Posts Tagged ‘email marketing’
Six Best Practices for Email Newsletter Design
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011The downsized economy has made everyone who’s still working busier than ever. Everyone is asked to “do more with less,” and that includes time and attention. At the same time, email marketing volume continue to grow, with 68% of b2b marketers planning to increase spending on email marketing this year. Effective email newsletters, focused on the needs of readers, remain a powerful tool for communicating with your customers and nurturing sales leads.
This means your email newsletter has only a matter of seconds to either engage the reader or make them hit the “delete” button–or worse, mark it as spam. Here are six best practices for making your email newsletter engaging and reader-friendly, and optimize it for viewing under different recipient email settings. These are illustrated using the popular iMedia Connection newsletter, one of the leading sources of marketing news and guidance. That’s not to say you should copy their template necessarily, just the techniques they use for engagement and readability.
- Keep your masthead or any graphics near the top of the newsletter shallow vertically, so that readers using the preview pane with images turned off don’t see just a blank box. Make sure at least part of your text content is visible without scrolling.
- Use white space on both sides, or at least on the right side of the template, to improve readability and make the newsletter seem less “heavy.” This enhances the appearance of the newsletter whether images are turned on or off, and gives it a blog-like look and feel.
- For each content item, combine a small graphic, compelling headline, and 1-2 sentence summary to entice the reader to click through to your site to read more. Keep the graphic small so that the link and summary are easily readable even with images turned off.
- Incorporate a “share by email” or “forward to a friend” button to encourage readers to pass along your content. Also include a “view this newsletter online” option, with social sharing buttons on the online version, to encourage social sharing of your content. Posting your newsletters online also provides SEO benefits and encourages readers to subscribe.
- Include buttons for your social network accounts in the newsletter to build your following on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social sites.
- Make use of the footer to provide links to supplemental or less important content: upcoming events, popular past articles, additional newsletters you offer, etc.
Utilizing these best practices in your newsletter design helps increase reader engagement with your content and extends the reach of your content.
Review: Six Small Business CMS and Web Marketing Systems
Monday, August 29th, 2011What’s the best web content management system (CMS) for your small business? Should you look at something beyond a CMS—a web marketing system (WMS), that provides additional functions like customer relationship management (CRM) and email? There’s no shortage of options, and the decision is an important one: you’ll be “married” to the platform you choose for as long as your current site is up.
Content management systems are valuable tools for small businesses that 1) don’t want to make a big investment in IT infrastructure, 2) don’t have web development (HTML, CSS etc.) expertise on staff, and 3) want to be able to maintain their own web content (adding new pages, text and images) over time, without needing to learn web coding skills.
“Free” CMS options such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal have an obvious appeal (price) to small businesses, but none are cost-free. All require some level of technical expertise, and Joomla and Drupal particularly have steep learning curves. Low-cost, fee-based tools are generally more user-friendly, provide more features, and most importantly come bundled with support. For businesses looking beyond “free” tools, here are six CMS and WMS options that can help you get more sales and marketing productivity out of your website, while being easy on your web content contributors.
Keep in mind that all of these tools impose some design limitations; if you need a truly custom look and feel like these sites, your only option is to hire a professional web design and development firm. But if you can live within a template (and most of these tools do offer a respectable array of options), you can save thousands of dollars on design and coding costs.
CMS Only
These platforms offer website building and content management tools with hosting, but no “extras.” If you are just looking to get a site up on the web and already have systems in place for CRM and marketing automation, these tools are worthy of consideration.
Pricing: $150-$600 per year ($12-$50 per month)
Squarespace is a generally well-regarded tool with reasonable design functionality for building natively search-optimized websites and blogs. It offers a solid set of features including site search, multiple permission levels for different types of contributors, a form-builder, and built-in analytics. The learning curve is far less daunting than most free CMS alternatives, and a strength of the tool is its mobile support. For anyone looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, basic website building and management tool, Squarespace is definitely worth consideration.
UPDATE: After closer examination, SquareSpace is not worthy of consideration, due to weaknesses in search engine optimization, specifically:
- • Custom meta title tags for high-level pages are limited to 50 characters (even the most conservative SEOs recommend 65 characters for the title tag).
- • Meta title tags inside a section (e.g., “blog”) will always begin with the section name. You can customize the section name, but you can’t override the fact the all-important first few characters of every page title in that section will contain it.
- • You can’t create custom meta description tags (!) which are essential in “selling the click.”
- • The people behind SquareSpace seem to lack understanding of how SEO works. True, manipulative tactics don’t work, but solid, white hat SEO is essential to getting a website ranked highly. Their information is both inaccurate and offensive to legitimate SEO professionals.
$240-$1200/year ($20-$100 per month)
Like the other tools listed here, LightCMS is low-cost, easy to use, search-optimized and provides tools like a forms builder. What sets it apart is better design flexibility than most of the alternatives, calendar tools and built-in ecommerce functionality. For developers and agencies, LightCMS also offers one of the most attractive partner programs. Considering all of its features, LightCMS is another shortlist-worthy tool for basic website creation, particularly for smaller B2C companies who want an easy-to-manage online store.
$300 per year ($25 per month)
Another website building option that includes extras like ecommerce functionality with credit card processing, and nightly backups. The site is a bit cheesy, but the functionality of the tool is solid. Solution Toolbox provides their own comparison of their system to Squarespace and LightCMS, but take it with a grain of salt; it’s biased in their favor of course and some of the specifics are out of date (for example, Squarespace now includes a forms-builder). Still, for smaller consumer marketers who want to run an online store in addition to their basic website, this is worth a look.
Web Marketing Platforms
These suites combine CMS functionality with additional web marketing applications to provide more than just a website, but a complete online marketing software system.
$480 per year ($40 per month)
Business Catalyst combines the features of the products above—a CMS, forms builder, and ecommerce tools—with email marketing functionality and a basic CRM system. It provides respectable design flexibility and support for mobile devices. Though the product had issues in its original incarnation, Adobe has fixed many of these issues since acquiring it in late 2009 and continues to invest in product development. The catch? Business Catalyst isn’t sold directly to users, only through web developers and agencies (though there are ways around this).
$2,400/year ($200 per month)
Genoo is a solid, easy to use tool, very strong on email marketing / marketing automation. It offers some of the best built-in SEO tools of any of these packages. Genoo doesn’t provide native CRM functionality, but does have a pre-built integration to Salesforce.com. This is ideal for midsized companies with at least moderately sophisticated internal marketing resources who are already using a separate CRM system and are ready to graduate from hosted email marketing services. Genoo’s offering includes training on how to use its lead-nurturing capabilities.
$1,800/year ($150 per month)
This is a complete web marketing package for smaller, non-ecommerce businesses. It provides a robust CMS for a website and blog along with native CRM, email marketing, and forms-building tools, as well as comprehensive strategy guidance for making all of the pieces work together. The ePROneur package uniquely combines hosting, software, services and strategy to help companies with limited resources effectively generate leads and revenue online. The web marketing resources section of the company’s website also offers a wealth of free strategic and tactical web marketing information.
Any of the alternatives above can help small to midsize companies cost-effectively build and manage their web presence with no IT infrastructure and limited technical expertise. The key from there is to choose a platform whose strengths match up with your business type and needs. And also to investigate multiple options to determine which tool, and company, you are most comfortable working with.
FTC Disclosure: Webbiquity has no affiliate relationships with any of the vendors in this review.
2011 B2B Marketing Trends
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010MarketingSherpa recently released its 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. You can download the executive summary for free (or pay $400 for the full report). The summary reveals no shocking surprises but a few interesting trends:
78% of marketers identified “generating high-quality leads” as their top priority, while 44% said the same for “generating a high volume of leads” (so generating low-quality leads is a priority for some marketers? Strange.). Both figures were up slightly, but similar to last year. As MarketingSherpa notes, “Year after year, the greatest challenge that B2B organizations face is generating high-quality leads.”
A slightly higher percentage of marketers than last year (41% vs. 39%) called “marketing to a lengthening sales cycle” a top challenge. This may be just a statistical hiccup or it may be due to the continuing economic slump. While there’s no reason to expect sales cycles to shorten, an improving economy next year should help stabilize the length of the decision process.
Generating PR “buzz” and having a product perceived as “cutting edge” were called significant challenges by only about a third of marketers, unchanged from last year. “Soft” benefits tend to take a back seat to harder measures like leads and marketing productivity during lean recessionary budgets, but should increase in importance as economic conditions improve and companies shift from a cost-cutting and expense minimization to growth mode.
Of eleven different marketing categories, all of those in which marketers said they plan to increase spending in 2011 are online activities: website design / optimization and social media topped the list with 69% of companies planning larger budgets in these areas, followed by virtual events and webinars, SEO, email marketing and paid search. The categories with the largest percentage of marketers reporting plans to reduce spending next year were high-cost offline tactics: direct mail, trade shows and print advertising.
Asked to specify which marketing tactics are most effective, more than 90% judged online activities such as website optimization, email marketing and SEO as somewhat or very effective—not surprisingly given the responses to the previous question regarding 2011 budget priorities. Tactics like telemarketing, PR and PPC advertising fell predominantly into the “somewhat effective” camp. But strangely, social media—one of the top priorities for increased spending next year—was viewed as “highly effective” by only 16% of respondents, while 25% said it was “not effective.” Why would otherwise highly sensible, ROI-conscious marketers spend even more money on a tactic that they don’t believe works very well? MarketingSherpa’s explanation:
“Social media is undervalued in terms of effectiveness and this is a result of the infancy of this marketing tactic and the low level of experience organizations have in execution when compared to more seasoned marketing tactics. As B2B marketers become more mature with their social marketing practices, their perceptions on the effectiveness of this tactic will improve.”
The study also found that direct mail was judged as a low-effectiveness tactic. However, both social media and direct mail can be effective if done right (though social media results tend to start small and build over time). Perhaps more of these marketers should seek professional outside help in these areas.
Finally, in what appears to be bad news for marketing automation software vendors, 60% of respondents reported having this application in place, while another 20% (likely purveyors of lower value / short sales cycle / low consideration items) said they no plans to implement such software. That leaves only 20% of the market left to fight over. Now, it’s possible that the survey sample was biased in favor of early adopters or that respondents were confusing email service providers with true marketing automation, but it’s also possible that this market is simply maturing faster than its leading vendors have publicly acknowledged.
Want to know more? Again, you can download the free executive summary or purchase the full report to get all the details.
Tips to Make Your Email Marketing Messages Matter This Summer
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Guest post by Ajay Goel.
It’s that time again – the dog days of summer for email marketers when recipients are eager to trade in the cold blue hue of their computers for some warm summer rays. When more emails will go unopened, because chances are, recipients are either away on vacation, preparing for vacation, or simply wanting to be on vacation!
So how can you make your email marketing messages matter to office workers counting the minutes before happy hour on sidewalk patios? Or busy moms and dads whisking their kids from one outdoor activity to the next? Email marketing service JangoMail came up with some tips you may find helpful.
- • Tap into how your products will make summer activities even more fun. Barbeques, campfires, hiking trips—each presents an opportunity to reach out to recipients with deals on food, apparel, cookery and other products your recipients already want.
- • Keep your messages breezy and brief. Emphasize warm and cheerful photos and images over text. Make your text large and colorful. Papyrus’ photo of a small girl stretching on a pristine beach immediately draws one in, reminding us to celebrate life—and buy cards for those birthdays, weddings, and showers!
- • Hook into the viral effect of email by offer up great summer deals. Include built-in incentives for recipients to share your coupons as Six Flags Great Adventure did for its “buy one, get one free” campaign.
- • You don’t need to be Coppertone to reach people during the summer months. Even B2B companies can “summer-up” as Alcatel-Lucent did when touting application enablement, with one image featuring the words “open has value” floating over a woman relaxing on a green, inviting field.
- • If possible, emphasize events recipients can go to. Whether it’s a sale or trade show, hone in on the social elements – create a visual picture of the food, drink, service and good times with others they can expect. They want to get out of the house or office anyway. Show them why they should come to you when they do.
- • And don’t forget! Take advantage of your reporting and analytics to track how your recipient behaviors are changing with the season. Are they opening your messages earlier in the day? Are they opening them at all? Capturing the essence of the summer also means adjusting to the season’s pace. Your recipients will show you how.
Ajay Goel is CEO of JangoMail, an email marketing company that helps businesses reach customers and prospects in a highly reliable and personalized way.
