We gave you a run-down on the basics of email marketing last week.  In addition to using other tools such as social media and a well-run website, we told you that successful email campaigns are as important to Denver online marketing as ever.  The fact that there are so many ways to digitally market for enhanced business doesn’t mean that email marketing (a relatively old form of e-markeitng in comparison to some newer techniques) holds any less importance.  Email marketing is still a vital piece of the e-marketing puzzle!  Today, we’d like to offer up some guidelines to ensure that email marketing can really help your business’s Denver marketing techniques.  We hope these guidelines can help you begin to sketch out a frame for a successful email marketing campaign.

Guideline #1: Ensure that your message can be delivered to your targeted customers

One of the most important considerations when ensuring delivery of emails is that particular internet service providers have no reason to block any of your dispersed content.  Last week, we discussed the importance of customer permission to market to, and the importance of customers’ ability to unsubscribe to your business’s emails.  Make sure you are clear about internet service provider spam policies, and if need be, contact ISPs about whitelisting, so that your content is not blocked by the ISP’s spam filters.  In terms of delivery, it is also important to ensure that your message gets across and can be seen by everyone.  Folks, in the year 2011, this means your email marketing campaign had better be visible to anyone using a mobile device!

Guideline #2: Keep track of metrics to measure success

This means keeping track of email open rates, subscription list numbers, and other considerations such as click through rates from your emails to your website.  These metrics can be measured in tandem with time of day, day of the week, etc.  Click through rates in particular are important to measuring the success of your email campaign.  CTR can also help you determine and pick through your target market.  For example, if you see that a consumer on the email list has not clicked through to anything in a calendar year, it is perfectly logical to remove this consumer from your list.  Excess certainly does not equal success!

Guideline #3: Be creative, and think about what your customer wants

We did touch on this guideline a little bit last week, so we will go into a little more detail here!  Customers often require incentives for high open rates and higher click through rates.  This means, sales and ways to save money, contest entry opportunities, new products, new information, etc., …anything you can think of, really.  Think about what gets you to read through a marketed email that pops up in your inbox.  A clear message, and solid incentive are key for success.  Perhaps, you may want to define your own email value proposition: what is it you want your customers to get out of this email?  Is it simply information, or are you hoping customers will make an online sale, or perhaps convert to a real life sale?  Quite simply, set goals in order to attain them.

As a Denver Marketing company we are always searching to stay relevant with the content we are posting.  The holidays grant us a unique opportunity for content creation.  This year there were several ways that we used the holidays to generate content and we hope these ideas can help other companies create unique content as well.

Themed Blog Series

For those people involved in companies that capitalize on the holiday season taking the time to develop a blog series about their products or shopping in relation to the holiday season is a great way to develop content that not only works for the companies web site but multiple social media platforms also.

Infographs

There are a lot of infographs out there.  Many of them are centered around the holidays and are great conversation starters for posting on social media sites.  Companies may even want to have an infograph of their holiday figures commissioned in order to further promote the holidays and how it correlates with their business.

Gift Ideas

Another option would be to post photos of gifts ideas to the social media platforms.  This not only helps generate quality posts for the platforms but also helps promote the companies inventory to potentially increase sales during the holiday season.  A second facet of this section could be having members of the community post links or photos of items that the company offers that they would like for Christmas.

Holiday Contests or Giveaways

A great way to generate content and interaction is to have a holiday related contests.  Whether its giving away potential gifts or simply generating some holiday cheer, we know that contests generate content.  Contests also generate new followers for companies which is community that lasts beyond the holiday season.

While Contest typically denote some form of investment or commitment from the community members, giveaways simply require entry (or rewards for being in the community).  This gives community members reasons to stick around and wanting to comeback and interact daily for more.

Previous Holiday Related items

This is content that is open to interpretation for the company, it’s the sweater in the closet that can only be brought out at this time of year.  Maybe there are things from the companies past related to the holidays that could be shared.  Possibly there are things that the company would like to share that don’t fit into the other categories.  This is where we search out on Google for previous posts to share related to the holidays and our field.

All of these things can create great content for a companies social media platforms.  One or a mix of all can work.  It’s really up to how involved in the holidays that the company wishes to be.  These were some suggestions we had for companies, are there any things that should have their own category that we missed?  If so share them in the comments!  We’d also love to hear if any of these have worked for a company you are a part of!

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With new tools and software being introduced into the Denver marketing world, and the growing popularity of social media outlet, we sometimes overlook one of the oldest, most time-tested internet marketing techniques: email marketing.  Email marketing is efficient, and, when done effectively, can send a powerful message.  This classic internet marketing technique also allows for plenty of creativity and personal touch to help build your brand, and reach your customers.  Today, we are just going to go over some basic guidelines to be considered when you are beginning an internet marketing campaign.

1. Make sure you have permission to email your customers

Although at first thought this may seem to not be of much importance, remember that it is important to support customer trust in your brand by making sure customers have given you permission to land advertisements into their inboxes.  Whether permission is gained via website sign-ups or other promotions, customer permission to use email is generally not difficult to obtain.  However, make sure you have it, so that your company is not guilty of spamming!

2. Keep it simple

As far as the actual design of email goes, simple is often more successful than intricate or fancy.  Depending on customers’ email database of choice, emails can look very different to different customers.  Although colors and interesting images are great, it is also important to be sure that a customer who is unable to view these design details and pictures can get the gist of the email message.

3. Drawing the customer in: it’s all about the title!

Consider the number of emails you get in one day.  It’s highly possible that you are receiving hundreds of emails in the span of 24 hours.  You know as well as we do that some messages take priority over others, and that some messages are regarded for several seconds before being discarded.  Other messages still are sent straight to the ‘trash’ after the title and sender are written off as being of no importance!  In email marketing, consider this: the only way you can ensure that the majority of customers will read your email is by pulling customers in with the title.  Consider key words and phrases that will convince customers of why this email is important to read.  Dates and numbers (for example, sales prices and promotion time-spans) are often a good thing to include.  Going back to our #2 guideline of keeping it simple is also a good idea!

4. Be persistent

An effective email campaign doesn’t mean one email sent per year, you have to be dedicated to reaching your customers by contacting them on a regular basis with new, pertinent information!  Just as a website or social media site needs to be frequently updated to be effective, email marketing needs to be a regular channel of communication.

5. Target the right customers

Email is similar to direct mail marketing, without the excessive amount of paper waste.  By building a database of customers (who have given permission) to be contacted via email about company developments, promotions, etc., we would hope that so-called ‘cyber waste’ could be minimized.  Analyzing customers and segmenting them into target markets can help you personalize a campaign for each market to better reach your customers.

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As a Denver Marketing company we work to market companies in the most efficient ways possible.  A key part of marketing online is done through Search Engine Optimization.  We talk a lot about SEO here at our company because we believe in it, we blog about it, and we use it.  SEO can never be minimized and there are constantly being new ways added in which online marketers can increase SEO for their clients.  This week we will look at SEO inside of blog articles specifically.

Links

If you travel back and read our series on Search Engine Optimization (or simply download the e-book at the bottom of the page) you will see some great information about links.  The short of it is, it’s extremely helpful to have at least one, if not multiple links inside a blog post.  Typically we only link to other articles on our site.  Though this doesn’t quite increase the rankings like an inbound link to from site would, it still increases the overall SEO because search engines are searching out and reading each individual post to determine the inter-related aspects.

Categories

The automatic default post category for articles built in WordPress is to be “Uncategorized.” Creating a keyword specific category 0r categories for your blog posts not only help keep it organized but it also gives a category for search engines to place your post under.  Though it may not weigh heavily as a single SEO aspect, using the categories function is one of a many options within WordPress to help increase the visibility of a post, thus making it easier to be picked up by a search engine.

Tags

It is beneficial within WordPress to tag your posts (this is different from the myth of meta tags, which we discuss in our e-book below).  We have pulled in an image of our most-used tags from one of our personal blogs.  It is key when branding a blog to make sure that you are using tags and keywords that are relevant to your brand.  Even though these tags carry very little SEO rankings, they do help search engines determine what categories to place the posts in.  They also do carry weight in how WordPress presents the blog through their site.  It is definitely worth the time it takes to lay out the tags.

Keywords

Most of the time a meta tag denotes a keyword.  This is something that is key for building SEO into a blog post.  The more a keyword is presented in a blog post the higher a search engine will rank that post related to the keyword.  So making use of keywords should be top priority for any blog post.

Excerpt Function

A script is used to write a small synopsis about the blog post.  This is what will appear when the link is shared on Facebook and other social media platforms.  This is another place to type keywords to help catch the eye of both readers and the search engines.  An image of the script box has been attached below.

Image SEO

Finally, Preparing your images for SEO is extremely helpful.  Whenever someone goes to search for images, due to the lack of SEO built into the images of many sites right now, your site could be the one the person finds.  All that you have to do is enter some text related to the subject of the image as the alternate text of the image.  The other benefit for a blog of placing images in the post is that people are more likely to click through and read a blog post that has an image than they are one without.

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As a Denver Marketing company we are blogging every week.  Many of the reasons why we blog coincides well with the public relations side of a company.  This week we will conclude our look at Public Relations Principles for Small Businesses Online.  We have looked at what we feel are the key aspects of public relations online for any small business.  If you want take the time to read about how public relations relates to: Digital Press Releases, PR 2.0, Micro Media & VNR and Community Management.

If a person takes the time to think about it, public relations and blogging go hand in hand.  A blog can act as the front line through which all information about the company can be released in a cyber mode making easier access for both consumers and media.  There are many facets of a traditional public relations practitioners job that can be carried out through a blog.  It’s truly up to the business on how far they go in using a blog for public relations purposes.

A company wanting to engage in public relations practices will use a blog as a way to engage clients.  This is the main aspect of using a blog for public relations purposes and has many different modes.  A company can use the blog to simply harbor conversation (something we covered in depth last week when we talked about community management).  A company can also use the blog to post new information about company changes or new products.  This can come in the form of a press release or in-depth article lining out specific outcomes, plans, and product specifications.  Blogs can also be used as an opinion research tool, using the companies followers to determine areas of improvement and potential growth.

The web site implications for a blog should be covered but are always secondary when looking at public relations.  There are Search Engine Optimization implications that always come with a blog.  This is compounded for public relations because if a company has major news that they are releasing, if they are up to date on their SEO when they release their information, people searching for it will be automatically directed to the host site instead of any secondary sites.  This ensures that the company’s information is being received straight from their mouths.  This should go without mentioning but a blog should be professional looking.  It should carry over any theme that the company has on their web site and should be appealing to the eye.  When a consumer comes to the site and sees this, the credibility of the company is boosted.

Most of this stuff is very simple for companies to embrace.  Some may already be implemented.  However, it is a great reminder that things can come together to do wonders for a company in the field of public relations.  If you have any thoughts about how public relations relates to blogs feel free to leave them in a comment below!

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