Tag Archives: Constant Contact Inc.

About 1599 days ago E-Commerce

5 Steps to Localized Online Marketing

our beautiful site

“As a fine dining chef, I always had this strange desire to serve hamburgers.” That’s the first line of a marketing e-mail that Terrapin, a restaurant and catering business in Rhinebeck, N.Y. sent to the nearly 20,000 addresses it has collected over the years. The e-mail went on to explain how Josh Kroner, Terrapin’s chef, delighted in cooking burgers from natural meat, as well as other comfort foods such as macaroni and cheese in the restaurant’s less-formal bistro room. The e-mail also featured a lavish photo of a juicy bacon cheeseburger. That one simple message resulted in lots of business, according to Elissa Mastel, marketing and public relations director for Terrapin. “We had so many people come in for burgers that week,” she says. “The effect was comparable to when we won the best mussels award in Hudson Valley magazine.” It was a highly effective use of localized online marketing. Even if yours is a business that customers have to physically visit to patronize — such as a restaurant, beauty parlor, or health club — you can still use the World Wide Web as an effective tool to get them there. But the rules for success when promoting a local-based business online are different from those for an e-business with national or international reach. Here are five tips on how you can best use the Web to bring in local customers: 1. Make sure your website is optimized for localized searches. The way to do this is to include the name of your town, county, or neighborhood several times in your meta tags, title tag, and the text on your site. This way it will rank high on a search engine if someone is looking for your type of business in your location. (Terrapin’s site, for instance, is the first result after Google maps in a Google search of “Rhinebeck, N.Y. restaurant.”) “If I add a locality to my title page, it’s easier to gain rank in a search of, say ‘print shop, Litchfield County, Connecticut,’” says Josh Katinger, president of Accession Media, an Internet marketing firm. “I’ve immediately outranked everyone who may have a bigger marketing budget than I do, but isn’t in my area.” 2. Make the most of Google Maps. With applications for the iPhone and other mobile devices, as well as an automatic top spot on Google searches that specify locations, Google Maps is the killer app of localized online marketing. You should make sure your business is listed so that it will help attract customers. Once Google has verified your address with either a telephone call or postcard, your listing will appear. You can write your own descriptive text, offer coupons for potential customers to print out, and even adjust the indicating arrow in case, for instance, the entrance to your business is on a different street than its legal address. 3. Bribe customers for e-mail addresses. Most people these days are aware that their e-mail addresses are a valuable commodity, and they also fear spam. So simply asking customers or potential customers to add their addresses to your list may not bring the desired result. At Terrapin, each check comes with a comment card for diners to fill out and provide their e-mail addresses. Those who do fill out the comment card get a chance to win a prize, such as a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant. “We couldn’t get anyone to add their names before we started this promotion,” Mastel says. “Now just about everyone who pays fills one out, and sometimes other people at the table do as well.” Once you’ve got those precious addresses, make wise use of them, she advises. For instance, she crafts Terrapin’s e-mails carefully, trying out several different subject lines and sending them to herself as a final test before sending them out. She also recommends using a third-party e-mail service such as iMail or Constant Contact. Among other advantages, a service like this will prevent customers from getting duplicate messages, she notes. 4. Consider online advertising. “I’ve always been skeptical about print advertising, and we’re gradually moving away from that to online advertising,” Terrapin’s Kroner says. “The beauty of online advertising is you always have analytics to let you know what’s going on.” For instance, Google Analytics told Kroner that a large number of site visits were linked from the Rhinebeck’s Chamber of Commerce site. 5. Use a custom site to test non-online ads’ effects. If you do decide to advertise offline, you can test your ad’s effectiveness by sending listeners or readers to a custom URL that is different from your regular one. If you do this, Katinger recommends creating a custom domain name, and not simply adding an extension to the end of your regular URL — which may well get forgotten. “I also own the domain www.am-llc.com,” he says, “I can use it in a TV or radio ad to track responses very specifically.”

About 1630 days ago Online Marketing

Publishing an Effective HTML Newsletter

our beautiful site

Want a cost-effective way to build your business by nurturing your present and future customers? Then create an HTML newsletter. In this challenging economy, small businesses should consider the e-newsletter as a vital part of their marketing plan to distinguish themselves from the competition and allow potential customers to get to know them over a long sales cycle. E-mail marketing software providers Constant Contact in Waltham, Mass., and iContact in Durham, N.C., help customers launch permission-based e-mail campaigns through step-by-step templates and easy contact uploads. “Newsletters create top-of-mind awareness,” says Ryan P. Allis, CEO and co-founder of iContact . “It’s important to do e-mail marketing right and branding yourself with your local customer is what an effective permission-based email marketing campaign can accomplish.” How to get subscribers Encourage your customers to sign up for your newsletter directly from your website where they can quickly provide their information and choose exactly what kind of information they want to receive from you. Both iContact and Constant Contact provide an archiving function so potential subscribers can view previous newsletters’ content. Potential subscribers can also sign up for your newsletter via a signup sheet provided at your retail counter, conference, workshop, or presentation. Make sure, though, that on the signup sheet, as well as on your website, you let these signups know what the newsletter will contain and the frequency of your campaigns. Says Allis, “It’s critical that you disclose what they’re signing for so you can sell them the benefits.” Under no circumstances should you disclose your contact list to anyone, but consider broadening your contact base by a partnership with another comparable business. You can publicize their event or workshop on your newsletter and they can do the same for you. What your newsletter should contain First get the basics right with a clear subject line that reveals your company’s name. The line can be creative or more straight-forward, but it must set up the reader’s expectations of what’s to follow. Allis says that once a subscriber opens the newsletter then you can continue to build your list, expose them to links, send valuable content, and get people to become clients to take action. Taking action includes customer purchases, visits, and donations. “What matters is engagement with your customers, not size, “Allis says, “You need to know what percentage of your clients are clicking through.” He suggests using list segmentation for a specific promotion and integrating video and e-mail links with social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook so you can receive more viral views of your content and receive higher click-through rates. Next, figure out what you want to say. “Write great content,” advises Eric Groves, senior vice president of worldwide strategy and market development at Constant Contact. “Stop writing about you and write about what you know. Make their experience on your newsletter fun and always have something that customers are interested in. Consider attributing survey questions to your customers to get them engaged.” How the information is presented is also important. “Make your layout look professional,” Groves says. “A reader’s eye can’t digest content as if they were reading a book, so include white space and graphics. We make it easy to match your colors so your branding stays consistent.” Groves suggests using third party content from other newsletters, with their permission, of course. RSS feeds and websites can add to your content to make your newsletter more professional. Cheap marketing tool Rock Blanco, CEO of Prime Numbers Technology in Medfield, Mass., a year-old travel database company would be “lost without” his Constant Contact-generated newsletter. He communicates industry trends, products, and news via his newsletter, which also serves as his public relations champion. “One hundred percent of my sales and marketing effort is managed by Constant Contact,” Blanco says. By observing his click-through rate, he’s able to assess where his subscribers are spending their time. He also uses Constant Contact’s survey function to generate advance and specific customer support for his new products. Everyone can afford to send an HTML newsletter with iContact and Constant Contact pricing their monthly fee below $20 per month for 500 contacts. Both companies also offer a free trial. iContact and Constant Contact give their customers numerous tools via tutorials, webinars and videos to meet their marketing needs and make them successful. “We’re here to increase the lifetime value of your customer base,” says Allis.

About 2361 days ago E-Commerce

E-mail Marketing the Right Way

With costs as low as $15 a month, hiring a company to for e-mail outreach is probably the best marketing investment a small business can make. While about 95 percent of companies do at least some e-mail marketing, most get someone else to do it for them. About half of companies with between one and five employees do their e-mail marketing in house, says Jeanniey Mullen, senior director of e-mail marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide, a New York interactive ad agency. But the larger the company, the more likely they are to outsource the function, she says. For companies that have more than five employees, the percentage jumps to more than 80 percent, according to Forrester Research, of Cambridge, Mass. That’s because sending a mass e-mail may sound simple enough, but in reality it can be pretty tedious. The pitfalls of doing it yourself Jennifer Gordon, president of Sojourn Bags, a four-year-old Chicago company that sells distinctive handbags, tried the do-it-yourself approach but found that if she got one e-mail address wrong in a mass mailing, the whole thing would bounce back. “We didn’t have the bodies to throw at the problem,” says Gordon, whose handbag firm has five full-time employees and 27 part-time sales reps. While manpower is one problem, more often firms that do their own e-mail marketing run into another firm because they lack an understanding of the specifics that can make or break an e-mail marketing campaign. Here are some questions you need to ask: Are you using a spam buzzword that will get you blocked by most firewalls? Will your e-mail look the same in e-mail programs from Google, Yahoo! and MSN? With those questions in mind, about 18 months ago, Gordon hired Constant Contact, a Waltham, Mass., company that handles outsourced e-mail marketing campaigns. Other such firms include Bronto Software and Email Labs. Return on investment Gordon says she pays $15 a month to reach about 500 clients. Since she signed up, sales have risen about 65 percent. “We see a huge jump in numbers when we send [an e-mail blast] out,” says Gordon, although she notes that not all of the increase in sales is due to the e-mail marketing. “It’s definitely the best marketing money we spend.” Gordon couldn’t quantify a response rate because, she says, it’s hard to tell if a buyer on the website was driven by an e-mail plug. Generally, the conversion rate for e-mail is about two to five percent and the engagement rate (meaning those who open the e-mails) is about 60 percent, according to industry watchers. Sojourn only sends e-mails to those who opt to receive them and so there are generally no worries about being lumped in with spam. But just because you aren’t a spammer, doesn’t mean you won’t be treated as one. A less-than-reputable e-mail firm may work with a spammer and as a result, all e-mails from the e-mail firm’s IP address may be blocked by certain recipients. As a result, some firms may want to also buy their own IP address, which jacks the monthly price up into the $200 range. Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact, says her customers rarely ask for an IP address because her company doesn’t work with spammers. “Permission marketing is the only way to go,” she says. Usually, though, firms can expect to pay between $15 and $75 a month to get a third party to run their e-mail marketing. The average return on investment on $1 spent on such a program is $57 in new business, according to the Direct Marketing Association, an industry group based in New York. Mullen says that rate can fluctuate wildly. This is one area where small businesses can have the edge over large ones, she says, because they have smaller e-mail lists and can experiment with different formats. “Small companies that take e-mail seriously can have significant success,” Mullen says.