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Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Small business owners should then pay close attention to the suggestions and tips you will find in this article. These suggestions will help you make your emails stand out from the rest and have a higher chance of being opened by your recipients. Keep in mind that the people who read your emails are some of your best customers. Use these tips as a way to give them something that they will enjoy reading in your emails and keep your business name in their heads for a long time to come.

You should include your company’s best days. Your marketing calendar is your guide to the best days of the week to send emails. The first thing that will come to mind about your marketing calendar is the beginning of the end of the week. Most people will either ignore your emails or delete them if they hit the week’s start or end. It would help if you changed the times so that your customers will remember when you should be sending out emails.

When sending out emails, make sure that they are interesting and informative. This is what will keep people subscribed.

Email marketing tips for small business owners also include changing your subject lines. Some people use the same subject lines over again. Other people change their subject lines every few days. While you want to change your subject lines on occasion, could you not do it too often? This will only prove to be a distraction and will turn readers off of your emails.

It may seem like common sense, but there is one simple reason why you should change your subject lines more often: to get more subscribers. When you change your subject lines frequently, subscribers will notice your emails. And when they notice your emails, the chances are that they will at least open and read some of them.

To get more subscribers, you should always use email marketing software to send out your emails. Email marketing software can be used by small business owners or by large companies. In fact, some of the largest companies use email marketing software. Email marketing software is handy because it is straightforward to use; it doesn’t take much time to learn how to use it.

The Role of Digital Entrepreneurs

The role of digital entrepreneurs is changing in the post-pandemic world with more opportunities available to them. This means those that are interested in entrepreneurship will have more opportunities without the start-up costs that once might have prevented them from getting started. Here are a few things that give modern tech entrepreneurs an advantage in a rapidly changing market.

Chatbots May Replace Employees

Even a very small business will require some employees to meet the demands of customers. However, chatbot technology has taken huge leaps forward in recent years, enabling businesses to benefit from completely automated customer service response software. Chatbots can be programmed to answer virtually any question or concern, and, since they are computer applications, they can provide assistance 24 hours a day.

Run Your Business From Home

It’s very possible that you can run your business from your own home or on the go by making use of new apps and third-party services. Cloud technology allows you to store data digitally. You can access it from any computer or mobile device, so you can literally work from anywhere in the world. Additionally, third-party services, such as IT support and bookkeeping services, can provide you with the support you need, eliminating the need to hire your own employees.

Social Media is More Important Than Ever

If the coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that there are circumstances in which computers will provide our only means of communication. While text messages and email are included, social media sites offer a more personal way to communicate. In the future, entrepreneurs and other business owners will take greater advantage of the importance of social media, almost exclusively using online platforms to build their brands. Establishing a positive online presence will help entrepreneurs to continue conducting business even during lockdowns that force brick and mortar businesses to close.

Newer technology is being adapted to help entrepreneurs create pandemic-proof businesses. From augmented reality to contactless payment methods, newer entrepreneurs are using state of the art tech to help them develop continuity plans for their businesses. From the launch to its continued operation, anyone can pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship without substantial financial backing when they make use of technology that most people take for granted.

The Best Direct Marketing Strategies

Businesses should not give up on older/direct marketing strategies just yet. The most popular forms of direct marketing are postcards and direct mails. These two methods are still viable today; after all, they gave us the billion-dollar industries of today.

Online advertising is in vogue in the world today; therefore, most businesses are rushing to create an online presence. Most people have no access to electricity or the internet; that is what online marketers ignore. The best tip for businesses should be to use the marketing skills that best suit customers’ situational needs.

Furthermore, financially stable individuals in society are the older generation. In most cases, they do not have extensive knowledge of modern technology. They have money to spend; coincidentally, businesses are driven by profit. Losing such a capable market out of the need to fit in would not be prudent. In this case, the enterprises should adjust their marketing strategy to tap into the older generation’s consumer potential.

1. Postcards

Postcards are information printed card-like sheets and mailed to potential customers. Luckily, they can include graphics as well as images to appeal to a consumer. They rank as the most-read form of marketing; it ranks as high as 57% on the readability scale. Businesses can use postcards to;

Advertise the opening of a new and straightforward business such as a restaurant or a retail store.

Cost-effectively send brief information to inform former customers about their website.

2. Letters

Letters are a flexible way of sending information to customers. They give businesses the liberty to share as much information as they need to. Moreover, they add a personal touch to marketing. It is also very detailed; customers, therefore, make informed decisions about products and services. Businesses can use letters when;

Sending information that ought to be understood entirely. For example, a letter invitation to fundraising is more likely to be effective than any other means.

When they seek to have a personal effect on the consumer; it can be achieved through hand-addressing or a pen- addressing machine; to capture the consumer’s attention.

Also, letters are slightly expensive than postcards; yet both are very crucial in direct marketing. Fortunately, the two forms of direct marketing can co-exist in marketing. One kind does not disqualify the other.

The Emerging Social Media Trends You Need To Know

Social media is changing, especially for businesses. In the past, it was expected that a company’s social media feeds could stand apart. The work was about creating an account that was true to your brand and spoke to the ideas your company needed to promote. The company’s feeds stood alone, apart from the general community of conversation happening.

Today, social media is more social than ever, especially for businesses. There is a community minded approach that requires being aware of the tone of the conversation in the room and being a part of it. This demands more of businesses on social media.

What does this mean for specific social media trends? How should businesses handle the current landscape?

1. Authenticity

This has been the advice for a while, but the demands are greater now. Currently, businesses are expected to be more human. How are things going in your office? How is your company treating your employees? Customers want to know and see this. Transparency matters now more than ever before on social media.

2. A Change In The Way You Handle Your Social Media Calendar

Managing social media takes a lot of time and effort. It’s long been the advice that a business should plan out their calendar months in advance when they can. They should look at what they want to promote, holidays, and other events to influence the conversation.

Now, the conversation on your feed is more influenced by the conversation happening day to day online. To participate in that appropriately, it’s essential that a scheduling calendar is kept loose. It’s good to have ideas listed to post about, but posts will need to be tailored to the conversation of the day.

3. Businesses Are Watched More Critically

When a company doesn’t match tone and posts self promotion content, it stands out. A company can expect backlash when posting things that feel off in the current context.

4. Company Values Matter

For a while, there’s been a growing trend that brands should have values. A lot of businesses adapted to this by finding a positive cause their business could stand behind. For example, a business that values environmentally friendly methods for production would talk about this on social media as something important to their business. They would then make sure their company did its best to stand behind this issue with methods that aligned with these values.

Today, customers want to know where a business stands on many important issues. Staying out of a political issue is seen as taking a side in itself, but doesn’t win any favor with the people on one side or the other. Social media followers are putting more pressure on the businesses they follow to make their values clear.

Four Affordable and Effective Marketing Strategies

Businesses can’t grow without effective marketing strategies. Since there are a number of different marketing strategies, a business owner has to choose the ones that will help him or her reach the target audience. For example, a company offering retirement planning shouldn’t advertise on TikTok, a video sharing platform with mostly users age 23 and under. Effective strategies which can help most brands reach more consumers include:

SEO

Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy to rank better in search engines and it has an excellent ROI. Most people start their online experience on a search engine and organic traffic is free. Search engines send businesses qualified leads and the businesses at the top of the results get the most clicks.

Start an Affiliate Program

Creating an affiliate program allows a company to let publishers send them qualified leads. If the lead makes a purchase, the affiliate gets a commission. The brand can set rules about how the publisher can promote a product or service and offer images for them to use. Most businesses use an affiliate network, which allows them to set up a program quickly and easily.

Use Social Media

Business owners should find the platforms their customers and potential use and concentrate their efforts there. Marketers should read posts first to see what the desired audience talks about. This makes it easier to start conversations and create content that people will want to share. A good rule of thumb is to create useful, funny or otherwise non-promotional content 90 percent of the time.

Find Micro-Influencers

While major brands can afford to use celebrity social media influencers, most businesses can’t. Kylie Jenner, with 147 million followers, makes about $1.26 million per post. Micro-influencers have far less followers, but they also charge far less per post. Some may work on a commission basis or for free products. Micro-influencers usually have a highly, engaged niche audience. Business owners can search for someone with thousands of followers in their niche and reach out to them. Each of their followers may spread the word to their followers.

Remember, there is no one tactic that works for everyone. Businesses should experiment and track their results. Creating separate landing pages will help a business owner keep track of what is working and what isn’t.

Four New Business Metrics To Focus On In 2020

Out of all the measurable metrics available to a business, marketing metrics are often the most confusing as many managers and sales teams have never run a digital campaign before and so are not aware of the many benefits digital marketing metrics can bring to their departments and businesses as a whole.

Not applying these metrics will not only omit crucial data relevant to a business’s marketing campaigns but also reduce its long-term success.

Being able to track marketing metrics over time can help a business in various ways.

Marketing metrics allow a business to measure department performance on an individual basis, identify areas of weaknesses within each department, help a company work towards their goals and objectives, measure what matters most to the business and focus resources towards those objectives.

The problem with using marketing metrics today is twofold: lack of knowledge on which marketing metrics to use and using outdated metrics that are not as relevant as they once were in the past.

Vanity metrics such as email opens and page views tell a business nothing of why those emails were opened, why those pages were viewed, and how to measure and follow them along the sales funnel.

The good news is that modern technology has now made it possible for marketing teams and the businesses they work for to track opens, clicks, and views to see how customers move from engagement to purchase.

The new marketing metrics businesses should focus on in 2020 are those that measure customer behavior because their behaviors are what drives engagement and sales for a business.

The following four new metrics are excellent measurements of customer intent and customer action.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

According to Forbes and Entrepreneur, customer lifetime value might be the single most important metric for a business to measure as it gives an estimation of how much repeat business a company will get from a customer.

Historically, marketing teams used to measure lifetime value over the long-term but in 2020 and beyond they should focus more on how it relates to short-term business goals and strategies such as quarterly sales, paid campaigns, and content creation.

In doing so, they will be able to better measure various marketing channels and different sales funnels and see more clearly how they affect CLV.

When a business can gauge the customer experience via their campaigns and sales funnels they are better able to understand in real-time how they are impacting the lifetime value of a customer. They are then in a better position to create new pathways, strategies, funnels, and campaigns to increase that value over time.

The traditional method of calculating CLV is as follows:

Customer revenue minus all the expenses of acquiring and serving that customer.

However, the new and improved CLV metric adds the following criteria to the equation:

  • Measuring all touchpoints where customer value is created.
  • Maintaining and integrating records to keep the integrity of the customer journey alive.
  • Measuring customer revenue at each touchpoint.
  • Adding the entire revenue stream over the lifetime of each customer and coming up with an average.

What is left is a more holistic approach that focuses more on customer experience and how campaigns, content, and other acquisition methods can be optimized to keep customers flowing along the sales funnel, thus creating higher lifetime values.

Marketing Maturity Score

Businesses often get into a state of lax when it comes to their marketing. After all, if a campaign or marketing strategy is working then why fix it?

That justification may hold when measuring a direct response – an instant lead or a purchase – but not focusing on data that helps measure a customer’s experience will ultimately lead to a smaller lifetime value for that customer.

Focusing on short-term activities and not long-term results shows a lack of marketing maturity that must be recognized and adjusted so that campaigns can be optimized.

Using metrics to measure customer activities instead of actual results keeps the focus on campaign goals and objectives instead of on customer experience.

Instead, it is better to optimize a campaign around data points that show where customers are dropping off so that unsuccessful campaigns have a better chance of becoming successful once changes are made and successful campaigns becoming even more successful through data-driven optimization.

Measuring the maturity, and for that matter, the maturity of a marketing team, comes down to answering four basic questions:

Is there a willingness and eagerness to make changes to a campaign based on relevant metrics and data?

Is the focus more on the results of a campaign or the activities it produces?

Is data more important than activities or activities more important than data when it comes to campaign optimization?

Are customer objectives or campaign objectives more important?

Answering these questions will give a business a better idea of the maturity level of their marketing teams and the campaigns they are running.

To help in this regard, Adobe has come up with a Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment that helps company’s gauge and score the maturity level of their marketing department and their efforts.

Cross-Channel Visibility Measurement

Metrics that provide analytical insight into what channels and content on those channels created engagement are known as cross-channel visibility measurements.

Businesses should know which marketing channels are producing the best results and what content is driving the most engagement so that they can spend more of their time, money, and efforts providing similar content on those channels.

The problem with collecting and analyzing such data is that customers are constantly shifting from devices and channels so it is hard to measure where they are spending most of their time online and what kind of content they are looking for.

Google says that 90 percent of customers never stay on a single device when purchasing an item online.

Businesses can rectify this issue to a large extent by measuring the percentage of their customers who log in between two identifiable channels that businesses use for their marketing and content distribution.

For instance, Facebook and Shopify have a good cross-channel relationship that allows marketers to gauge the activities of their customers between the two.

Businesses and marketers can also utilize the following two measurements to increase analytical insights into cross-channel visibility:

Match Rate (Identification Rate): how many people a business can identify on various channels for cross-channel promotions.

View-Through Rate: how many people who viewed an ad or piece of content went on to participate in a specified and desired action.

Using the above cross-channel visibility measurements allows marketers to focus on those channels their customers spend most of their time on, uncover the content their customers like to consume and see how their customers move from one channel to another and one piece of content to another before they end up making a purchase.

Customer Health

Measuring customer health is nothing more than measuring the relationship between customers and the businesses that serve them.

Technology has made it possible to measure digital marketing metrics like engagement levels, buying propensity, and customer churn levels to monitor customer health.

If businesses just focus on how customers move through various channels and their sales funnels then they are missing out on the other important half – where and why they drop off during the sales process.

Knowing which campaigns and content promote healthy engagement and which ones do not, gives the marketing team a better idea of what to provide the customer with so they continue to stay a customer for a long time.

Aside from marketing metrics that gauge customer health like product purchases, engagement, and campaign ROI, businesses can also use the following five metrics to see if they are doing a good job nurturing their relationships with their customers:

Customer Duration: how long customers remain with a business.

Point of Contact: who in the company the customer interacts with the most – usually, the higher the position and the more seasoned the employee the better.

Number of Orders/Users: measuring the number of customer purchases against past averages.

Support Requests: gauging customer sentiment by measuring the tone of customer support requests on average.

Indirect Feedback: using third-party data such as customer reviews and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer satisfaction levels.

Conclusion

What is most important to businesses and marketers is what happens to customers when they come across an ad or a piece of content.

Modern marketing technology has given marketing teams the ability to measure behaviors such as customer intent and content affinity so they can provide what the customer wants and deliver it where they want to receive it.

If businesses want to stay relevant in the eyes of their current customer base and gain the trust of new customers, they will need to use metrics that measure and provide insights into customer lifetime value, customer engagement, campaign effectiveness, and customer health.

How to Have a More Productive Career

Oftentimes, when starting a business venture or pursuing a career, habits, not talents, create stumbling blocks. Understanding how to manage the moving parts in conjunction with self-discipline are keys to being successful in any field.

For example, when there are numerous tasks to accomplish, trying to memorize them all is counterproductive. At some point, being sidetracked will cause certain items on the agenda to be neglected. Instead of taking a chance and dropping the ball on completing a big task, set alarms. For example, if an on-call meeting is necessary, create an alarm indicating when the call should be completed. Focusing on one group of tasks at a time is also more productive than multi tasking. If there’s nine calls to make that day, it’s better to finish them all rather than taking a chance and forgetting one.

Networking, especially in the social media age, is important. Building a platform for people to connect on is important for brand recognition, which will increase success probability. In addition to brand recognition, don’t underestimate the power of interning. Interning does not translate to lack of talent. In fact, in most cases it creates a platform for future ventures, especially if the person can provide invaluable insight and skill. It’s similar to sampling food at the grocery store. Sampling something and making a purchase beats blindly buying a product and have buyers remorse.

Another thing to keep in mind is the tasks that take highest priority should be completed first. Falling victim to tasks like checking emails can set the precedent of the entire day. Instead, accomplish the greatest task first and gradually complete the easier list items. It is also beneficial to outsource tasks whenever possible. For instance, if there are phone calls and artwork that need to be completed, as the artist, it makes sense to have someone else make the phone calls and focus on the product. Spending consciousness comes in handy for outsourcing because the money that is saved can hire the proper help.

Success is attainable. With proper prioritizing, saving more than spending, and delegating tasks when necessary, mastery of anything is guaranteed. Turning these tips into habits increases productivity and increases earning potential.

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

  • Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
  • Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

  • Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
  • What topics do you think you’ll write about?
  • Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
  • If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

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