Social Media Marketing and Lead Generation
Found an interesting slide share presentation about social media marketing and lead generation.
All about Email Marketing for Your Business
Email marketing and newsletters may be sent with more confidence for less than most of the competition. Emails are priced according to the quantity you purchase, so the more you get, the less they cost.
- Make customer communication more efficient and to improve the productivity or their marketing resources
- Improve email marketing deliver ability—ensuring their communications are delivered to the highest percentage of recipients as possible
- Accelerate customer acquisition and conversion rates from their email marketing efforts
- Track the performance of their marketing efforts from communication to transaction—connecting campaigns to tangible return on marketing investment
- Leverage dynamic content for customized one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many email marketing communications
- Reduce their marketing costs while improving the performance and productivity of their marketing resources
- Make it easier and faster for customers to buy their products and services than any other marketing or sales channel
- Integrate voice, fax and sms text communications channels with their email marketing efforts
- Maximize Web analytic data to improve customer acquisition, customer retention and customer growth results
Marketing
Marketing leaders across all industries—business-to-business and business-to-consumer—are using email marketing as their core channel for acquiring, retaining and growing customers.
Email Newsletters
Bulk email hosting can be affordable and provide a steady flow of traffic and return customers. If used correctly by businesses, email newsletters, targeted email campaigns and email announcements can provide valuable statistics on what your customers need.
Quite apart from these practical considerations, there is also a strong argument which says that long-term successful email marketing relationships with customers and others can only work if they’re permission based. It’s important to stress that anyone considering email marketing must read up on the subject of permission and spam. By offering value-added services to your existing clients with email marketing software, you can build indestructible customer loyalty, gain a sharp competitive advantage and increase the average order value per client.
Affiliate Marketing: A Cost-Effective Way to Advertise your Business
An affiliate program is a form of internet advertising that rewards marketers for driving traffic to a company’s website and producing sales. The company gives its affiliates a personalized tracking link that the marketer can use in their promotions. This link enables the company to track where traffic and sales are coming from and pay their affiliates accordingly. Simply put, affiliate programs are about paying commissions to people who help you to make sales. This is not quite as easy as it sounds.
Running an affiliate program has its ups and downs. It is very important to be armed with up to date information and technical know how if you are going to run such a program successfully and with the minimum stress. In this article we will look at the benefits of affiliate marketing as a tool for increasing your businesses profitability…
Here are some of the reasons why you should consider affiliate marketing as an effective way of advertising your business and products.
1. Low cost
Running an affiliate program is very cost effective as you only pay your affiliates for the results that they produce. The affiliate bears most of the cost of promoting your product, you provide them with the necessary tools, such as banners and other promotional material. Of course, this arrangement is mutually beneficial, you get low cost advertising; your affiliates get the opportunity to make money from a product that they haven’t had to spend time and money developing.
2. Affiliate programs produce unlimited income through leverage
When you have a paid job, your monthly income mainly relies on whether you go to work or not. With affiliate marketing, your affiliates do all of the work in getting traffic to your site. Once you have provided them with your ad copy and links you don’t to lift a finger, especially if your product is a digital one. Although not everyone earns limitless amounts of money, running an affiliate marketing program greatly increases your chances.
4. Go international
With affiliate marketing, you are dealing with a global market place. All you have to do is choose a niche product and prepare all the necessary tools for your affiliates to lead traffic from just about anywhere to your website.
5. Low risk
The main reason that so many internet companies rely on affiliate marketing is that the risks are relatively low. This is especially true for those with little money available to set aside for advertising. Affiliate marketing is just the way to do it.
6. No closing time
With affiliate marketing, your business works every single second of the day while targeting a worldwide market! What could be better than that?
Affiliate Marketing: Know The Can-Spam Act
The amount of false information available about e-mail marketing on the net is staggering. If you are advertising your affiliate program through e-mail campaigns, make sure you know what your responsibilities are.
The lawless days of spam e-mail are over, at least for U.S.A. based advertisers. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) sets forth specific requirements for advertising via e-mail. The law has been tested numerous times since being passed and fines have been levied, property seized, people have even been sentenced to prison.
As an affiliate marketer obviously you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this law. Luckily, complying with the provisions in the law is fairly simple. Here is what it requires:
No misleading or fake header information. This includes the “From:” and “To” fields.
No deceptive subject lines. You want your customer to know what you’re selling anyway, so this should be no problem.
Messages must be labeled as advertising. Again, the moral is: no sneaky stuff.
An “internet-based” opt-out method must be provided. You have 10 days to stop e-mailing a person once you have received their remove request.
Messages must include your business (or home) physical address. This provides accountability and a way for the customer to verify that your business is real.
Breaking any of these rules could lead to a fine of up to $11,000 per violation! Honesty is now truly the best policy. You may be thinking: if this is such a big deal, why is my inbox flooded with spam every day?
It’s not a perfect world, and the short answer is that many of those advertisers are breaking the law. Commonly they are outside the United States in areas where prosecution may be unrealistic. You, on the other hand, would probably be quite easy to catch.
Be sure to read the detailed requirements for yourself. You can find more information at the Federal Trade Commission’s website, http://www.ftc.gov/spam
Social Media Marketing – Goals and Effectiveness
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing, which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks like You Tube, Twitter, My Space, and Facebook, social web application like dig, delicious, reddit, Wiki. The goal of each Social Media Marketing program varies from business to business, but mainly involves building of brand awareness, increasing visibility and through this, promote a product or service. One of the most talked about examples of this is how DELL has made $3 million from utilizing Twitter alone.
Social Media Marketing is becoming an essential marketing tool for connecting with customers and optimizing online presence. Social Media describes the tools and platforms, people use to publish, converse and share content online. Video, pod cast, blogs, discussion boards and social networking sites are all tools, online businessmen can use to build relationship with their customers and keep them on websites longer. Social media provides more opportunities for organizations to present optimized content that can be indexed by search engines and ultimately improves site rating.
To implement some of the social media elements, it is first important to evaluate your customers to create an effective strategy. If your consumers are professionals who commute, then pod cast can be downloaded and can be very effective.
Posting video content on video sharing sites is a unique opportunity to improve your position in Google’s universal search results. WithYouTube, customers can visit the site, view your video and easily post to their own blogs, social networking profiles or websites. YouTube is a great way to reach a broader viewer and generate buzz around new products, especially if your product has a visual appeal.
Building healthy relationship with the customer, that last is an on-going process for a businessperson. Social media takes this a step further by making that relationship personal through blogs. It tells about you, not only about your product or service.
A blog, which includes video, pictures and text, can build interest and loyalty among customers and a new way to search engine optimization. Create a page dedicated to community with website visitors and this will be interactive.
Social media encourages social visits to your site. Keep adding content to encourage customers to return regularly. With the advent of social media, consumers have become contributors, contributing to brand messaging. SMM is related to other online tactics such as SEO, SMO. It has a more active planned role in directing, influencing and suggesting the community members.
How To Increase Your Site Traffic And Succeed in Affiliate Marketing
As an affiliate marketer, your main objective is to sell the products and or services offered by your partner merchants. Unless you can do this, you can never hope to make a significant amount of money with affiliate marketing programs. So how do you boost sales, customer acquisitions, and leads? All things being equal, you have to increase your site traffic before you can get more sales. By the law of averages, the more people that are know of the products you are offering, the more products you will sell.
Here are a few tips that can help you boost your site traffic:
- Optimize your site for the search engines, SEO. The most successful sites on the Internet are the ones that are seen the most. There are many ways to achieve increased visibility on the Internet, but the best method is that of search engine optimization. The details are too technical to discuss here, but the purpose of SEO is to help your site get higher rankings on the search engines. If you have ever used a search engine, such as Google, you will notice that any keyword search will return thousands, if not millions of results. Most people won’t bother to browse through page after page of results; they will prefer to look into the sites already shown on the first page. Statistically speaking, the sites listed on the first page will get the highest amount of traffic, putting those sites in a better position to make money.
- Provide fresh content. Your site must be constantly updated if you expect your visitors to keep coming back. Your site must have useful content, as well as tools that will help your target audience. Make your site as easy to navigate as possible, and be sure that your links work the way that they should. There is nothing more frustrating than a “broken” website, and once your site has been labeled as such, chances are slim that people will want to come back.
- Build an online community. Join some forums and meet people. Build relationships with your potential customers. You are able to put a signature file in many of the forums so be sure to put a link to your site in your signature. Make your visitors feel welcome and appreciated, and they are likely to come back. Be interested in solving their problems and they will thank you with their business.
Making your affiliate marketing program work is really not that much different from operating a traditional business. The only way you can keep your customers is to treat them right. As long as you treat your customers with respect and exert effort in trying to meet their needs, you will find that they will be more than willing to help you with yours.