SEM - Email Marketing to Save Money | Custom Website Design - Web Links Directory

SEM - Email Marketing to Save Money

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With today’s tough economic conditions, many small businesses are looking for ways to save money or at least make their money go a little further. When it’s time to trim costs, marketing budgets are often the first to get cut, especially if they contain expensive items like glossy printed pieces, a one-time radio ad, or pricey direct mail campaigns. To make your marketing dollars stretch further, you need to use high-impact, low-cost marketing strategies that get the word out about your business yet don’t break the bank. One low-cost strategy you can implement is an email marketing program to help you communicate with customers, target the right prospects, and market your business effectively without spending a lot of money.

In 2008, the Direct Marketing Association reported that the return on investment (ROI) for email marketing was more than $45 for every dollar spent on it. That’s amazing! Email marketing is also incredibly effective, since nearly 87% of adult internet users open the opt-in emails they receive from businesses (according to MarketingSherpa). With numbers like these, it’s easy to see how email marketing can help small businesses save money on marketing while reaching their target audience at the same time.

Email marketing, like other marketing strategies, is most effective when used consistently and with repetition. Research suggests that target audiences need to see a message anywhere from 3 to 7 times before they will take any action or respond. Many small businesses have found success with using a three-step approach to their email campaigns. For example, a typical example might be:

Email #1: Educate recipients about your product or service, and highlight how it solves the problems they may be experiencing. Remember to focus on the benefits your customers will see by using your product or service, and try to avoid simply listing the features. Instead, specify what those features will do to improve life for your customers.
Email #2: Educate recipients about how your company differs from the competition, and reinforce the message from Email #1 that highlights how your product or service benefits your customers.
Email #3: Send recipients a great offer - now that you have educated them about how your company can help solve their problems and provide them with benefits, offer them an incentive to give you a call or place an order today.

Also, be sure to use a strong call to action in your email campaigns, and always provide recipients with multiple ways to contact you (via a web form on your landing page, a toll-free number, direct email links, etc.).

Targeting
One critical component to your email marketing efforts is to always use a professional listserv service to send out your campaigns. Don’t risk appearing amateurish - or violating CAN-SPAM laws - by sending email campaigns from Outlook or other email programs! Also, make sure you select a listserv service that can provide you with delivery reports on click-thru rates, unsubscribes, bounces, and the number of opens for each campaign. That way, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and track what worked so you can repeat it for future campaigns.

Segment Your List
Another benefit of email marketing is that you can segment your email list according to any criteria that you’d like. This enables you to send targeted emails with customized messages that are tailored to each specific market segment. With print advertising, targeting typically involves choosing a publication based on key demographics. But, publications like this still go to a very broad audience who may or may not even notice your ad. With email marketing, you can target the message according to whatever criteria is important to you, then send targeted emails to each segment of your list. And as mentioned earlier, nearly everyone who receives an opt-in email from a business will open it.

Investing in Results
Since email marketing can deliver a $45 ROI for every dollar spent, what percentage of your marketing budget should be devoted to an email marketing program? The trick to smart marketing in an economic crunch is to invest in the marketing strategies that deliver the best results, and drop the things that don’t contribute to your bottom line. By investing in email marketing, you can effectively communicate with your target market, help your business generate more leads, and ultimately improve sales, all while saving money. So if you’re looking for ways to cut costs, consider implementing an email marketing program for your small business and make that marketing budget stretch just a little further this year.

Search Engine Secret # 1: There are no secrets! The search engines make it all very public and clear what you need to do to get top rankings. The success lies in the details and proper implementation. But there is no top secret, proprietary technique for getting top rankings.

OK, so now we all know there are no secrets, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t information you need to know, such as:

If you don’t optimize your site, you won’t get top rankings. It really is that plain and simple. If the engines can’t spider your site and you don’t have links and strong content, you don’t stand a chance against the sites that do have all that in place. So many people don’t want to spend money on SEO, or are afraid to take the plunge but then they can’t understand why they don’t have rankings. So maybe there is a secret - maybe the secret is take action and get your site optimized!

Your site structure matters! I can’t tell you how often people have said to me “I know my site is a mess, but I don’t want to spend the money fixing it, so can’t you just throw up some keywords and Meta tags and get me some rankings?” Ummmm, no, I can’t. Your site structure is your foundation. You would never build a house without a solid foundation, why would you build an SEO campaign without a solid foundation?

Don’t just focus on small keyword list that is made up of the most popular and competitive keywords. You will be missing out on opportunities for great keyword phrases that convert really well. Expand your list. Include long tail phrases. They may have less traffic but they will convert at a higher rate and if you get enough of these phrases they will likely add up to be better than your original list.

SEO is changing and evolving so staying current on what the engines are looking for is important. Either hire a firm to get you top rankings or find a way to make sure you stay current with information you can trust.

Social media and SEO go hand in hand, so get out there and be social. You can optimize your site without doing social media, and you can do social media without an optimized site. But why would you? The two enhance and compliment each other. The truth is there is a lot of competition out there for website traffic so why not use all the tools at your disposal?

Source: sitepronews.com/

432One ResponseSEM+-+Email+Marketing+to+Save+Money2009-02-21+04%3A34%3A52Software+Outsourcing to “SEM - Email Marketing to Save Money”

February 26th, 2009 at 2:36 am
Victor Velasquez says:

More than calling it SEO would be wiser to see it as Target Audience Optimization. You should concentrate all your efforts on giving the right messages to the right audience, and using the keywords that your market is using when they think about your services.