How Social Media helps to grow the Small Business 

The business press is full of stories about how small companies are using social channels to attract and engage customers. But while there are plenty of individual success stories, the confidence in what to do specifically is not always clear for small business owners that are strapped for time and online marketing resources.

Case study:

I was talking with a small business owner recently who was lamenting not updating his website and also that his competition was showing up “all over the place” online.  The nature of his product requires some education and an effort to dispel common misperceptions. The rapid advancements in technology of his particular product category are not very well known amongst his target consumer market. But there’s a substantial amount of search volume and interest in the solutions his product provides.  He’s also a small business with limited time and budget.

To me, this was a classic opportunity for the power of influence through storytelling.

My tip for him was to start a blog that answered the most common questions prospects and customers ask.  And to do so in a compelling way that his competitors were not:  with video, images and text. Each new blog post would be another potential entry point to his website via Google and social networks where people share links. With 1 post a week, he’d have 52 more pages and videos on his website in a year, each offering interesting, useful content that could position him above the competitors. Along the way, he’d be able to gather insight from web analytics, social shares, comments and interactions with the blog posts to refine message effectiveness.

A few key questions to start with his blog content plan:

• Why do current customers buy your product? This can come from sales people and/or the business owner.
• What are the misperceptions & objections? Document the things that are educational opportunities.
• What type of information helps them change the perception?  What are the tipping points from skepticism to confidence? Is it demonstration, 3rd party data, credibility of the company, word of mouth?
• Where do prospects look for information on this solution? Talk to sales people, look at website stats and any logged information about lead sources.

By answering these fundamental questions, this small business owner can create a blog content plan that specifically addresses the questions, concerns and triggers that will influence prospects to trust, buy and refer.  Understanding the key features of the product most relevant to the target customer as well as prospect tendencies towards finding a solution of this type can literally translate into topics for him to write or talk about on the blog.

Those topics can be run through Google AdWords Keyword Tool to identify the keyword phrases that people are searching for most often. Relevant search phrases can inspire blog post and YouTube video titles, categories, descriptions and tags.

Some basic next steps might include:

Set up a WordPress Blog, template and hosting (Genesis, StudioPress & Synthesis make this a no-brainer). Plan to write one blog post or publish/upload 1 video per week (2-3 minutes) that answers a key question prospects and customers ask.  The video can be captured using an iPhone or other smartphone and iMovie can be used for editing. If you’re on PC, you can use Windows Movie Maker to edit the video.  For people not comfortable just talking to a camera, have an employee ask the question(s) and answer them while being captured on video.

Create a YouTube Channel and start connecting with other channels and video publishers on relevant topics, 5-10 min a day. After uploading a video, embed on the blog, and share on existing social channels like Twitter and Facebook as well as through email to existing customers or opt-in prospect list. Ashley posted some great examples of SMB Twitter promotion yesterday. When embedding the video on the blog, write a description of what is talked about in the video so search engines can make it easy for people to find.

The initial focus for a basic video and photo blog should be on getting used to the habit of creating useful content on a regular basis.  I know many readers might be thinking that more substantial SEO and social media tactics should be setup as well, but without good content, social networking and optimization won’t work to convert prospects to customers anyway.  Time is usually limited for small businesses, so getting a small base of content built is a great starting point.

Creating a cycle of listening for questions, answering them through content and refinement can go a very long way for small business content marketing. Once things are setup, 20-30 minutes per day can be spent interacting with blog comments and social networks. Establishing a feedback loop means you’ll always have ideas to blog or talk about. It also means you’re connecting with real people, interacting with them and providing something of value that they can share and act on.

In time other promotion channels can be added starting with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as SEO best practices with more specific keyword research and link building. If the initial customer research identifies Twitter as a substantial opportunity, a Twitter Marketing strategy might be involved at the same time the blog and YouTube channel are created. The reason I’m keeping these suggestions simple and basic is that I know how much small business owners can get overwhelmed. Needs to grow outside online marketing consultants or training can always be used to speed up things up.

What else? An email newsletter that re-purposes blog content and the Q/A that happens on Facebook, the blog and Twitter can be delivered to existing customers. Viewing every channel of participation as an opportunity to interact and share will help grow networks, trust and credibility as the “go to source” for the product category being promoted. It’s important to create value, but also to not lose sight that this is business. Don’t be afraid to suggest solutions or promote offers. Just do so in a relevant way.

Finally, make sure web analytics (Google Analytics is free) and basic social media monitoring (Trackur starts at $18/mo, search.twitter.com is free) are set up to assess how people are finding and interacting with blog content. Watch for trends in network growth like fans, friends and followers but especially with quality of interaction through comments, likes, shares and the effect on blog/website traffic that drives inquiries and sales.

For a lot of small business owners not used to online marketing, SEO or social media, these suggestions might be out of their comfort zone. But with the way consumer behaviors are changing and increased competition, getting out of the comfort zone and into a place where direct customer interactions drive content and inspire business outcomes is an essential investment.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

Social Media Marketing – An Overview

Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc., These are all examples of social media, and I bet as soon as you hear these words, you can add at least another three sites to the list off the top of your head. But what is social media?

Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

It's more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people.

According to Ron Jones' - "Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online."

There is a wide variety of social media, ranging from social sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr through social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

In my opinion, social media has shot to the forefront of people's attention because it's fun. Thanks to social media, it's easy to share your ideas, photos, videos, likes and dislikes, with the world at large - and find out what they think of them. You can find friends, business contacts and become part of a community or a bunch of different communities. 

Social media gives you what TV never could - a chance to be engaged and engage others.

Because of this, social media is of particular interest to businesses. Currently, businesses of all sizes are experimenting with social media marketing, grappling with the question of how to get in on what appears to be an especially viral way to get their message (and their products) out there.

Insight of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a recent addition to organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix; advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion. Increasingly also viral marketing campaigns are grouped to integrated marketing communications.

In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms. However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate. With the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.

Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

Social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access. Increased communication for organizations fosters brand awareness and better customer service. Additionally, social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns. With emergence of services like Twitter, the barrier to entry in social media is greatly reduced.

Social media marketing is also known as SMO - Social Media Optimization, benefits organizations and individuals by providing an additional channel for customer support, a means to gain customer and competitive insight, recruitment and retention of new customers/business partners, and a method of managing their reputation online. Key factors that ensure its success are its relevance to the customer, the value it provides them with and the strength of the foundation on which it is built.

Finally it is a strong foundation to serves as a stand or platform in which the organization can centralize its information and direct customers on its recent developments via other social media channels, such as article and press release publications, etc.

Kinds and benefits of Social Media

Many social media sites come in the form of a blog, micro blog, podcast, video cast, forum, wiki, or some kind of content community. To help you understand social media better, let's break them down into basic forms or groups.

Social news: Sites like Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, and BallHype let you read about news topics and then vote and/or comment on the articles. Articles with more votes get promoted to a more prominent position.

Social sharing: Sites like Flickr, Snapfish, YouTube, and Jumpcut let you create, upload, and share videos or photos with others.

Social networks: Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter allow you to find and link to other people. Once linked or connected, you can keep up to date with that person's contact info, interests, posts, etc. Many people are connecting to friends and business associates with whom they had fallen out of touch. It's bringing the world together like nothing else has.

Social bookmarking: Sites like Delicious, Faves, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks and Diigo allow you to find and bookmark sites and information of interest. You can save your bookmarks online and access them from anywhere or share them with others.

This is just a sampling of social media sites. More are added daily. Breaking them down into these categories or groups will help you understand their focus and to consider which avenue is right for your approach to social media marketing.

Key Benefits:

Let's look at the general scope of social media universe.

• Five of the top 10 fastest-growing Web brands are user-generated content sites?
• Sixty-seven percent of businesses say that the best source for advice on products and services are their consumers?
• Forty-five percent of adult Internet users have created content online?
• There are about 1.2 million blog posts per day?

So do you think it would benefit you to tap into this ever-growing universe of social media? Absolutely! Many companies are trying to figure out how to get involved. They're shifting money from traditional marketing budgets to social media marketing because it:

• Helps manage company's or brand's reputation.
• Builds brand awareness and helps improve how people view your brand.
• Gets you closer to your customers. Learn about their needs then respond. Discuss converse, debate.
• Offers creative and effective ways to learn insights not previously available.
• Features new and inexpensive ways to support your clients.
• Is typically less expensive than traditional advertising.
• Offers various ways to measure and track performance.

Listed above are some of the key benefits to use the social media is the best channel to promoting the products or services through internet.

Source: scribd.com and searchenginewatch.com

Online display advertising ecosystem

The biggest divide in the online advertising world is search advertising v/s display advertising. Search sounds exactly like what it is: the ads next to search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and competitors. Search is bigger than display by revenues, and much more concentrated. 

The benefit of search to advertisers is it corresponds much better than display advertising to intent.  A searcher for “hotels in Palm Springs” is most likely in the market for a hotel in Palm Springs. The other thing search has going for it is its easy and quantifiable — you can sign into Google Adwords with nothing more than your credit card, type up some text ads, and be running campaigns with impression and click reporting within hours.

The display advertising world is structured differently. Display ads are obviously those pictures you see plastered all over the sites you visit. There’s less intent so individual impressions earn a lot less money. Typically the prices are measured as CPM, Cost Per Mille, i.e. cost per 1k impressions. It’s also important to understand the structure of the market a bit. 

In the beginning (90s), advertisers pretty naively bought ad impressions millions at a time on popular sites. Performance was often evaluated based on pure impressions or CTR, click through rates. Ads were often sold on the basis of quantifiability — you could, for the first time, measure how many ads were seen, who clicked, how often, where he or she went, etc. As search advertising evolved, I think a lot of the people chasing quantifiable advertising moved to that, while display became more about branding. This, btw, is the value of facebook — brand advertisers want to be able to precisely target age, gender, income, and other demographics; on facebook, users freely and generally accurately share this information.

The display ecosystem has a bunch of moving pieces. If you look at the display advertising tech landscape graphic from Luma Partners, you’ll see:

Agencies 

These are the big advertising agencies that run most large advertising accounts go through. Companies like Toyota, GM, General Mills, etc, will give these companies tend to hundreds of millions of dollars to run ad campaigns on their behalf.

Media Buying Desks 

The ad agencies weren’t really capable of managing digital campaigns. That is, when ad agencies came about, your media outlets were maybe 10 national TV networks, radio stations, local newspapers, and a couple national magazines. And the media buying process was pretty simple: the agencies would send out an RFP that said we want manly men in their 40s who buy outdoorsy cologne and the aforementioned publishers would respond and say how their audience matched that profile. Compared to the online world of today, where there are thousands of premier publishers such as the NYT, ESPN, online magazine versions, etc; this was much simpler. 

Today, trafficking ads is an order of magnitude more work and advertisers must decide what they want to buy, where, on which site, when, with what creative, etc. So the agencies built or bought companies that have the capability to build digital media, traffic campaigns, optimize the ads, and create the necessary reporting. Eg Vivaki is Publicis, b3 is WPP, etc.

Ad Exchanges 

These are, well, exchanges where publishers and advertisers come together to sell and buy remnant ad inventory. Basically, there is premier and remnant inventory. Premier inventory is something like display ads on high quality reporting on ESPN or ads on articles on ARS Technica. These are often sold by in house salespeople in a process remarkably similar to how everything used to work, though people mostly email PDFs instead of sending faxes. Every ad impression that isn’t sold as premier is referred to as remnant, and these remnant impressions are offered to ad exchanges such as Right Media — RMX, owned by Yahoo — in exchange for a cut.

So the way this works is I can buy, with some rules, 1MM impressions on RMX and RMX will put these impressions on their publishers such as ESPN in ad impressions that ESPN didn’t sell in house. These impressions go for an order of magnitude less money than premier. RMX is one of the more technically sophisticated. The benefit for publishers is they get some money for inventory they didn’t fill. Just to be clear, a good eCPM for premier might be $20-$40 and a good eCPM for remnant might be $3-$5.

Demand Site Platform

A DSP helps advertisers purchase remnant ads across multiple ad sources including exchanges, ad networks, and individual publishers. A good DSP will have sophisticated targeting and optimization algorithms that incorporate first and third party data on behalf of the advertisers. Typically, a DSP’s clients are advertisers that aren’t big enough to go to one of the big seven agencies. Often these advertisers spend $10 – $50k / month, for example a local Toyota dealership instead of the national dealer chain, etc.

Ad Servers 

These help publishers. See Exp: OpenX, DoubleClick Dart, etc. Particularly for larger publishers, coordinating all these ad purchases is complicated. Your advertisers want to give you rules, such as user bleaching rules (only so many impressions to a given user per some amount of time), time of day, what pages an ad can run on (few people want to run next to naked folks, etc). 

They also want to be able to update and optimize their creative or even change the creative or the landing page they go to. Advertisers, or their agencies, also demand reporting — how many times was an ad seen. On what pages did users click on the Ad etc., within publishers the ad sales or monetization folks don’t want to be releasing the site every time they tweak Ads. Ad servers are internal or external software that manages all this and can be quite complex.

Data optimization 

This requires some explanation. In the beginning, people basically bought broad swaths of display ads. The value to optimization is the more targeted you can make your ad, the more value it has. My favorite example is espn: assume 10% of their online audience is female. If you’re an advertiser that wants to sell female sports jerseys, your CTR amongst women is 5%, your conversion rate is 5%, and a conversion is worth $50, your value per 1k impressions is 1000 * .1 * .05 * .05 * 50 = $12.5, so your CPM has to be < $12.50. However, if espn could pick out the women and sell the publisher only that segment (with some error, obviously), but say espn can enrich the demos so that women are 50% of impressions in a segment. Suddenly advertising on espn is worth 5 times as much for the advertiser and hence espn can charge 5 times as much. This is the value of data optimization. It's performed many ways, from things as simple as geo targeting and day part to more sophisticated demographic estimation, retargeting, and varieties of behavioral retargeting.

Re-Targeters 

Re-targeting is a simple idea. Say that I see cookies going to a site like a bmw forum. I might reasonably intuit that these users are interested in bmws and choose to show bmw display ads to them as they browse the internet.

Behavioral retargeting is the next step of retargeting. Plain retargeting is nice, but it suffers from a couple flaws. First, it has limited reach, ie there are only so many cookies that go to a bmw forum. BMW probably wants to reach more purchasers than just those. Second, it doesn’t really help generate intent. If you’re going to a bmw forum, you’re probably already pretty interested in bmws, so that may not be the best person for bmw to advertise to. Behavioral retargeting means any of a variety of ways of trying to figure out cookies to advertise to to get broader reach or cheaper acquisitions than retargeting.

The other big movement going on in the display world is the evolution of how people buy ads. In the early days — 90s — people tended to buy online ads in a high touch process with salespeople. Ad networks started which brought more buyers and fewer salespeople. Companies like Right Media — which Yahoo bought — started and allowed you to create bidding rules that run on their servers so advertisers can buy ads. So I can say that I want to, across many websites, target cookies that have visited a site or set of sites (retargeting), or show them so many ads per day, etc, and based on a variety of characteristics of a cookie and the site which that cookie is visiting and the web page they are viewing, $X is my bid for that cookie. 

RTB or real time bidding 

This is the new - now, instead of giving limited rules to someone like RMX, you register with Google (the largest RTB platform) or Yahoo’s RTB, and their servers, for each impression, send you a bid request. Your computers located in a server farm near their servers are given typically 100ms to respond with a per impression bid for that cookie on that page and that impression. See. Also, this is obviously an enormous tech investment. DSPs also help with this; most companies aren’t capable nor is it worthwhile to build this out in house.
Source: blog.earlh.com

Email Marketing Apps for Small Business

Email marketing is one of the dominant ways that a small business reaches out to customers and prospects. Email marketing is about relationships — and successful relationship marketing involves a lot more thought than simply firing off a newsletter via email.

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, email marketing is one of two marketing budget items that saw an increase in 2009.  The other is social media.

But where many have claimed that “email is dead,” MarketingSherpa has proven otherwise in its studies.  In fact, they show that email is quite social.  A recent survey asked users how they share information they find on the internet:  78% responded that email is how they do it.  22% use social media sites.

Here are 30 small business email marketing applications to grow customer relationships and your business:

Emma

Emma is a Web-based service that combines do-it-yourself with free personal assistance when you need it (custom email design comes at an additional charge).  They have strong tracking and analytics components that allow you to learn what works, or doesn’t, with your audience.

Constant Contact

They offer a free 60-day trial. They have been around a long time and have a strong arsenal of email marketing tools from HTML newsletter templates to personal coaching on how to get your email campaigns done right.  They have added event management so you can handle online registration, as well as online survey tools to gather info from customers and prospects.

AWeber

AWeber grew very popular because it focused on auto-response emails.  They made it very simple and elegant to create a form a prospect would fill out.  This service is auto-responded to that information with whatever message you had set up. They offer a robust set of tools including email newsletters, emails to RSS, and, of course, auto responders.  First month is $1, and then pay-as-you-go based on subscriber count.  You don’t pay per email with them.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the first email marketing providers to offer a “forever free” plan.  Small business users I know love this plan as it gives you up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails for free each month.  After that, it has pay-as-you-go pricing.  On top of the email newsletter and database list management, they offer integration with online event registrations and ticket sales via Eventbrite.

iContact

iContact offers all of the same features as the others, but they focus attention on their deliverability rates – often talked about as whitelist agreements. While it may not seem like a big deal at first glance, if your email provider isn’t doing things right, your email may not get through.  iContact partners with a third party, Pivotal Veracity, to score emails to help improve how many get through to recipients. They offer a free trial, no credit card to get started, and a good educational resource section.

Vertical Response

In addition to email, Vertical Response is probably one of the more integrated services out there, with integration to Intuit and Salesforce.  They offer postal mail options, too, so you can send a postcard to a prospect or customer to add another touch beyond email and it has great educational materials also.

EmailBrain

I liked that they had a “no credit card” free trial signup.  More importantly, I really appreciated that they offer an industry-focus approach with 20+ industry examples and case studies.  You could dig in and see what someone else like you was doing — a good way to get a jumpstart on your email marketing.

eConnect

eConnect Email’s claim to fame is their the first provider to offer a tagging system for email.  Look at it as a meta-organizing system where you can see what your customers and prospects find interesting and are clicking on.  You can tag items in a specific email, in a campaign, and across multiple campaigns.  That information is then available on a subscriber level, so you can see the top five tags your customer is interested in.

FuseMail

FuseMail offers email hosting as well as campaign management.  They have a 14-day free trial.  The big area that stood out for me was they have an SMTP Direct service (which is an email gateway) where you can use your existing email newsletter program and gain the advantages of their email servers.  The advantage of this is that you don’t have to get everyone on your existing mail list to “opt-in” to your newsletter again, which is almost always a requirement when signing on with a new service.  FuseMail doesn’t have this requirement with their SMTP Direct service.

SimplyCast

SimplyCast, owned by Mailworkz (offers 300 emails a month “free forever” account, similar to MailChimp).  Some of the key features that SimplyCast offers are worth considering:   Image hosting (so you can easily have your image render properly), easy to include attachments, forward-to-a-friend options from within the email (great for viral stuff), and dozens of template categories.

JangoMail

Many providers tag your emails with “Powered by ABC Email…” and you probably don’t particularly want to see this sort of branding on your email messages to customers.  JangoMail promises “your emails are your emails, not ours.”  Even though they are a web-based email provider, they allow for you to manage your messaging through Outlook or Thunderbird, and other web-based apps like Gmail and Yahoo, too.  Free trial allows for 50 test emails.

GetResponse

GetResponse appears to be very social media savvy.  They offer video email and social media tools.  Your email subscribers, for example, can easily receive your Twitter updates via the GetResponse service.   They also have a split-testing feature so that you can test one email against another to see which one pulls better results.

Contact29

Contact29 is an email marketing provider focused primarily on the real estate and mortgage industries. If you are in those industries, they are worth a look.

SendLabs

SendLabs has created a tool to help you see what your email will look like in the recipient’s inbox.  With a single click, this feature within the SendLabs Summer ’09 release will send a copy of your email to all of the major email programs (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.) and provide a screen shot report on how well your email will render for everybody.

Campaigner

Campaigner offers a nifty workflow tool that allows you to determine when and what actions trigger an email to be sent to your customer or prospect.  It is similar to an auto responder (which sends an email when a customer fills in a form on a website usually), but a bit more advanced.  With their workflow tool, you can trigger a specific response based on what a customer does within the email.  If they click a certain link, for example, they might receive an email 1 hour later.  Free trial, of course.

EasyContact

I liked the very simple 3-step plan that EasyContact presents to first time visitors.  You get a clear sense that they have thought about how to make it as easy as possible.   They also offer a free forever plan and low-cost pay-as-you-go options.

Big Response

The other services may have similar offers, but Big Response has a couple of things worth mentioning:  First, they highlight that you can collect an unlimited number of subscribers – meaning you don’t pay to store contacts and only pay for emails sent.   You get unlimited phone and email support from their experts. 

Benchmark Email

Their competitor comparison chart reveals a lot about what they offer that others don’t.  You can tie into your Google Analytics account.  You can view all of your subscriber opens within a map within the reporting feature.  You can segment out all of your email lists easily which is handy as you get to know your customers better.

StreamSend

The big differentiator for StreamSend is they offer every customer a private IP address, which helps you keep your reputation intact.  You are not judged by the email provider you use, but by your email quality.

myNewsletterBuilder

myNewsletterBuilder stands out in the crowd of email marketers by providing pre-written content that you can use in your newsletters and emails, by industry segment.  They also partnered with eVoiceSpot, which is a multimedia rich presentation service that you can embed into your email or newsletter.

YesMail

YesMail has one major awards and recognition for its platform and service.  They have a specific small business offering called YesMail Direct.  This link goes direct to that page. They are connected to InfoUSA, so if you need to build a mailing list you can do it all under one roof.

Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi is a simple email marketing system.  One of the nice features is it comes with free design assistance.  It also has a limited edition that is completely free and includes good sharing functions like Forward to a Friend, among many other standard features.

PoMMo

PoMMo is a free open-source program that bills itself as “mass mailing” software.  It is a no-frills program.  It’s is 100% free.  However, like many open source apps, remember there’s always a cost — it costs you time.  You are pretty much on your own when it comes to installing it and troubleshooting issues.  There is no customer support to call.

CRM EMAIL

Many companies don’t like their email efforts separated from their customer data. Keeping it all together is a lot of work.  Customer relationship management software companies have listened, but these five web-based offerings are aimed at the small business owner.  If you want to enable customized emails to your customers, with full tracking and opportunities to create new campaigns from your customer data, then you should look closely at these companies:

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is a popular CRM solution with automated email marketing as a central concept.  As you make contact with customers via email, or via interactions on your website or online shopping cart, Infusionsoft tracks those contact points.  You can then use those interactions to send targeted and relevant communications. Your salespeople can access this info and understand what communications the customer has seen, or where they’ve gone on your site, and have a more intelligent conversation.  (Note:  Infusionsoft is a sponsor of this site’s Internet radio show.)

Zoho CRM

Zoho is an online application suite like OpenOffice or Google Documents, but with a lot more applications and options for managing your business.  Their ZohoCRM tool recently introduced the email within CRM option. The email add-on is $5 a month additional.

Highrise HQ

Highrise HQ is a web-based CRM from 37 Signals (owner of Basecamp, a popular project management tool).  Like most CRM solutions, they allow you to track who you talk to and so forth, but the ability to see all of your email efforts and dialogue with a customer on one page is fairly useful.

Leopard CRM

Integrating your email into your CRM efforts always looks daunting, but Leopard CRM simply says — calls our support team and we’ll walk you through it.

SalesBoom

SalesBoom is an online CRM application that offers an email campaign management tool.  With it, a user can capture leads via a simple web form and then send individual emails, or manage entire drip marketing campaigns where you email customers or prospects a series of emails over a period of time.

SalesJunction

SalesJunction offers one of the lowest monthly costs for a web-based CRM that I’ve found.  The basic edition has a 15 day trial.

Lyris HQ

Lyris HQ used to be known as Email Labs.  It integrates with Salesforce.com, which is the industry-leading online CRM solution, so that’s a plus for the many business owners using Salesforce.  I could not find pricing on their website, which is a downside in my opinion. Small business owners are too busy to talk to sales reps or sit through web demos just to discover pricing.

SOCIAL EMAIL

There’s loads of proof that social networks have changed how we communicate. They increase transparency, build trust, and give people (customers and prospects) the choice to opt-in to our messages.

With social media you can communicate directly to your customers without the traditional email hurdles and miss the inbox altogether.  For example, your company can send messages to people in a Facebook or LinkedIn Group today.  Twitter does not offer a group feature where you can message a group of people privately, but a third party app called Tweetworks does.  You could accomplish something similar by addressing a group with a hashtag although it wouldn’t remain private.  The goal with a private message is to avoid bothering others that would not be interested in the offer or message.

Return on Subscriber offers a solid post on how to achieve more social email:  Making your email marketing social

Finally, remember that programs and offer details change.  But, to the best of my knowledge all information herein is accurate as of the time of publication.

We hope these 30 applications and ideas help you.  What email marketing software do you use now?  Leave a comment below with your favorite.

Source: smallbiztrends.com

Email marketing – An Overview

Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail (email). In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.

It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to either cold lists or current customer database.

Broadly, the term is usually referred as:

• Sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
• Sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
• Adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $1.51 billion on email marketing in 2011 and will grow to $2.468 billion by 2016.

Types of email marketing

Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails:

Email newsletters

Email Newsletters are direct emails sent out on a regular basis to a list of subscribers, customers. The primary purpose of an email newsletter is to build upon the relationship of the company with their customers/subscribers.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, purchase or order confirmation emails and email receipts.

The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. But, due to its high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters), transactional emails are a golden opportunity to engage customers; to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers, to anticipate and answer questions or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services.

Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which gives companies the ability to include promotional messages within the body of transactional emails. There are also software vendors that offer specialized transactional email marketing services, which include providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific marketing campaigns (such as customer referral programs).

Direct emails

Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example, an announcement of a special offer or a catalog of products). Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they can also rent a list of email addresses from service companies.

Comparison to traditional mail

There are both advantages and disadvantages to using email marketing in comparison to traditional advertising mail.

Advantages

Email marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with email blasts that are delivered between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. outperforming those sent at other times in open and click rates.
• Email is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292m in the UK.

Disadvantages

A report issued by the email services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.

Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.

Opt-in email advertising

Opt-in email advertising, or permission marketing, is a method of advertising via email whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it. This method is one of several developed by marketers to eliminate the disadvantages of email marketing.

Opt-in email marketing may evolve into a technology that uses a handshake protocol between the sender and receiver.  This system is intended to eventually result in a high degree of satisfaction between consumers and marketers. If opt-in email advertising is used, the material that is emailed to consumers will be "anticipated". It is assumed that the consumer wants to receive it, which makes it unlike unsolicited advertisements sent to the consumer. Ideally, opt-in email advertisements will be more personal and relevant to the consumer than untargeted advertisements.

A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm's customers. Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products.  In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.

With a foundation of opted-in contact information stored in their database, marketers can send out promotional materials automatically—known as Drip Marketing. They can also segment their promotions to specific market segments.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

How To Make Money From Blogs – Indirect Methods

Many of the following methods are the result of the profile and perceived expertise of the blogger themselves.

Building a profile as a blogger doesn’t happen quickly and starting a blog with some of these hopes should be seen as a long term thing.

Consulting – when you are perceived as an expert on a topic you will find that people naturally come to you for advice – some of them willing to pay for it. Some niches are probably better positioned than others for their bloggers to get into paid consultancy work of course.

Business Blogging – Similarly there are some businesses that employ people to blog for them either as their main role or part of their role. One example of a company who employed a couple of bloggers was Vespa who now have two blogs. Blogger Jobs is one site worth following if you’re looking for these types of jobs. Most of the jobs there are from blog networks but occasionally they include businesses looking for bloggers also.

Book Deals – Some days as I read through the RSS feeds that I follow it seems that every blogger I read has a book either in progress or coming out. Once again it’s about being seen as an expert in your field – if you can achieve this you will find publishers are more receptive to having an idea pitched to them and at times will even seek you out. This is becoming more and more common with publishers as they are seeing not only some great writers but that many of them already have large amounts of content on their blogs ready to be pulled together into a book!

Offline Writing Gigs – Manolo from Shooeblogs recently landed a writing gig in the Washington Post Express after he was discovered via his blog. These types of opportunities can be in the form of newspapers, magazines, trade publications etc.

Online Writing Gigs – Similarly some bloggers also land jobs writing for other forms of websites as a result of being discovered from their blogs.

Selling e-resources – I wasn’t sure whether to classify this as direct or indirect (and depending upon how you do it you could probably go either way) but some bloggers are leveraging the expertise they have in an area by putting together their own ‘e-products’ such as e-books, tele-seminars, courses etc and selling them to their readers.

Business Partnerships – One of the benefits of blogging about a niche topic that interests you is that you will begin to connect with others who have similar interests and expertise. As you interact with them it’s amazing to see the opportunities for working together that arise.

Speaking Opportunities – Once again this is dependent upon the topic you’re writing about but some lucky bloggers end up with all kinds of opportunities to speak at conferences, workshops and seminars on their topic of choice. Sometimes they are freebies, other times the conference will cover costs and on other occasions there are speaker’s fees.

If you’re planning to use some of these indirect ways of making money because of your blog it’s important that you think seriously about building your own profile and credibility as a blogger. Think about the types of people that you respect and look to as experts and consider what they offer in their fields.

These people are generally original thinkers that not only report what others are doing, but who provide answers and vision for their industry. They are also often well networked and have the ability to draw others along with them.

Use your blog not only to report and rehash news but to also show initiative in proposing solutions. Be proactive in your blogging and lead the conversation rather than just react to it.

Source: www.problogger.net

How to Make Money From Blogs 

- Direct Methods

Different models that bloggers are using to make money from blogging into two areas – Direct and Indirect methods.

Direct Income Earning Methods - these methods are where a blogger earns an income directly FROM their blog.

Indirect Income Earning Methods – these methods are where a blogger earns an income BECAUSE of their blog.

Direct Income Earning Methods for Bloggers;

1. Advertising

There are many ways of selling advertising space on a blog (this could almost be a series of its own) but some of the different advertising options that I see bloggers experimenting with include:

Contextual Advertising – Programs like AdSense and YPN (beta) are very popular with bloggers and are probably the most common income stream being used by them today (MSN are developing one too). In short – these programs scan the content of your blog to assertion what its topic is and attempt to put contextually relevant ads (text and image) onto your blog. They are generally simple to use and involve pasting some code into your blog’s templates. 

Payment is on a ‘per click’ basis (referred to as CPC or ‘cost per click’ ads). Contextual ads suit blogs that have a particular niche topic, especially if it has some sort of commercial angle (i.e. it has products and services associated with it). They are not so good with ‘general’ type blogs (i.e., many topics) and/or political/spiritual blogs which argue just one side of a case (this confuses AdSense). I write much more extensively on how to use AdSense on your blog here.

Other CPC Advertising – There are a variety of other ad systems that pay on a per click basis which are not contextual in nature (which is important as systems like AdSense do not allow you to run contextual ads on the same page view as them). These systems include Chitika’s eMiniMalls (aff) which I reviewed here.

Impression Based Ads – Impression based ads pay a small amount for every person who views the advertisement. The amount that they pay varies from program to program (and ad to ad) and is generally a fraction of a cent. There are a variety of ad systems around like this including Fastclick (aff) which I reviewed here and Tribal Fusion. Impression based ads won’t earn you much if you don’t have a lot of traffic but can be great if you do.

Blog Ads – BlogAds have become something of an institution when it comes to advertising on blogs. They traditionally have had a focus upon monetizing political blogs but are expanding their focus lately. The beauty of them is that bloggers set their own rates and can accept or reject advertisers that apply to them to be featured on their blogs. These ads put the control of what ads show and how much they earn into the hands of the blogger. 

The downside is that if you price them too high you could never have any ads showing at all. They can also be difficult to be accepted into as a publisher as these days they only accept people into the system if they have someone who is already in ‘sponsor’ or recommend the new publisher.

Text Ads – Another increasingly popular way to sell ads on your blog is to look into text links. The beauty of these are that they don’t take up much room and that depending upon the system you choose to run them you can have control over which advertisers you accept and reject. AdBrite (aff) is one such system that gives you control in a similar way to BlogAds in that you set your own prices and approve all ads. They are also other formats of ads. Text Link Ads (aff) is another text link seller that more and more bloggers are using. The beauty of both of these systems is that they have a pool of advertisers already so you don’t have to go looking for your own advertisers. 

Their systems are also both very automated and are just a matter of pasting some code onto your blog. I use them both and while they don’t earn anywhere near as much as AdSense or Chitika for me they add up over the year and have done well for me. Bidvertiser and Adzaar are other system that I know are popular with some (we’ve used them quite successfully on b5media although I have little personal experience with them).

RSS Ads – An increasingly popular way for people to read blogs is via RSS. As a result publishers and ad providers have been keen to find ways to place ads in feeds. These attempts have been met with a variety of success levels. I’m yet to hear of too many people making big dollars with RSS ads yet but the ad systems seem to be improving. 

AdSense offers RSS ads to some of its publishers (you have to have a certain number of impressions first) as does YPN. Feedburner is a tool I’ve used to help monetize my own feeds – they give publishers three options (1. AdSense if you’ve been approved by them, 2. Amazon affiliate program and 3. If you have a lot of subscribers (over 500) they have an Ad Network). Pheedo is another system that you might like to try (although I’ve not had much experience with it).

Other Ads Systems – In addition to the above systems are many other advertising options which we’ve not had experience with and so won’t personally recommend. I’m sure they are worth experimenting with however as I see many of them being used by bloggers every day. Here they are in no particular order:

AdGenta, CrispAds, Clicksor, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, Double Click, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, OneMonkey, and TextAds. Feel free to add your own and tell us how you’ve gone with them in comments below.

2. Sponsorship

Another form of advertising that a smaller number of bloggers are using is to find their own advertisers. All of the above systems have the advantage of finding you advertisers (or at least assisting in the automation of ads to your blog) but as your blog grows in profile and influence you might find other options for private deals come up.

The big blog networks have people dedicated to the task of finding advertisers (often working through ad agencies) but smaller bloggers might find this worthwhile also. I’ve been selling ads on my Digital Camera Blog for two years now and as it’s grown in traffic and profile and managed to attract larger companies (who are willing to pay more) to buys space. Currently the blog features ads from Adobe who have bought a combination of banner, newsletter and text ads.

The key if you’re going to take this approach is to target advertisers in your niche that have products that closely relate to what you’re writing about. There are a variety of ads that you can offer them including banner ads, buttons, text links, mentions in newsletters and even individual post sponsorships. I would highly recommend that you always make it clear to readers that your post is a sponsored one when you’re writing a sponsored post.

3. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are where you take a commission for referring a reader who purchases a product or service to a company. Probably the most common of these for bloggers is Amazon which has tens of thousands of products that you can link to (I reviewed it here). Other affiliate programs that represent many different companies and products include Linkshare, Commission Junction and Clickbank.

Affiliate programs take some work if you want to get the most out of them (perhaps more work than advertising) but can be lucrative if you match the right program with the right blog/topic. If you want to explore affiliate programs more you might like to read 10 tips for using affiliate programs on you blog.

4. Selling/Flipping Blogs

The idea of selling (or flipping) your blog is one that many bloggers have in the back of their minds for ‘one day’ but in reality it is not something that is overly common… yet (I think this is changing). Probably the largest sale is that of Weblogs Inc (a network of blogs) which sold to AOL for a reported $25 million. Of course this is the stuff that most of us can only dream of – but there are examples of smaller blogs being sold, either privately or via auctions on sites like eBay and SitePoint. One such auction was that of the Blog Herald which took place here.

Starting a blog with the main goal of selling it down the track is one that I’ve heard of a number of bloggers doing but few have been successful. Rather than starting with this intention I think if you start with the intention of building a quality site that has a large readership and it’s own good income stream you are more likely to find buyers down the track.

5. Donations and Tip Jars

A very small number of blogs have a history of making good money with these (Jason Kottke being one of them). To be successful with asking for money from readers you’ll want to have a large and loyal readership (and a rich one might help too). Most bloggers just don’t have the critical mass or the cult following to make it work.

6. Merchandise

Another method that some blogs use with reasonable effect is to sell T-Shirts, Mugs, Stickers etc with the blog’s name, logo and/or taglines on it. This is another idea that will probably only will work if you either have a brilliantly designed merchandise range and/or you have a cult-like status as a blogger with some fanatical readers who are a little obsessive about your blog. Some blog topics lend themselves to this more than others.

7. Selling Subscriptions

The idea of charging readers for content is one that surfaces from time to time. While there are numerous websites around the web that do this successfully (community membership sites) I’m yet to see many (any) blogs do it well. The problem that most bloggers who have tried it have run into is that most topics that you could think to start a blog about already have free sites available. To make it succeed you would need to have some sort of premium/exclusive content and/or real expertise on a topic.

8. Blog Networks

Another emerging income source for bloggers is blog networks. There are two ways to make money here. Firstly you can start a network and contract bloggers to write for you or secondly you might like to join a blog network as a writer. There are many networks out there and all have their own strengths and weaknesses. I’ll attempt to write a post on what to think about when you’re looking at whether to join a network later in this series.

Source: http://www.problogger.net