Tapping the Marketing Power of Small Business Email

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Small business owners spend a lot of time and money marketing their products and services to prospective customers. Those small business marketing efforts span a range of tactics and platforms including, for example, social media sites, Google Adwords pay-per-click campaigns, and SEO optimization to drive website traffic.

But you may be missing out on your largest media channel for growing both your customer base and your bottom line: everyday business email. How many business emails do you and your employees send every day and over the course of a year? Every one of them is a missed marketing opportunity according to Nick Lissette, CEO and founder of Black Pearl Mail, a New Zealand-based email branding-management company.

Email as a Media Channel

Consider this finding from the Radicati Group’s Email Statistics Report (PDF):

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Email remains the predominant form of communication in the business space. This trend is expected to continue, and business email will account for over 132 billion emails sent and received per day by the end of 2017.

Black Pearl Mail (BPM) claims that business employees each send, on average, more than 10,250 email per year. Lissette maintains that although business email is “owned media” (a channel over which business owners maintain control), it remains an underutilized, untapped marketing opportunity.

“Small businesses communicate primarily by email, and yet it goes unbranded or poorly branded,” says Lissette. “You’re most effective communication channel should be your most-branded,” he contends.

A Black Pearl Mail signature remains a consistent look across devices. Seen here on the iPhone.

Branding Business Email

A plug-in for your existing email platform, BPM supports Gmail, Google Apps for Work, Office 365, Exchange, IMAP, POP, and Lotus. BPM “provides a consistent look to your email to anyone who opens it,” said Lissette. “It doesn’t matter which email platform they’re on or what device they use to view it.”

The service consists of three main components: email signatures, central management, and analytics.

Email signature builder

The email signature builder lets you create consistent email signatures and branding for your business. You can upload your company logo, add banners and footers, and include promotional links to drive traffic to your website or social media pages.

“You can add anything to the top of an email: a promotion, a YouTube video—any content relating to your website.” said Lissette. For example, the email signature of one BPM customer, a bank in this case, contained the logo in the left-hand corner and a banner listing the latest interest rate.

“Once you start branding your email, it does amazing things for your business,” said Lissette. Another customer, a glazier by trade, sent 100 emails that included a promotional banner. “Out of those 100 emails, 48 people clicked on the promotion,” Lissette claimed.

A Black Pearl Mail signature as seen on a tablet.

Central management

The BPM central management console operates primarily in the cloud, although Lissette said it’s also available as an on-premises version for companies that require it. The console lets you create and assign email signatures to your employees, which helps to keep your company’s branding consistent. You can assign individual signatures, create signatures for specific groups within your organization, or simply assign one signature company-wide if you desire.

Lissette said that small business owners can make changes to any or all signatures from the Web-based console. This, he added, keeps company messaging consistent, relevant, and up-to-date.

Email analytics

You have direct control over your email until you click “send.” BPM’s analytics capability changes that by letting you gauge email effectiveness. “You can see when a recipient opens an email without requiring a “read receipt,” said Lissette, a capability he calls mission critical.

The analytics capability also generates reports on which links recipients click, which lets small business owners and marketers see which promotions or content resonate with potential customers and make adjustments accordingly.

Small Business Benefits

Not surprisingly, Lissette claims that any company that uses email can benefit from Black Pearl Mail. It turns everyday business email into a lead-gen opportunity. “Traditional email marketing campaigns [think VerticalResponse or MailChimp] have relatively low click-through rates,” said Lissette. “People filter for them, and they become optional reading.”

The company’s website claims that, “With good content customers can expect a click-through rate of higher than 5 percent with external emails.” If click-through is as high as BPM claims [Editorial note: it’s a big if, and we have not yet tested this claim], a small business owner might reasonably expect more traffic to his or her website and social media pages.

Black Pearl Mail Pricing

Black Pearl Mail costs a minimum of $15 per month (that includes up to 15 people). The company charges an additional 1$ per month per person after that.

Lauren Simonds is the managing editor of SmallBusinessComputing.com. Follow her on Twitter.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other small business topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com Forums. Join the discussion today!

Tapping the Marketing Power of Small Business Email

Model performance: The power of measurement and transparency in affiliate marketing

The UK performance, or affiliate, marketing industry is currently worth over £1bn a year, with advocates claiming it generates one in 10 sales. However, despite being such a mature channel in terms of the sales figures it generates – £16bn plus a year – practitioners bemoan a widespread lack of quality attribution modeling in the sector .

Add to this some of the historic distrust of performance marketing, and it’s apparent that some marketers are failing to make the most of the opportunity, plus arguably wasting their marketing budgets as well as endangering their relationship with consumers, although some are working to raise awareness of how things can change.

Last-click
Sarah Treliving, head of digital at GroupM media agency MediaCom, explains one of the principal reasons behind the poor application of performance marketing techniques is using a one-dimensional attribution strategy; namely last-click.

This model rewards those in an affiliate network that have been deemed to have generated a sale using the last click before the conversion, regardless of earlier customer interactions upon the path to purchase (or further up the purchase funnel).

“Everyone knows last-click is flawed,” explains Treliving, adding that this had led to scepticism among some advertisers as to the incremental value posed by their affiliate marketing investment.

Clare O’Brien, the IAB’s senior programmes manager, says: “Our Performance Marketing Council also recognises that in some quarters of the marketing and advertising world, that there is a degree of legacy reputation existing.”

Cannibalisation
However, by its nature affiliate marketing employs a complex mix of channels (search, display, content, email, etc), and simply employing last-click attribution in such a complex sector incentivises some poor practice.

‘Last-click’ means all parties on a media plan are chasing the final click before conversion, this could lead to users being over -served with ads. This subsequently eats into an advertiser’s profit margin, according to Ed French, director of digital at ad tech company Ve Interactive. He explains that such a model also means that advertisers could end up retargeting users that would have purchased a product anyway.

The danger of myopic rewarding
Not only does this negatively impact upon profit margin, it could also potentially damage a relationship with a potential customer. Research published last year from InSkin Media and Rapp reveals that 55 per cent of consumers are put off buying an item they have previously expressed an interest in online, if they are retargeted with ads multiple times, after initially researching for it.

Therefore, it’s apparent that the lack of a holistic attribution strategy is not just poor marketing practice, but also potentially detrimental to sales.

Tom Rickey, Ve Interactive’s affiliate partnerships director, explains how such instances can simply be avoided by more responsible “rules set ting” for retargeting when advertisers agree upon campaigns with their affiliate network partners. This involves setting moderate time and recency settings, ie giving sensible directions as to the minimum amount of time to wait before serving a user with an ad after they have visited a website.

Multi-touch
However, a more fundamental tactic can be employed by advertisers. This involves completely overhauling how they reward their affiliate marketing partners by using multi-touch attribution, according to Rickey.

The IAB’s O’Brien echoes this sentiment, and explains how it further aims to improve advertisers’ knowledge of best practice in the performance marketing sector, and therefore improve transparency.

“This is one of those instances where better information and a more transparent lens onto the operations of the sector would reveal that in broad terms, affiliate marketing achieves complete and reported purchases,” she explains.

“CPA [cost per acquisition] represents one of the most risk-free ad spend strategies for advertisers. However, back to the expertise issue, it depends where in the purchase cycle the performance marketing part of the mix occurs,” she adds.

“There is no one-size fits all marketing technique and customer conversion varies hugely dependent of type of product and service and consumer purchase path,” according to O’Brien.

More advanced advertisers understand this, and have developed expertise that allows them to finely optimise their spend, and therefore results, she adds.

Focus on the upper funnel
Ve Interactive’s French explains that adopting a more holistic attribution model (one that focuses on the upper echelons of a customer’s purchase journey, as opposed to the lower end, or last-click) not only rewards media partners on a more equitable basis, but it can also help advertisers improve how they make use of their data.

For instance, advertisers can take their converted user data (i.e. the information on people that have bought items via an affiliate network) and then use this to work out the attributes of other web users that may also likely to purchase.

This can be achieved by cross-referencing it with second and third-party data sources, and is often referred to as ‘look alike modelling’, meaning advertisers can use their spend more efficiently. “The efficiency is gained by not just retargeting everyone that has visited your site, ” explains French.

By doing so, advertisers can work out the incremental value of their spend with affiliate networks, he adds. “Measurement has definitely driven better understanding of the ads and the platforms that they are on,” says Treliving, adding that MediaCom’s specialist direct response unit – MediaCom Response – has led efforts in this area. “You need a common source [of data] and measurement methodology for all those things,” she adds. “You have to look at all the different types of placement for the last click to understand how a rewards site might be contributing to an overall sale.”

New thinking emerges
Affiliate networks are taking note, and star ting to offer attribution payment models that rewards publishers further up the sales funnel. For instance, earlier this year, Affiliate Window introduced a ‘top-up’ commission feature if their content helps le ad to a sale further on another site. Previously the publisher which ‘won the last click’ would have been rewarded, by employing cross-device tracking.

Similarly, eBay Enterprise – the e-commerce giant’s affiliate sales network – more recently announced that it was to introduce a ‘Dynamic Commissioning model’ that lets advertisers pay publishers custom payouts based on new or returning consumers, the type of device used at check out, and product assortment.

eBay Enterprise claims this encourages advertisers to use metrics beyond simple conversion, and contributes to more complex marketing campaigns in or der to deliver incremental results.

Luke Griffiths, general manager, eBay Enterprise, marketing solutions, explains: “Our Dynamic Commissioning product spells the end for ‘one size fits all’ marketing. It means brands can have complete confidence that the customers they’re reaching are the right ones and allows for a greater degree of control over targeting.

“Previously, marketers were targeting indiscriminately and couldn’t provide robust proof that they were reaching the right customers. Now brands can adjust what they are prepared to pay for different audience segments.”

Griffiths says advertisers must analyse their data in order to effectively assess how their marketing spend is performing. He adds: “We still see brands that fail to use analytics and target according to old-fashioned demographic stereotypes, rather than real-time observed behaviour.”

All sources agree that intelligent mining of data in a coherent fashion is key to attaining transparency; failure to do so means less honest players in the system can continue to ‘ game the system’.

This feature was first published in the 16 September issue of The Drum.

Model performance: The power of measurement and transparency in affiliate marketing

The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand

Attention is the new commodity. Visual Storytelling is the new currency.

• Human brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than text.
  
• Web posts with visuals drive up to 180% more engagement than those without.
  
• Viewers spend 100% more time on web pages with videos.

Filled with full-color images and thought-provoking examples from leading companies, The Power of Visual Storytelling explains how to grow your business and strengthen your brand by leveraging photos, videos, infographics, presentations, and other rich media. The book delivers a powerful road map for getting started, while inspiring new levels of creativity within organizations of all types and sizes.

“This book is not only a complete overview of [visual storytelling] but, most importantly, the key to doing it right, a total Right Hook!”
―Gary Vaynerchuk, New York Times bestselling author of Crush It! and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

“A valuable guide to understanding how to develop powerful marketing programs using the art of visual storytelling.”
―Guy Kawasaki, author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur and former chief evangelist of Apple

“The Power of Visual Storytelling is the new marketing bible!”
―Nancy Bhagat, Vice President, Global Marketing Strategy and Campaigns, Intel

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, The Power of Visual Storytelling is worth a million.”
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The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

By now it’s clear that whether you’re promoting a business, a product, or yourself, social media is near the top of what determines your success or failure. And there are countless pundits, authors, and consultants eager to advise you.

But there’s no one quite like Guy Kawasaki, the legendary former chief evangelist for Apple and one of the pioneers of business blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Tumbling, and much, much more. Now Guy has teamed up with Peg Fitzpatrick, who he says is the best social-media person he’s ever met, to offer The Art of Social Media—the one essential guide you need to get the most bang for your time, effort, and money.

With over one hundred practical tips, tricks, and insights, Guy and Peg present a bottom-up strategy to produce a focused, thorough, and compelling presence on the most popular social-media platforms. They guide you through steps to build your foundation, amass your digital assets, optimize your profile, attract more followers, and effectively integrate social media and blogging.

For beginners overwhelmed by too many choices as well as seasoned professionals eager to improve their game, The Art of Social Media is full of tactics that have been proven to work in the real world. Or as Guy puts it, “great stuff, no fluff.”

check out For More Information

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

Instagram Power: Build Your Brand and Reach More Customers with the Power of Pictures

Can you do “real” marketing on Instagram?
 
That was the question bestselling author Jason Miles wanted to answer. So he used his e-commerce company as a laboratory and he began to study what other successful marketers were doing.
 
While some marketers haven’t even heard of Instagram there is a growing group of smart marketers using highly successful Instagram monetization strategies to grow revenue.
 
If you’re not using Instagram to your advantage, this book will help you start now. Instagram is the hottest social media site today: Two years after its launch, the number of its daily mobile users surpassed that of Twitter. Then Facebook purchased it for a billion dollars–and it took the world by storm.
 
In Instagram Power Miles provides everything you need to start marketing on the world’s most popular photo-sharing App. You’ll get it all in a quick and easy to read format. Miles will take you from setting up an account, to implementing the ten proven monetization strategies, to integrating Instagram with your complete marketing strategy.

Whether you’re a kitchen table entrepreneur, or a corporate marketer, this book will become one of your most trusted resources.

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Instagram Power: Build Your Brand and Reach More Customers with the Power of Pictures

Five Email Marketing Tips to Power Your Marketing

According to McKinsey, email marketing is one of the most effective methods of customer acquisition. Here’s why: 91% of US consumers use email daily, 40% have more than one email account, and personal emails cut out the “noise” that’s popping up more often on social media feeds. I short, email marketing can be a personalize, direct line to a unique customer. So here are five ways to harness the power of email marketing for your business.

Design Custom Email Advertising

Print advertising is advantageous for brand recall. Customers see a print ad and, with advertising frequency, they’ll remember that brand when it’s time to buy. Email marketing is entirely different – it’s focused on action. Print is branding, email is action. So why are you using the same print creative designed for branding for your email advertising that’s designed for action? Email marketing lets customers click, buy, shop, sign up, register, share, like and donate instantly so create custom-made HTML emails that help you do just that! If you’re investing in designing strong print creative, then you should invest just as much into designing a custom-made email campaign.

Don’t Send Emails When No One’s Looking

You worked hard on coming up with a great original email (not a print ad) and an awesome call to action. Now, at 10 PM, you’re about to hit SEND. Wait, who’s checking their email at 10 PM? Some do, many don’t so why are you sending it now? Research when your customers check their emails, when they take action on your emails, and the days they prefer to receive emails about you. Here’s a clear example: don’t send an email out one hour before Shabbat but DO send an email out one hour after Shabbat, when everyone’s checking their phones & email.

Subject Lines Matter

Should we say “Free! Free! Free!” in the subject line or maybe “Special!!? Yes, your customers may be interested in that but they’ll never know about it… because your email went straight to spam.There are certain words, terms, numerics & symbols that may trigger spam filters in Gmail, Yahoo and AOL so you need to research what subject lines will help your email reach your intended destination – customer’s inboxes. Incorporate a sense of urgency as well without sounding too “spammy”. For example, massage the line such as “When You Buy One Pair of Tickets, You Get a Second Pair 100% Free!!!” into “Your Free Tickets”. See how different that line is? You got customers attention, they open the email to see if they won free tickets & they see how they can get free tickets. Don’t sell it all in the subject line; it’s meant to tease about the content of your email.

Don’t Do the Same Old, Same Old

Did you know that 41% of all emails are opened on mobile devices? Yet you’re still designing email campaigns for desktops. Mix it up! Still sending the same old content, same old deal, same old event? Mix it up! Send an email with different content, a unique event, a special sale. If customers know what you’re selling already, they have less incentive to open or click through your email. You should even consider selling less and informing more – 90% of consumers find unique content useful, which is why open and click through rates for newsletters, monthly bulletins, industry news and advice are higher than promotional emails.

Think Beyond the Click

Many people make the mistake of thinking it’s all about the click. The “click” isn’t a sale. The “click” is the first step in the decision-making process. The landing page after the click is more important. Think of the click as getting customers in the door; now you have show them a great in-store experience and valuable product line. Make your landing pages easy to navigate and focused on the sale. Customize your web landing pages to increase conversion rates. Pagemodo creates unique Facebook landing pages for your page that gets you the obviously intended Like but much, much more. Implement a 10-second pop-up on your website that can collect customer emails. Annoying? Maybe. Valuable? Definitely. Ensure your best products are right on the first page when customers click through your email, increasing chances of buying. When you think beyond the click, you’ll create a better experience at the best time – the time of purchase.

Email marketing is set to surpass $2.3 billion this year. It’s a smart investment when done right. So do it right with these seven tips.

Yitzie Hyman is the Director of Strategy at The Jewish Link of NJ and founder of Henry Isaacs Marketing, a marketing, design and digital ad agency specializing in Jewish & Kosher marketing. You can reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or online at www.henryisaacs.net.

By Yitzie Hyman

Five Email Marketing Tips to Power Your Marketing

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

By now it’s clear that whether you’re promoting a business, a product, or yourself, social media is near the top of what determines your success or failure. And there are countless pundits, authors, and consultants eager to advise you.

But there’s no one quite like Guy Kawasaki, the legendary former chief evangelist for Apple and one of the pioneers of business blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Tumbling, and much, much more. Now Guy has teamed up with Peg Fitzpatrick, who he says is the best social-media person he’s ever met, to offer The Art of Social Media—the one essential guide you need to get the most bang for your time, effort, and money.

With over one hundred practical tips, tricks, and insights, Guy and Peg present a bottom-up strategy to produce a focused, thorough, and compelling presence on the most popular social-media platforms. They guide you through steps to build your foundation, amass your digital assets, optimize your profile, attract more followers, and effectively integrate social media and blogging.

For beginners overwhelmed by too many choices as well as seasoned professionals eager to improve their game, The Art of Social Media is full of tactics that have been proven to work in the real world. Or as Guy puts it, “great stuff, no fluff.”

Click Here For More Information

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

Taylor Reaume: Facebook Marketing Power Tips For Santa Barbara Businesses

Are you marketing your business effectively on Facebook? There are so many ways your company can use social media to build awareness with a target audience. It may seem like Facebook is all about cat videos and selfies, but don’t be fooled. Facebook is a powerful marketing opportunity that can build your business when used properly.

One reason for Facebook’s effectiveness is that consumers now want to be more involved in creating the brand story. While business marketers used to be able to “push” information out to consumers on a need-to-know basis, consumers now want to “pull” information in and make decisions based on what they find.

The first place they are likely to look for information, whether it’s deciding on a restaurant or looking for a doctor, is online. And they’ll use their social media circle of friends as part of the research process, too.

Since the conversation can no longer be one-sided, social media is also used to create a dialog. There is no better, faster or more cost-effective way to reach prospects and customers than online.

While Facebook is one of the older forms of social media, it is also one of the most effective and widely accepted. Here are a few recent — and stunning — Facebook statistics that should capture your attention:

» Monthly active Facebook users: 1,310,000,000 — That’s a lot of opportunity!

» Mobile Facebook users: 680,000,000 — Plenty of reason to make sure your Facebook page is mobile-friendly.

» Increase in Facebook users from 2012 to 2013: 22 percent — It’s still growing.

» Total number of minutes spent on Facebook each month: 640,000,000 — It’s engaging.

» Percent of all Facebook users who log on in any given day: 48 percent — People are involved.

» Average time spent on Facebook per visit: 18 minutes — Once they visit, they stick around.

Facebook is so ubiquitous that many Millennials check their FB page before they even get out of bed, but it’s not just for use by businesses that target a younger audience. The fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is 40-60 years old.

In the old days, we used to keep in touch with friends via phone or letters; now we use social media to say hello, share information and build relationships.

It’s Not Just for Cat Videos

Did you know that Google “crawls” the Facebook Fan pages to look for indicators that could propel your business to the top of its search engine results? The same rules apply here as they do for website pages — content must be optimized, engaging, relevant and shareable. The good news is that these strategies don’t just build rankings; they also build relationships.

Let’s say you’ve started a Facebook page, added some nice photos, wrote an “about us” piece, included location and contact information, and have links to your website and other social media pages. So how do you garner likes and build a community?

First, make sure you promote your page everywhere and ask people to like it. Recommend that they share information with friends who might be interested in what you offer.

Your page needs to be dynamic, with new information added on a consistent basis. The social media world moves quickly. Information only stays at the top of the page for a few minutes. Unless you have said something that catches consumers’ attention and makes them stop, they move on to the next item. That’s why it’s important to be on Facebook every day with something new.

Constant reminders about your company, products and services, and the benefits you offer will start to build top-of-mind awareness. If you don’t think you can find the time to interact every day, take some time at the beginning of every month to outline thirty ideas or points you want to make. Some can be seasonal or talk about sales items, but most should just be a way of engaging your audience.

Here are a few power tips that can make your Facebook page sing:

» Consistency: Your message needs to be consistent across all online platforms. Have a marketing strategy with the “talking points” or main issues you want to present to your audience and stick to them. Don’t assume that one or two sentences every day is enough to form a complete impression. You might need to think of 10 different ways to say the same thing so that your audience can understand.

» Content: Content for Facebook must be optimized the same way your website is. What are the keywords your audience searches for, and how can they be included? Don’t just sell, sell, sell — use your Facebook posts to educate, engage and entertain. Ask for “likes,” tell a few jokes, post interesting tidbits they might want to share.

» Drive Traffic: Invite your community to click through to your website on a consistent basis. Tell them about your newsletter, a complimentary PDF you offer, or the latest blog article.

» Contests: These can be a good way to generate attention and gather leads. But don’t just spend money on a contest and move on. You must have a plan in place to use those leads, and try to convert them to a sale.

Above all, remember that this is a two-way street. You must also monitor your Facebook page on a regular basis. React if someone makes a comment, respond if there is a question, and say thanks if you get a compliment.

For a good example of a Facebook page that works, check out GoGoleta. Note the use of attractive photos, regular updates and posts that provide helpful information.

If you’d like more Facebook and online marketing tips, be sure to click LIKE on Search Engine Pros Facebook Fan Page.

Make Facebook a central part of your online marketing strategy. Boost your “likes” and your “followers,” and you’ll boost your sales and profits.

— Taylor Reaume is an e-Business coach and founder of Search Engine Pros. He can be contacted at taylor@thesearchenginepros.com, or 1.800.605.4988. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

Taylor Reaume: Facebook Marketing Power Tips For Santa Barbara Businesses