messages, you will have to spend lots of time getting new followers to replace the ones that drop off. If nothing else, make sure to “feed” your feed with lots of great content from blogs to offset your marketing messages.

On Facebook I try and make sure that my profile is mostly real info about me – NOW know that I don’t do much but marketing so there is a lot of talk about that but selling is done on my business pages. Occasionally I will post an event or something else on my profile but for the most part it is a sell free zone. As this is in line with Facebook’s terms of service I SHOULD be okay but have to tell you, you do not own this list and cannot export it so be careful to stay on Facebooks good side!!!

SOCIAL MEDIA TIP!

Try and get your Facebook and Twitter peeps into your email list! If you ever lose your account you don’t want to lose touch with those people!!!!

Small Business Marketing Goals Make A Huge Difference

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:33:31 +0000

Small business marketing can be super fun and totally overwhelming. Every once in a while I like to throw down the gauntlet with some small business marketing goal numbers so that my peeps have something to shoot for!

Those of you who have been readers for a while know that about once every six months I post a post with suggested tasks and arbitrary suggested goals! If you do even a couple of these things you will notice a change in your online success!

Stake your claim to audacious keywords!

When I started blogging for Marketing Artfully, I picked three keywords to shoot for based on my targeted clients, entrepreneur marketing, realtor marketing and small business marketing. Through repeated use of these terms in my titles and content of posts, MA ranks pretty well for some competitive keywords.

So now I have a secret for you! If you use the google buzz more and get friends through google, your site will show up on their search results ABOVE all the other regular search terms and google will put some recommendations below also based on the fact that you are “friends” on buzz or your profile.

Small Business Marketing Goal – select some keywords that you think are out of reach and make it a goal to write about them once a week for a year. Yes I said a year. If you think that you are going to write one blog post and take over a competitive search term, you my friend are sadly mistaken. If you think you are going to write one post and stay on top for the next 5 years, again no go. Search these days is more dynamic than ever and targeting keywords in your blogging, tweeting and facebook notes will make a huge difference in your results.

Do more email marketing

Email marketing is a pain in the rear. You have to write an email, then do your links, make sure it is pretty and THEN as soon as you hit send you notice that there is a typo on the first line….noooooo. Okay, that is pretty melodramatic but we all feel stress when we are going to send out something to our entire client base. Some people like accountants, bookkeepers and mortgage pros count on being correct more than, say marketers, so they SHOULD have someone else take a once over with a critical eye.

That having been said, if you send out 3 perfect newsletters per year while your competition is sending out one a week, who do you think will win that game AND do you think your mailing list will notice that you send “perfect” newsletters? Most people do not have time to critique your stuff and the ones who do are no loss. I can tell you in all sincerity, if you have a typo, SOMEONE will let you know! Thank them and then sell to them while you have them on the phone!

Small Business Marketing Goal – Set a schedule for yourself on how often you are going to send out a newsletter. Really. Then do it. Do not “try” to send it once a month and then skip. Do not “try” to send it once a week. Yoda says, “do or do not, there is no try”. If you make a commitment to sending out a newsletter twice a month instead once a month, your sales will go up. Sooo if you are not sending one at all, sign up for a service like Constant Contact and get started today. If you are already doing one (sporatically) make it a priority.

Figure out how to make video more a part of your marketing

Video marketing is going to be huge and just one more way to get your message out there. If you have a well written post and plop a video in there with your voice and some personality, you have made both the search engines AND humans happy! I KNOW that every one of you have watched a video online so you can not say that it is stupid and just ignore it.

So how do you do video? Buy a flip camera today. It is about $150 bucks and super easy to use. If you do not have $150 buck today, get the enhanced jingproject.com videos to do screen captures for $15 a year. If you do not have $15 to make a huge impact on your business, consider doing something else! Harsh? YES. But I see too many small business owners worrying about pennies when they should be worrying about how to dominate their market niche.

Small business marketing goal – If you know how to do video, do one each week or month. Post it to youtube.com with a link back to your HUB site. Share it on Facebook. If you do not know how to do video, do a search on youtube.com for how to do Jings and do one today. EVERYONE is intimidated when they do not know how to do something well. Your first videos will be HORRIBLE but as you do more they WILL get better!

Okay this is getting long so I am going to talk about the rest of my small business marketing goal suggestions tomorrow. For now pick just one of these ideas and implement it. Start now.

Small Business Marketing – How To Get More Traffic

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:50:12 +0000

All small business marketers want more traffic to their website, blog or facebook pages. These are where you can actually make content and build a brand and a following rather than just talking to your readers. So how can you get more traffic?

This is NOT a get traffic quick scheme! This is a slog it out, build a following, talk to them kind of post so if you are looking for a quick hit, move along.

Still here? Okay here goes…The first thing you need to do is figure out where you are sending all of that traffic and what you want it to do! I send all my marketing traffic to Marketing Artfully and until recently had kind of mixed the message once you got here. There were tons of things to look at and click and places to go. Now it is very clear that I want you to click over to my membership site. SO….look at the site you are going to be sending all that traffic to and make sure it has a call to action.

Back to traffic….

There are a gagillion ways to send generate traffic and the first thing I want you to do is STOP and figure out what you like to do!!!!

Do you like to write?
Then blog A LOT and then use the little button at the bottom to “share” your content on Stumble Upon, Technorati, Digg and Delicious (I use the tell a friend wordpress plugin by social twist for this!)
Write articles on Ezine Articles and point links back to your site
Get out there and comment on other people’s posts
Do you like to teach?
Hold seminars and webinars that drive people to your website
Make a little video class series and offer it for free
Do you like people?
Join the social networks and get involved – you cannot just put a link on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and let it sit there forever without any love
Are you a Salesman? (I LOVE salesmen!)
Call people with complementary blogs and talk to them. Ask them if they would let you put a blog post on their site with great content.
Ask them if you can do a teleseminar with them that you can tape and distribute
Call your database and tell them all the great things you are doing on your main site
Email your database and ask them to share the big changes with their friends
Email someone with a complementary blog and ask them to NICELY to feature a link back to your site! I got the nicest email today that sparked my interest from Ethan over at Sparxoo which prompted this post.

So there you have it, some ideas to increase your traffic that are not hard, but take some work! Some will provide you with direct traffic and some will help your google rankings. Any which way, all will get more eyeballs on your site!!!

If you would like to see the email that sparked this post and find out more about how to generate backlinks from other sites, visit our Marketing Memebership Site – the great letters I responded to are available at the $1 level!!!

Email Marketing – Hiding your list

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:28:33 +0000

I like email marketing as much as the next gal! I have numerous lists of people who have subscribed to receive my message and I email them twice a month with great marketing information in my newsletter. Do you know something funny I noticed recently? You can’t subscribe to my “real” email newsletter! HA!

Over time I have noticed that people who signed up online to receive my newsletter unsubscribed faster than everyone else. They sent me nasty emails and said “take me off your list” – just so you know, I send out about 1,200 emails and get only one or two unsubscribers per mailing so it is not a common occurrence to me. And it makes me sad. I spend a A LOT of time writing my newsletters and make sure to only send out great information so when someone sends me a mean email it really does hurt my feelings.

So how do I get new people on my list you ask? I meet them! I go to networking and ask them very politely if they mind if I send them out a marketing newsletter twice a month. BRILLIANT! I also teach them. I teach classes on marketing and ask THOSE people if they would like to hear from me too!!!

Sometimes I “meet” fun people online who I don’t really know but it feels like I do – I ask and add them too!

So how do you get on my super cool, very informative small business marketing email list? Wouldn’t you like to know!

PS – I have been working really hard on my membership site and may be a little punch drunk BUT I had SO much fun writing this I don’t care!!!! Happy New Year…:)

How To Use Email For Marketing from Top 10 Internet Tools

Tara Jacobsen — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:24:54 +0000

How to do email marketing

How to use email for marketing is simple. It is not easy but the benefits you get FAR outweigh the time it takes to become proficient! In Learn Use the Top 10 Internet Tools for Small Business, I talked about 10 things that I thought were super vital for your internet success. Here you will find out about how to make the most of email marketing.

For each of these items I am going to start with advanced ideas and work back to beginner basics. The reason for this is that there is A LOT of information out there about basic email marketing and I have found that if I tell my readers hard concepts they get them (after a while..:)

EMAIL MARKETING – THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST

When you have a list of people who have agreed to receive emails from you, you hold great responsibility. They have said that you can take their time in exchange for providing them with good information.

What software should you use for keeping track of your lists?

Email Marketing Software Programs â€“ If you have over about 250 people in your database I highly recommend that you start having your people in a â€œrealâ€ email program.

Aweber â€“ This is the one that I recommend to all my non-realtor clients considering starting with a “real” email marketing program. Aweber has great email and autoresponder capabilities, meaning that if you are targeting different types of prospects you can do it from one place. The one drawback is that you cannot manually add people individually after your initial upload so be careful if you are wanting to use this as a general contact database (you can have them signup via a web form). Sign up for their FREE trial and see if it will work for you.
Constant Contact â€“ This is a friendly email program that is great for beginners but it really makes me mad that they do not have multiple autoresponders so you can not target multiple types of clients (although you can set up multiple types of lists). That being said, it is SUPER easy to use and has really pretty email newsletter templates if you have only one type of client.
Brokers Helper â€“ BEST Email marketing program for Realtors with lots of templates and ease of use. They have a FREE trial also!
My Red Tools – Brokers Helper program for KW Realtors (you get a little discount) They have a FREE trial also!

Almost every small business owner I speak with wants to know what database they can use for everything. Their shopping cart and email marketing and direct mail and the list goes on and on. I wish that there was one UBER program that could handle all of these things well that was affordable for everyone but I have yet to find it. Once you know that you will be managing multiple lists you can get to the business of marketing and stop complaining about how hard it is!

Here are some things you can do to monetize your emails:

Send out information about your product or service. This can be done in a non-spammy way by providing great information and then adding a link to find out more about your offering. This is number one because generally your highest ROI is from selling your own products or service. For example – a garage door guy could send out an email about how to winterize your garage door and then put a link to his page or post that offers that service on a paid basis.
Send out emails with affiliate offers in them. This requires that you sign up to be an affiliate with a company or to have a referral agreement with a partner. Almost any business has affiliate programs that are relevant to them and it is easier than ever to get information about available offers. I like to use www.offervault.com to find great offers easily.
Email information about your industry. This is the most passive kind of email as there is no call to action to buy anything. That having been said, Lori Crawford of Trinity Eastlake Real Estate gets a lead almost every time she sends out a newsletter about local real estate information to her list. You would be surprised at how just contacting your list on a regular basis will get you more business!

ADVANCED EMAIL MARKETING

So now you have a regular email marketing program set up..what’s next? Autoresponders! Autoresponders work by sending out a series of emails once someone has signed up for your email list online. All of the email marketing software programs that I recommended you use have some sort of autoresponder built in.

Top Autoresponder Mistakes – Here is my take on the top autoresponder mistakes people make once they get people on their list

Sending out too many messages – I KNOW, everyone says you should send out messages to your list daily or at the very least weekly. I think that people can get overwhelmed when you send out too many messages and that the impact can get diluted. I like to send out two messages a month and have had great feedback on that amount.
Numbering their messages – I have one list I am signed up to that tells me I am on message number 235, etc. I think that they did it for ease of use in setting up their autoresponder series BUT it just reminds me that they have sent me LOTS of messages.
Not adding their blog posts to their autoresponder series. I know that I am a prime offender for this one. DO NOT assume that everyone who signs up for your lists reads your blog posts regularly. This is a great place to get extra content for your autoresponders.

This post is a part of my ongoing posts Top 10 Internet Tools! If you would like to learn more please visit…

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