Tips for Your Call to Action on Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail campaigns can be terrific marketing tools. While e-mail marketing can be mistaken for spam or deleted without opening by busy recipients, direct mail offers an opportunity to stand out.

One of the best ways to get a response is to craft a strong Call to Action (CTA) with every message. Here are three tips on the best ways to maximize the impact of your CTA.

  1. Offer an incentive. You want people to respond to your CTA. In e-mail marketing, responders often get something (a newsletter, a free e-book) to incentivize the all-important clicks. You need to incentivize your customers as well. Offer them a discount or a two-for-one sale with specific ending date. Tell them the first consultation is free. Make sure you offer these incentives only in connection with the direct mail campaign, or they’ll lose the incentive value.
  2. Know your audience. What does your audience want? What drives them? There’s no substitute for knowing them. Do you sell pizza, and Big Game Night is on television? Make sure they get a discount direct mail from you! Do you sell or rent formal wear? Start your direct mail campaign several months before prom and weddings roll around in May and June. Offer free viewings and consultations. Do you sell tax services? Contact your audience before tax time rolls around, when they get their W-2s.
  3. Make it easy to respond. Their response should be simplicity itself. If it takes too much time or effort, they are unlikely to do it. Make sure they can phone, e-mail, text, or drop a response postcard in the mail. If by phone, have an 800 number and make sure it’s clearly visible.

How Much Is Too Much Blogging?

 

·    How Much Is Too Much Blogging?

For most businesses and personal blogs-posting once a week is the norm. But blogging frequency will not be the same for all. There are a few areas that you will need to investigate before you can decide on the perfect number of postings for your blog.

·    Blogging Goals

Ask yourself this question-What am I striving to accomplish with a blog? And then set yourself up for success by setting blogging goals that run parallel with your overall business objectives. Or on a personal note- are you just having fun or want to help others with your wisdom? Give the best of yourself by setting a blogging schedule and be consistent. People will show up and respect you for not wasting their time.

·    Readers

Blogging is not just about you. Who is your audience of readers? Are you making connection with them-or overwhelming them? Posting too much may chase your readers away because they can’t keep up. Give your readers informative and delightful content-but don’t overdo-keep them in a bit of suspense and always wanting more. Make sure your reader has time to absorb and enjoy what you have created-they don’t want to be rushed.

·    Quality vs. Frequency

Fresh insight and wisdom needs a moment of incubation time before release. Frequency of posts does not automatically promote quality content. If the quality of your content is slipping-it’s just a matter of time before your readers slip away. Don’t breed familiarity- keep ahead of your clients and friends and let them chase you in anticipation.

·    Too Much Blogging…

If your blog is just words on the screen and not accomplishing your goals-too much blogging.

If your readers are overwhelmed and leaving-too much blogging.

If your posts are many and void of quality content-too much blogging.

 

The Importance of Multi-Channel Marketing in 2016

If there is one thing customer’s love, it’s the ability to choose. Multi-channel marketing provides customers with choices and, in turn, provides your company with increased profits. It’s 2016, and yet still some businesses aren’t taking advantage of all of the benefits that multi-channel marketing has to offer. In fact, some don’t even know what it is. If you need clarification on what multi-channel marketing is and how it can benefit your business, keep reading.

Multi-Channel Marketing: What Is It?

Multi-marketing strategies provide customers with choices, but how? This is done by using various platforms to allow customers to purchase your product or service while maintaining communication with them.

  • Communication Channels: Communication is maintained through email, catalogs, stores, or mail.
  •  Action Response: Consumers can purchase products after initial communication is made in one of the above channels.

Why You Need It

In short, single-channel marketing customers don’t spend as much as multi-channel marketing customers do. Multi-channel marketing allows you to be where the customer is at all times, constantly putting your product or ideas into their hands or mind. By maintaining contact and allowing customers to choose how they purchase a product, your revenue increases along with customer satisfaction. With the average multi-channel customer spending three times more than the single-channel customer, the numbers speak for themselves. Forgoing multi-channel marketing is, essentially, forgoing profit opportunity.

What You Need

Coming up with a multi-channel marketing campaign is crucial. You need to be able to adequately combine a choreographed campaign, marketing response attribution, and a clear message to your customer.

In this day and age, customers are gaining more and more control and options over how they spend. Multi-channel marketing strategies play into this ability and keep customers happy by giving them the option to choose how they spend their money.

Your Website Content Can Affect Your Sales

Websites are no longer just visual representations of brands and companies. In fact, they play a pivotal role in any online marketing or SEO campaign. No truer is this then when it comes to effectively marketing products and services to core, niche and mass audiences. With this in mind, your website content has to be easy to scan and digest. It should also entail industry-relevant and high-quality content for visitors and potential customers. No matter the industry or sector you serve, your website can truly be a tool in generating leads, profits and recurring revenue.

Visibility is the Key to Success

According to industry experts, your website must have the following features in order to secure higher visibility across Google. These essential tools can also foster brand validity and growth, while driving business and sales across the board:

Uniformity and Consistency

Sites must have gripping templates and user features that are easy to access. This includes eye-catching logos, along with menus and designs that establish uniformity and consistency across your pages. The days of intricate Flash presentations and add-ons are simply over. Today’s websites are streamlined, centralized, and optimized for SEO and especially mobile and wireless access.

Captivating and Compelling Content

Your content must also be precise, concise, and to the point. This will keep visitors and customers on your pages longer – resulting in higher conversion rates and sales. Long gone are the days of lengthy content that would turn potential clients and customers away. Keep your content direct, industry- specific, and inclusive of strategic keywords and links that connect your customers to the products and services they seek.

Websites must also feature links to your social media pages. This can generate a lasting buzz about your brand, while appearing in local search results and Google Maps.

Understanding Optimal Frequency can Improve your Email Marketing

According to a TechnologyAdvice survey, 45.8% of subscribers consider business emails as spam when they perceive they are emailed too often. It was also the most cited reason as recommendations of how businesses could improve their email efforts at 43.9%. Ignoring the importance of the frequency of your email campaign can have a devastating loss on your business through loss of subscribers and consequently potential customers. Campaign Monitor determined that two weeks seems to be the optimal frequency to send email marketing materials without having a negative impact on a company’s subscriber base.

The ideal frequency for your company may differ from the norm. You have to know your subscriber base and their preferences. Here are some tips for optimizing the frequency of sending email marketing campaigns to your subscriber list.

1. Don’t Send Everything to Everyone

Know your audience. If you’re having a sale on men’s razors, you don’t need to send them to every person on your list. Tailor your marketing campaigns to the relevant people on your database.

2. When in Doubt, Just Ask

Include a page on your website that allows subscribers to select their preferred frequency of receiving marketing emails. Having a place where subscribers can let you know how they feel will save you the effort of having to guess.

3. Trial and Error

While two weeks is the optimal frequency found for the average email marketing campaign, this may or may not apply to your subscriber base. Vary your frequency in sending marketing campaigns and monitor the results until you find a frequency that works for your subscriber base.

There is plenty of data out there supporting various optimal email frequencies. When it comes down to it, the most effective frequency is the one that works for your subscriber base.

Millennials are Loving their Direct Mail

When most of the mail being delivered by the Post Office seems to be catalogues and direct mail coupon offers, it would seem that the tech-savvy Millennial generation would likely ignore those daily offerings, since they appear to enjoy their interaction with portable technology more than paper. If your company provides services targeted at that valuable twenty-something demographic, you might be thinking that adding a direct mail campaign to your advertising budget would be a waste of money. It isn’t, and here’s why:

Unique Eye-Catching Opportunity

Millenials spend their entire day ignoring the swarm of ads generated by social media and massive search engines. Unless they are actively shopping, those Google-ads are not so likely to receive the clicks needed to convert a sale. When a direct mail ad appears in their mailbox, it is a singular piece of advertising held in their hand, and not as likely to be swiped away. Take advantage of the stationary moment at the mail box, and put your product in front of young, hungry consumers.

Millenials Love to Save

This new generation has been imbued with a refreshing approach to life–they are less interested in buying objects and far more motivated in purchasing services. Unlikely to waste money, a coupon promoting technology, restaurants, and convenience services will be collected and encourage the hard-working individual to utilize the added bonus.

Shop Local Is Key

Like the direct mail appearing in their mail box, the local services advertised is another aspect of the economy the Millennial generation values over the anonymity of the global internet market. Introduce your business to your neighbor and see them walk through your door. Even online services provided by local individuals are more appealing than corporate giants.

Add a direct mail campaign to your advertising budget today.

How to Track Direct Marketing Efforts

When starting a marketing campaign for your business or company, the first thing you want to establish is a way to track the success of your campaigns. This will help you figure out what is working for your company and what’s not working. By establishing clear cut ways to track your marketing efforts, you can determine where your ideal audience is viewing your marketing efforts and if they are responding to it.

Traceable Codes

There are 2 main ways you can use traceable codes in your marketing campaign as a way to measure their success. If you are sending out mailers that indicate a special sale or promotion that you are having, use a specific code on the mailers that the users have to enter in order to access the discount. When the promotion or sale is over, you will be able to determine if customers found the sale via the mailers and unique code you used and how effective the mailers were. The other way traceable codes can be used is by adding them to your coupons that you offer. You may choose to offer coupons to your newsletter subscribers and a lesser coupon to all of your other potential costumers. With 2 unique coupon codes, you will be able to trace which coupons were the most effective.

Sales Campaigns with Unique URL

When sending out mailers or a newsletter to your customers, you can include a specific, special URL that the potential customer has to type in or click on in order to get to the offer or discount. This way, you will be able to track how many people accessed the discount via the specific URL.

Offer a Gift with Specific Purchase

A great way to track a marketing campaign is to offer a small, free gift with the purchase of an item. You can offer this free gift when the item is purchased with a specific code, through a specific URL, or during a short time frame. You will then be able to check how many customers redeemed the free gift offer.

Print’s Role in B2B Marketing

In your quest to expand your company, it’s important to put your best foot forward when marketing to other businesses to get them to buy from you or hire you. While having a good work ethic, competitive pricing, and superior product are all great strategies, you need to get your foot in the door first. In this digital age, print can have a big role in how you conduct your B2B marketing strategy, and in how successful it will be overall.

Location, Location, Location

Printed marketing materials are easy to distribute to a large room of business professionals. Simply make an appealing flyer, brochure, or other printed piece, then at any upcoming forum or conference you can hand out those pieces to prospective trade customers. Because everyone is there to share information and network anyways, print marketing can be seen as a much more positively received move than emailing the attendees at another time. As well, given the focus of the forum or conference those business professionals will be more likely to look at your work and read it thoroughly.

Feel

For many established business people, print materials still give a feeling that digital marketing lacks. The burst of color, the feel of the paper- it has a physical presence they identify with, and are more likely to look over your printed materials than a simple online message.

Comfort

The fact is many business professionals still read the newspaper and magazine. Communicating to them through the medium they have been familiar with their whole lives is a smart move, and will connect with them faster than a solely online focused marketing attempt.

Conclusion

Print isn’t close to being gone in B2B Marketing efforts. Use it wisely and you’ll see it still has much to offer

Building Keywords to Add to Your Content

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of adding just the right mix of the proper keywords to get your website to rank high in search engine results. This allows potential visitors to find you easily, and increases traffic to your website. While some run away screaming at the mention of SEO, it is really not a complicated process. The following three tips will help you add keywords to the content on your website, so you can increase the number of new and returning visitors to your site.

* Determine Your Purpose

First, determine what you are trying to accomplish by bringing visitors to your website. What are people looking for that they will find on your site? The whole purpose behind keyword optimization is to put the right mix of keywords into the content on your website, so your site will be picked up in search engine results. If the search engines can’t find you, neither can people that are looking for what you have to offer. Once you determine your purpose, then you can choose keywords to pepper into your content to allow your site to be on the first page of search results.

* Research Keywords

Next, research keywords for your website. There are several websites out there that will help you choose the right keywords for your website. The keywords you choose should reflect what your site is about. Your site likely already ranks high for certain keywords; keyword analytics sites can help you determine this. You should also brainstorm to think of other keywords that may be untapped. This will help you increase your search rankings.

* Check Your Keyword Density

Once you have plugged in the chosen keywords, go back to your favorite analytics tool and analyze your keyword density. Remember that too few keywords will cause your website to fall in the search rankings, but having too many keywords can also hurt you. This is called “keyword stuffing,” and is harshly penalized by the major search engines.

How to Make Print Simple Yet Effective

Although online marketing seems to get most of the attention these days, print marketing can still be a successful way to find new customers. You don’t have to make your print marketing materials complex or elaborately designed in order to grab the eye of potential customers. There are plenty of simple ideas for print marketing that are highly effective.

 

Keep It Clean

A clean design with a few well-chosen colors, rather than a busy one with multiple tones, is the ideal way to catch the attention of consumers. Clean designs won’t overwhelm consumers, and they won’t hide your message. When it comes to white space, don’t shy away from it. Leaving a considerable amount of white space around your design helps draw consumers’ eyes to it.

 

Get Right to the Point

Whether you’re designing a brochure, flyer, poster or newspaper ad, don’t include too much information about your products or services. You only have a limited amount of space to make an impression on consumers, so make the most of it. Include the most important points you want consumers to know about your products or services. Putting too much information on your print marketing materials can end up causing consumers to turn away instead of reading through them.

 

Make It Easy to Read

The layout of your print marketing materials is just as important as the text you’re including. Make it easy for consumers to read them by including bold headlines and bullet points. These help break up what would otherwise be walls of text. You can also consider using infographics, depending on the types of print marketing materials you’re creating. These show consumers what they need to know in a format that’s easy to read.

 

Putting these simple tips into practice when designing your print materials can help improve your chances of gaining new customers. Remember that consumers value simple, easy-to-read designs and layouts that immediately let them know what you’re offering them.