Tips & Tricks
15. June 2011
Jim Gras
Tips For Keeping Customers Engaged Over the Summer
Keeping your customers engaged over the summer can be a challenge. Between vacations, outdoor events, and school being out, the consumer’s buying habits and attention span change. People are in front of their computers less and use mobile devices more to check email in the summer months.
So how do you keep your customers engaged during the lazy, hazy days of summer?
Make sure your emails are mobile-ready. If at all possible, create a mobile version of your email. If you do not have the resources to do this, at the very least make the font bigger and keep the call to action closer to the top and more centered (so you don’t have to slide the email to the right).The same would be true with landing pages.
Try a time-of-day split test. A change in season can mean a change in your contacts’ behaviors. Parents are distracted by children now that school is out, children stay up later, there are more activities outside. If you usually send at the same time, try a different time or split-test one time with another and look for a difference in engagement. There is no magical time – it depends on your audience.
Be patient. In the lazy days of summer, it may take people longer to get to your email. Studies show that it can take 2 weeks for all of your interested contacts to interact with your email. Make sure your offer is still valid or, at the very least, make sure the landing page has an offer of some kind. It may be best to avoid “today only” specials in the summer, unless this is your business model.
Do a “summer tips” email. Retailers – do you have a product that can be used more/differently in the summer (hats, lotions, shoes, equipment)? Do you have information that is more relevant in the summer (healthy tips, travel destinations, children’s study tips while out of school, water safety)? Get creative and your audience will appreciate the tips.
Do a summer auto-responder series. Alternatively, set up an email calendar now and create the emails ahead of time. Schedule these emails in advance – especially if your email manager will be on vacation. An example of a “summer series” could be around deals each week, summer safety tips, motivating health tips related to the summer (skin care, pool exercises, healthy eating). Nonprofits could consider hosting a “summer challenge” fundraising goal and offer winners a prize at the end of the summer.
Express yourself. Summer is a more casual time, making it a good time to relate to your customers on a personal level. People like to feel they are buying from people, rather than companies. Take time this summer to stop selling and start building relationships. Take pictures of your staff at a company cook-out, share pictures from employee travels (this would be great on a blog or social media, too). Have a picture-caption contest – for example, use a picture of your CEO or owner doing something fun and ask your subscribers to write the caption with a small prize for the winning caption. Ask your customers what they did during the summer and ask them to post pictures to your website or Facebook page.
Get creative, find a reason to send to your list, and you’ll find your audience engaged with you through the summer and into fall. Read more about the importance of summer campaigns to small businesses here.
Written By: Penny Ashley-Lawrence, iContact Enterprise Account Manager
Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services
If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.
This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want.
Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free website evaluation.
Branding
19. May 2011
Jim Gras
Delivering on Your Brand
Your brand positioning has been agreed on, your target customer has been identified, your message has been refined to reach that audience, you have a new logo and tagline, a new email marketing template and your website has a new design. All of this really captures who you are and where you want to go.
So, your work is done. Right?
Wrong.
Good start, but you’ve only scratched the surface. Your smart positioning, new site, new template and new logo will only get you so far. Now, the real challenge: delivering on your brand experience.
Experience can make or break a brand. Say you’ve premised your entire brand on exceptional service (á la Nordstrom), but your frontline employees don’t deliver. At all. What stays with your audience is not that winning tagline about service, but the abrasive rep who rubbed them the wrong way. And at that point, no amount of appealing logos or clever messages can salvage your brand.
Retailers provide an example of how to think about your brand experience. In fact, the emphasis on brand experience in retail has inspired a whole cottage industry. Perfumers develop special scents for specialty shops. Of-the-moment DJs craft brand-inspired soundtracks for store stereos. But before you write this off as a trend for retailers only, think again. While you might not need to rush out for that perfect fragrance for your office headquarters, the lesson is this: Take a hard look at your brand experience.
Getting your brand experience right requires a top-to-bottom sweep of your touch points. So, do yourself this favor. Get your team in a room and start mapping out all the possible ways your audience might interact with your organization. In other words, audit your brand experience.
As a warm-up, start with the obvious conveyers of brand: your emails, your website, your ads. But then get into the not-so-obvious: how your staff interacts with your audiences, the atmosphere in your lobby, how you answer the phone, the music playing when a caller goes on hold, the tone in your email marketing messages.
Also, think hard about whether your processes actually reinforce your brand promise—and identify the gaps. For example, are you promising “easy” but making customers take a dozen steps to complete an order? Do you want to target young families but aren’t actually offering family-friendly policies for your employees? Do you want to be known for hospitality but have a less-than-welcoming presence at the front door? All of these details add up to an impression of your brand—good or bad.
So, get beyond the big picture and think through all those details that make up the experience. Then, make some changes, start actively managing the experience and watch your brand take off. Written By: Anna Adlard, Director of Account Planning at capstrat
Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services
If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.
This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want.
Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free website evaluation.
Leave a comment!! »Email Clean Up
10. May 2011
Jim Gras
Tips to Clean Up Your Email Marketing This Spring
Just like cleaning up your house, prepping the garden, or washing all the pollen off your car, with spring comes another set of tasks you should follow to get the most out of your email marketing; Email Spring Cleaning. Each spring you should take the time to make sure your campaigns are following best practices, to update your templates, to take advantage of any new features iContact is recommending, to review the basics, and to make sure your email marketing has as much impact as possible. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your email marketing.
* Clearly identify who your email is from – Be sure to set up your Campaign in iContact with an email address your recipients will recognize. Using your company name as the sender name is always our recommendation. Once you choose the “from name,” be consistent with it so your customers will always recognize emails from your business. As an example, we could use emailmarketing@seo-specialist-online.com
* Set your sending schedule – Pick a day and time for your emails (whether they are weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc.) and stick to it. Add it to your calendar and set a reminder. If you can’t log in during that time, use our Schedule Delivery feature to have your email sent at the date and time you want. Be sure to let your subscribers know on your sign-up form and in the newsletter what the schedule is.
* Make it easy for others to reach you or your company – In the body of your email, show your email recipients multiple ways to get in touch with your company. This can include an email address, a phone number, and a postal address. Having a physical address can assure your list members that your company has a real-world presence. Be sure your campaign settings are up-to-date.
* Make navigation easier – If your emails tend to be longer, use a table of contents. List out each story/article and link it to the item within the email. Your recipients can then navigate directly to the items that interest them. If you find your current template makes this difficult, consider switching to a new template as part of your spring-cleaning. With more than 500 beautiful templates to choose from, MessageBuilderTM can solve your navigation issues, and give your emails a fresh look.
* Check on your list-building activities – Review the different methods you are using to build your email list. If you have not added a sign-up form to your website, it is very easy to add one using our Sign-Up Form Creator. Be sure there is a form available on every page of your website. If you own a retail store, add a form at the register. While at conferences and events, bring a form or computer to allow potential customers to sign up on the spot.
* Combine Email Marketing with Social Media – If you have not already taken advantage of iContact’s Social Tools, now is the time. With Social Tools you can easily take advantage of the social networks of your subscribers. Using Facebook and Twitter allows you to reach a wider audience than with email marketing alone. Our social media integrations take all the guess work out, and allow you to leverage the power of email marketing with social media today.
These are just a few of the best practices we recommend to make your email marketing as successful as possible. To see more, and to read about how to build strong relationships with your customers and prospects, check out our Email Marketing Guide. It is full of information on how you can become an email marketing expert. Written By: Daniel Smith, iContact Senior Product Marketing Manager
Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services
If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.
This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want.
Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free website evaluation.
SEO Title Tag
9. May 2011
Jim Gras
SEO Title Tag
Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags. Title tags are important factors when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization advice, tips, strategy and tactics.
All search engines use title tags to gather information about your Web site. Such title tags cannot be called unique as many sites/blogs have got exactly the same wordings in their title tags. Twokad suggested to change the title tags from one title. Please careful when writing title tags never, never over stuff keywords title.
Make sure your title tags are not stuffed with keywords. I always thought that title tags and header tags were the same things. For the same very reason, title tags should vary. Vary the title tags on the inner pages of your website. For some web pages, such as product pages, automatically generated title tags may be sufficient.
Title tags for WordPress blog posts vs static pages. SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. While WordPress is perfectly built for SEO, it usually requires tweaking if you want to optimize your title tags accordingly. If it’s important that user’s see more than 55 characters in the WordPress title tags — then do it. The title tags should be between 10-60 characters.
Keep your title tags to 65 characters including spaces.You won’t get penalized for having longer title tags, but the search engine will simply ignore the longer part. The title tag is used by pretty much every search engine that uses spiders to crawl your website. The only information they are giving the search engine is their brand name.
This entry was posted in SEO and tagged html tags , html title tags . WordPress title tags are located in the part of the HTML code. I’m in fact talking about title tags in a post title – as in the title attribute in a link. At this point we’re talking about tagging your blog title tags for search engines. Understanding how search engines use and treat title tags allows us to maximize the use of title tags.
Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services
If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.
This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want.
Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free apcalis tadalafil jelly 5 ml.
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