Email Advertising

While maintaining email advertising lists and creating a strategy during a down economy, don't overlook co-registration.

Co-registration is an arrangements between companies to collect user information for purposes of email advertising. Usually this would be a separate check-box on a Web signup form where the user can opt-in to receive messages from a third-party.

Such potential partners are hard to come by because it's expensive and time consuming to set up partnerships on an individual basis. Because of this, most organizations work through a third party that makes the arrangements, processes the leads, and sells them.

Whenever money is involved, there will always be unscrupulous people involved. Marketers looking for a quick way to grow their email advertising list combined with suppliers looking to sell as many addresses as possible usually leads to significant problems that people must be aware of. These are the problems that people must defend against if they are going to enter co-registration for their email advertising campaign.

Before contracting with a co-registration provider, find out:

• Is this really co-registration or is it just a list purchase or rental? Some vendors have a hard time separating the two concepts. Co-registration is where individuals opted-in to your list on someone else's site. A vendor can't have thousands of addresses for you immediately; if they do, you know that something is wrong.
• How does the sign-up process work? You should try it out with a fake address and see what happens. Can you choose lists individually? Does the vendor honor those choices or do they sell your address elsewhere as well?
• How signups validated? Do they use double opt-in or will they be selling you potentially invalid addresses?
• What other data comes with the addresses?
• Will you receive any other demographic information? Will the data include where and when the subscriber opted in?
• Who else will receive the same addresses? The point of co-registration is that the subscriber signs up for multiple lists. Will you have any control over, or visibility of, which other organizations are receiving the same address?
• What happens in the event of complaints and non-deliveries? Will you be compensated for recipients who complain? What about for non-deliveries?

Even if all these things look good, take some more defensive measures.

Try Before You Buy

You must verify that you're getting what you expect. In the most egregious cases, vendors have been known to forge email advertising co-registration addresses. Ensure that the economics don't give incentives to the unscrupulous. To that end, you should pay for addresses only after you've sent to them.

Monitor Your Sources

If a particular vendor or site goes rogue, or even if the site is scammed and starts providing poor quality data, you must be able to identify it quickly and immediately segregate those addresses to prevent damage to your reputation.

Follow the Money

Track ROI for your email advertising co-registration addresses and sources. Keep the ones that work; drop the ones that don't. List size is far less important than the ROI you get from it.

Despite claims to the contrary, email advertising co-registration isn't a quick fix or shortcut for list growth. It requires significant planning and maintenance to keep the program running well. However, if your partners and vendors are well chosen and monitored, it can be a solid way to grow your list beyond what you can achieve through more traditional means.

As 2009 ends and businesses begin setting strategies for 2010, it's time to review your email advertising campaign, and what you want to focus on for the upcoming year. The question is what should you focus on for email advertising in 2010?

It doesn't matter what type of email advertising rep you are, whether your a novice or expert, B2B or B2C, 2010 is introducing a revolution. An entirely new way of reading and navigating information will the change the Internet as we know it. Web 3.0 is finally here and Apps are the new Internet.

As consumers are becoming more digitally driven, they're buying more enabling devices, i.e. ones that are connected to the Internet 24/7. Most of us already have these devices: iPhones, Android phones, netbooks, TVs, gaming systems, electronic readers, and more.

This means that email advertising will need to evolve in order to be more conducive towards a mobile accessible phenomenon that is drastically changing the way in which we read and interact with our messages.

For example, people that are connected 24/7 on mobile devices can see email advertising right now, and for those already in a store, they can purchase faster than they can shop online. Why? Because they're standing in the store when the email advertising arrives.

For B2B, this means that email advertising received at a trade show can also be tweeted to drive traffic to a booth, or a conversation happening in a large hall.

This also means that emails will face an important challenge to remain actionable for a later date. When you read most of your emails on your PC or laptop, the messages are staring at you, reminding you to read them, file them, or delete them. But when you read your emails in a mobile setting, you remove the bold black "new message" label and hours later when you look in your inbox, you run the risk of losing the message to the sea of other messages received while you were gone.

So when you sit down to consider your plans for 2010, remember this:

• Getting a solid commitment to opt-in messaging is key. The decade of digital devices starts in 2010, and you'll need as much commitment as you can get.
• Be ready to test messages that resonate when people are mobile. Mobile doesn't mean a phone necessarily, it also means walking around. Think out of the box; imagine someone becoming a brand facilitator for you with the push of a button.
• Don't claim victory over any type of messaging strategy. I'll put money on the fact that in the fourth quarter we'll be messaging differently than we do now.

The next year and a half will bring significant changes to our lives as email advertising gets better.

Many companies view social media as another outlet to pump their marketing messages into, especially marketing companies that have had success in other areas of marketing such as SEO, PPC, email advertising, or traditional media marketing outlets like television advertising, radio advertising, or print advertising.

Facebook fan pages, MySpace accounts, Twitter streams, blogs, YouTube channels, Digg submissions, Flickr accounts, Wikis, even rating and review sites are all social media marketing tactics you see commonly touted as efforts companies should be doing. But have you ever stopped to ask why?

Why should your company have a Facebook fan page? Is it because everyone else does? Maybe your competition does?

While it may seem cool to be able to say that you have all of these different social media accounts, you have to ask yourself if these marketing tactics are what you need to be doing to be successful in social media?

Consumers are changing the way they research and buy products. If your marketing strategy hasn't changed, it probably should. Traditional media marketing is still important, but marketing companies must move beyond pushy-style communication and learn to influence consumer-driven touch points, such as word-of-mouth and Internet information sites.

Because of how consumers are now making decisions, word-of-mouth is more important than ever. Consumers overwhelmingly say that a recommendation from a close and trusted source is most important to them when making a purchase.

The people that others turn to for advice are called Influentials. They are the most powerful opinion leaders in their communities. They are the most active 10% of the public, they are turned to for advice and opinion, they generate word-of-mouth recommendations, they are connected to more groups, and they are more educated and engaged in the world. Influentials are twice as likely as the total public to recommend and be sought out for advice.

Influentials are connected consumers who are more active Internet users. With the rise of Internet and social media, Influentials can now influence many more by writing reviews on Websites, sending mass emails, and postings on social networks. In the past, the Influentials were limited to impacting friends/family. Now their areas of influence have grown exponentially.

About 20% of word-of-mouth is stimulated by traditional media and online advertising. This is about 700 million word-of-mouth impressions each day in the U.S. Also, the effectiveness of word-of-mouth is significantly increased when stimulated, encouraged, and/or supported by traditional media or online advertising.

Buying media across the Internet and television advertising helps maximize the strength of influence of the Influentials. Your business should strive to connect to consumers wherever they are, fully activating your advertising messages, and word-of-mouth research is a key component in that mission.

This time I will talk about email advertising and direct mail.

Email advertising has increased in the past few years, but there still are limitations. Double opt-ins these days are the norm. Yet still, most click-through rates still average less than 0.5%.

This means that you can leverage your ad budget using a form of traditional media, namely direct mail. There are great advantages to a targeted direct mail program. First, due to higher rates for paper and postage, a lot of the competition has gone away. Direct mail is also one of the best performers when it comes to ROI, especially if you have a great offer and a great list. A great list is essential, so you must assemble your list with all the care in the world. If this is done properly, your database will be your business's most valuable asset.

Typical direct mail response rates range from 1% to 2% for general lists. But a mailing with a great offer to a targeted list in a specific industry can increase these rates many times over.

That's the last bit of advice on getting the most money out of your advertising dollars. Make sure that you test, measure, and track all of your ads so you can tell how many leads they generate, and how much your ROI is. Always know what you are buying.

This time I will talk about running a public relations campaign by being a contrarian.

These days it's great to go against what everyone else is doing, such as being optimistic when everyone else is pessimistic, or starting a business when everyone else is getting laid off.

You can use your story to your advantage by including it in your pitch to any traditional media. This way, you have more of a chance of being mentioned, especially if your business is unique or operating in an interesting niche.

Great stories are always in demand by media outlets that are looking for points of view that oppose the general media narrative of the day. At this point, the narrative in the U.S. is doom and gloom, but if you are the bright point of light, you can enjoy the public relations rewards now and for years to come.

Next time, I will talk about email advertising and direct mail.

For many online New Jersey marketing companies, online conversion rates are alot less than what they used to be. But simultaneously there are also some online marketing consultants who have experienced no significant drop in traffic conversions. This is because they have built exceptional subscriber loyalty over some years.

For many online New Jersey marketing companies, the biggest problem is email advertising deliverability. Email advertising is being filtered so heavily today that often less than 20% of a large mailing list gets delivered.

However, there are a few ways you can improve your email deliverability. One such way is to run it through a spam checker before sending it out. The best email advertising programs have built in systems that give you spam scores before sending your email out. So, for example, let's your email scores higher than a 1 on a 5 point scale, you should probably revise your email.

Also, a business totally dependent upon email advertising is not a very solid business. Businesses need a database that has not only names and email addresses, but physical mailing addresses as well. That way, if something apocalyptic ever happened in the world of email or the internet, they could just start using direct mail and still be in business.

Many ISP's now monitor email delivery rates, bounce rates, and even open rates. They use readily available data, and if a given ISP or third party list host has a dismal record, they may block all emails from that source.  If ISPs are blocking sources that send out alot of emails that have very poor open rates, some online marketers may have to move to a different outlet.

For example, a business could start marketing through various social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, and even build a larger email database. Businesses could use these social networking sites in much the same way that email is used. They can send direct communication messages with product/service offers, discounts, value deals, etc. And, since social networking sites are free to use, businesses will save money.

In a recent survey, email advertising was shown to be the preferred method of communication. When asked to rank their preferred methods of receiving marketing messages from vendors, 62% of responding consumers said that email advertising was their preferred channel of communication, followed by 23% for direct mail, and 13% for social media. The least preferred way to be contacted was telemarketing, with 80% putting it at the bottom of their lists.

The survey, conducted in Boston, MA, in October 2009, also showed that email advertising communications frequently trigger purchases, with 75% of respondents indicating that they had bought products or services as a direct result of receiving an email advertising message from a vendor.

The most common items bought as a result of direct email advertising were clothing and accessories (82%), followed by purchases from restaurants and coffee shops by 49% of respondents. Other popular items bought as a direct result of email advertising campaigns include grocery items (40%) and personal electronics (38%).

The survey also asked consumers about their involvement in social media direct marketing.

Social media marketing was found to be significant, with 40% of respondents stating they receive correspondence from vendors on the social networking sites they use, such as Facebook and Twitter. Nearly one in five people (17%) had volunteered or requested that companies actively contact or update them via these social media platforms.

Last time I talked about addressing your prospects' problems through relevant direct mail messaging. This time I will talk about using direct mail advertising and email advertising together to drive up response rates.

Because of the recession, some people have been discontinuing their direct mail campaigns because they think it is not cost effective enough. However, as an automotive ad agency, a retail advertising agency, and a professional services advertising agency, we like to think that we know what we're talking about. We know that the real metric we should be looking at is not just investment cost, but ROI. According to the experts, direct mail followed up by an email has a much higher ROI than either form of communication alone when running an integrated marketing campaign. Direct mail by itself also has a higher ROI with business-to-business when running a single faceted campaign.

The reasons for this are as follows. Most of the time, direct mail lists are alot cleaner than email advertising lists. Also, generally speaking, people are more accepting of unsolicited mail than they are of unsolicited email. After all, it's much more likely to open up an email and get a computer virus than it is to open up some mail and get an actual virus. Next, for business-to-business, direct mail is still delivered even if the prospect is no longer with the company. Email addresses, on the other hand, are usually turned off when a person leaves an organization. Think of all the people that got laid off in the recession and how many email addresses must have been turned off. Lastly, direct mail is subject to an infinite amount of creative possibilities, whereas something like print advertising, television advertising, or billboard advertising always has to follow a certain preset format. Even email advertising has to follow a specific template most of the time. But direct mail advertising is only limited by your own creativity.

Direct mail is a great way to increase your b-to-b clientele, especially as part of an integrated marketing campaign. And because of the recession, the cost for direct mail has actually gone down. Use direct mail to start a conversation with your prospects; follow up that conversation with an email; direct that prospect to your online assets; and finish the conversation with a sale.

In the last post I talked about using direct mail to start a conversation with prospective customers, a conversation for which the next step would be visiting your website/landing page. In this post I will talk about using direct mail advertising to obtain customers outside of the traditional office space. This is, obviously, directly relevant to business-to-business marketing.

Many professionals work outside of an office setting, including construction foremen and operations managers, health professionals, private tutors, or retail owners. Using direct mail as part of an integrated marketing campaign is essential when trying to reach these prospective clients and building relationships with them.

One way to integrate direct mail into your marketing campaign is to use it as a primer before or after an email or phone call. Doing this will enable your prospects to become familiar with your business and what it does, with you, and with your brand. This will make them more receptive to your other communications, such as email advertising, radio advertising, or print advertising.

It is also a good idea to integrate personalized landing pages/URLs in with your direct mail campaign. This will enable you to customize the call-to-action for each recipient, increasing the chance that the recipient will respond. The Direct Marketing Associations says that 33% of direct mail recipients go online to respond, and that increases by 20%-30% when personalized landing pages/URLs are used.

As said in the last post, you can capture prospects' information and build a database of qualified leads. That way you can also send follow-up emails or direct mails. Remember that direct mail is a great way to introduce your online assets to people, such as professionals outside of the traditional office space, who wouldn't normally be in front of a computer. Start that conversation with mail, drive it to your website, and end it with a sale.

Direct mail advertising provides key benefits as part of an integrated campaign. This week I will share notes on direct mail advertising as thought of by the experts in the business. These direct mail notes will be split up into 4 posts. Each of the 4 posts will have its own main point that you should take away from this. The first post will be about using direct mail to direct customers online. The second post will be about using direct mail advertising to get customers outside of traditional offices. The third post will be about using targeted direct mail to address your customers' grievances. And last, but not least, the fourth post will be about using direct mail and email advertising to complement each other in order to drive response.

Direct mail is a wonderful tool for directing your potential customers to your website. Through direct mail, you can send out a catalog of information about your company, along with a message telling recipients to go to your website. In fact, the catalog can be an extension of the website, or even vice versa if you prefer. Also, once at your website, potential customers can divulge some basic information such as name, address, and email address. In that manner, this can be a good tool for building databases of qualified leads.

Also, direct mail is a great tool for reactivating old, non-active customers. And since those customers already know you, you will have a 4 times higher response rate than with other, new customers.

It is a mistake, especially for business-to-business prospecting, to view your online and offline endeavours as separate channels. Your online and offline efforts should be used in conjunction with each other. You need to open up a conversation with prospects in order to not only obtain new customers, but also develop brand loyalty. Direct mail is a good way to start that conversation. Use it to direct prospects to the next step of the conversation, your website/landing page.

Email advertising is the most effective and cost-efficient medium available for your internet marketing campaign.  Email advertising enables you to develop a long-term dialogue and relationship with your customer.  However, if you abuse your email advertising campaign, you can also harm your relationship with your customer. So you must strike a delicate balance.

In order to reach that balance, you should combine informative content with promotional content. You should create the need for your product/service by providing relevant information. Then you can start the sales process by providing promotional content.  For example, car repair businesses can explain the importance of maintenance, the benefits of repairing instead of replacing, or even the symptoms of required maintenance before offering their services.

Because of this delicate balance that is required, careful planning is a necessity for your email advertising campaing. A successful campaign is constantly improving itself in order to meet customer expectations.

There are a couple of things you can do to maximize your ROI on email advertising.

First of all, make sure you use a valid return address.  The point of this type of internet marketing is to start a dialogue and end up with a loyal long-term customer.  As a result, your customers need to be able to respond to your emails so a long term relationship can be built.

Second of all, you need analytics to track your results.  This way you can measure exactly what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.  You should track bounced emails, open rates, click through rates, and conversion rates.

Third of all, you shouldn't overload your customers with too many emails or too much information. Your customers can't spend all of their valuable time on your emails, so keep them short and simple.

Next, you must abide by CAN-SPAM laws that require your customers to agree to receive your emails. If you don't adhere to a strict opt-in policy, you may be fined, and your deliverability rates will suffer.

Then, make sure you keep your database interested by staying relative and on-topic. Your database expects quality content, or they wouldn't have signed up for your email advertising campaign in the first place.

Finally, use a proper email advertising tool that will make your email advertising campaign scalable. There are many tools out there, so you must determine which one fits your needs. Many online marketing consultants run email advertising campaigns as well, so you should probably do some research and weigh the benefits of doing it yourself versus the benefits of hiring an advertising agency.

There are many advertising agencies out there.  Some are industry specific agencies, such as an automotive ad agency, or a retail advertising agency.  Others are agencies that work in any industry.  Depending on your preferences, you can go with either one.  But finding a full service ad agency with good online marketing consultants should be a little bit of a process.  It is a lot like shopping for a car.  You definitely don’t buy the first car that you see.  You shop around, look for the best deal, the best prices, and the best product.  Well, you should go through that same process for hiring the best ad agency as well.

First of all, you should find out whether the advertising agency actually does search engine optimization, or if they just claim to do so but do something else in reality.  I know that some New Jersey marketing companies claim to perform SEO services, but instead they just buy the sponsored links at the top of the search results page.  Anyone can do that, you don’t need an SEO consultation firm to do that for you.  The whole point of SEO is improving organic search results, that is to say, all the search results that come underneath the sponsored links.  Improving organic search results has nothing to do with buying sponsored links from Google or Yahoo.

Secondly, you’ll want to find out if the full service ad agency only offers SEO services, or if they also offer all other types of internet marketing services.  The other types of online marketing are SEM – search engine marketing (that’s where the buying of sponsored links comes in), email advertising, website design, website development, and pay-per-click (PPC, sometimes referred to as CPC, or cost-per-click).  The best ad agencies even do their own website hosting.  A great internet marketing campaign will utilize all aspects of internet marketing, not just one.

Your website will probably be the most important and powerful marketing tool that you’ll have, so make sure that your advertising agency is on the same page as you when it comes to long term success.  And as when dealing with any salesperson, pay attention to how your questions are being answered (are they actually answering your questions or just beating around the bush), ask for references, and most of all, trust your gut (human intuition exists for a reason).

Here’s another tip for both your traditional media and online marketing campaign:  FIND THE RIGHT PERSON!

This may now be a cliché, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still true.  Your company’s greatest asset is its people.  If you have incompetent people working for you, your business won’t go anywhere.  This is also true for both traditional media and internet/email marekting.  They say that your company is only as good as your worst employee.  Well, your traditional media and internet marketing strategy is only as good as the person who implements it.

Your business needs the right person (or group of people if you’re hiring an advertising agency) to head both your traditional media and online marketing strategy.  Do you have anyone who you can trust your life with?  Well, for your marketing strategy you need someone who you can trust the life of your company with.  If your marketer, or advertising agency, isn’t good at what he/she/it does, then you’ll be behind the curve, which will mean dire consequences for your business.

If you decide to go with a full service ad agency, there are a few things you should keep in mind when selecting one.  But I’ll save that for my next post.

Blogging is not just for running public relations campaigns.  It can and should also be used for SEO, or search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is a way to get your business at the top of a Google or Yahoo search results page. This is the most effective form of search engine marketing, or online advertising. If you use Google to search for the service/product that your business provides, does your business show up on the first page of results? How about the second page? Maybe the third page? Does it show up at all? Chances are that your business is nowhere to be found.

Most people these days use search engines to perform product/service research before they buy anything. And more than half of the activity on the Internet is on search engines. So what does this mean for your business? You need to get indexed on search engines so people can see your business when they are searching for a product/service that they need. If you do get indexed, then you will probably have an almost exponential increase in business since the marketing potential of the Internet is unlimited.

So how do you get indexed? well, that’s where blogging comes in. But first you must understand how search engines work. Suppose you go to Google and search for “automotive sales leads”.  Without getting into the technical aspect of it, especially since that would take up a couple of blog entries itself, simply put Google will run through the entire World Wide Web and find the sites with the most occurrences of the phrase “automotive sales leads”. “Automotive sales leads” here is a keyword.

If you blog for your company, then you can utilize relevant keywords so when people search for the service that you provide, your business will come up. So the point of blogging is to win those specific keywords that are relevant to your business. And since blogging is very frequent, it is easy to win keywords since you can use them over and over and over again.  Industry experts, like these guys, agree that blogging may be the most effective form of search engine optimization.

But getting indexed on that first page of Google isn't the last step.  After you've run a successful blogging campaign, which can take a while, your website needs to be able to convert prospects.  Let's say your an automotive dealer.  Once you've been indexed on Google and someone searching for "used car" clicks on your site, your site needs to be able to make the sale or get that person's information.  To get the maximum amount of automotive sales leads, you can have people fill out submission forms for email newsletters, videos, and other things of that nature.  Then you can simply follow up on all your automotive sales leads.  But that's a story for another day.

Everybody these days is jumping on the “green” bandwagon.  Want to save a tree?  Want to contribute to saving the rainforests while still being able to market your business with the targeting precision of direct mail campaigns?  Then how about email advertising.  Email advertising has all the targeting advantages of direct mail, but it’s completely paperless and even more precise.  As such, it costs a lot less and reaches a much greater targeted audience, maximizing your ROI.  And our email advertising techniques make it easy to build lists of potential customers who either respond to your emails or fill out forms on your website, allowing you to bridge the divide between marketing and sales.

Advertise through email with us!  Call us at 877-876-2995, or visit our website, or our other blog.

BOC Partners, Inc. is a privately held advertising agency located at 1030 South Ave West, Westfield, NJ.  For the most part, we act as an aggressive retail advertising agency and provide marketing solutions to the most demanding of advertisers. One of our areas of expertise is the automotive sector as we work with many large retail automotive dealerships. For 25 years BOC Partners has been winning over the likes of this category of business, which provides BOC the resources to handle just about any advertiser for any industry. The volume of work and demands of "turn on a dime" deadlines gives BOC Partners the skill set to handle almost any task.

In the past 3 years BOC Partners has been called upon to provide its experience to other retail markets including professional services, consumer electronics, home improvement and real estate, financial institutions, as well as B to B (business to business) accounts. We specialize in both traditional media (print media, direct-mail advertising, broadcast communications, etc.) and online marketing (search engine optimization and marketing, email advertising, web site design, traffic analysis, etc.).  Both our internet marketing campaigns and traditional marketing campaigns serve one end goal, increasing our clients’ sales; because as we all know, at the end of the day, sales are the only thing that matter (well, to businesses anyway).

Need assistance with your advertising strategy?  Call us 877-876-2995!