VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Get Holiday Ready - 6 Quick Things You Can Do Now

The holidays are going to be here before we know it so what better time to start planning for them than the present. It may seem early, but we're hearing a lot of our customers starting to get ready now. So here are six things you should be doing in October to get the holidays started for your business.

Plan Now - Plan your email campaign dates NOW using a calendar. Take an hour over the weekend or weeknight and plan out what you'll want to start offering and put that stake in the ground now! You can always change it later based on what you learn but it's a great starting point to keep you on the right track.

Spend a Little - Beef up your Google Adwords spend, yes even in this economy. You'll still need to capitalize on any new customers you can get so what better way than one that you can cap daily spending limits on. If you need help with swimming your way through Google's waters, tap into our partner MerchEngines who will guarantee traffic flowing for you through the crazy holiday season.

Create Now - Check out our Holiday Pre-designed layouts for your email campaigns in our Email Canvas tool. They're ready for you to input your own copy and images and away you go. It's a real time saver. While you're at it, create a bunch of campaigns by using our "Copy" campaign functionality in the Actions menu. If you don't use our layouts talk to your web designer or get yourself going now. Time can be of the essence and no one wants to wait until the last minute.

Confirm Confirmations - Take a glance at any confirmation emails you send to people who have purchased from you and make sure they're up to date. Make sure links still work and information is correct.

Staff Up - Will you be ready for the flux inbound emails and calls that you'll generate from your site or your email campaigns? If you ship a product do you have the bodies you'll need to pack and ship?  Here's an idea; there are a lot of college kids home on break that need some cash so you might want to start asking around now or advertising it in your email marketing campaigns and on your website.

Get Shipping Ready - You'll obviously need to know when the last date you can take orders for guaranteed holiday shipping will be so make sure you include this all over your website and emails.

If you do this now, you'll be in great shape for the holiday season so start planning now!

New Free Business Forms in the VR Lounge

Have you visited the VR Lounge yet to interact with over 1400 people interested in email marketing? If that hasn't been enough to get you there maybe this will; over 60 business forms for you to download absolutely free!

I would have loved to have these when I started the business. We've even put some of the ones we use today in there too. Here's a small sample of what you'll find:

• Accounting - Pro forma balance sheet, profit & loss statement, cash flow statements & more.
• Admin - Credit check, fax cover, wire transfer, purchase order, invoice template, expense report template & more.
• Finance - Lease or buy comparison, calculating present value & more.
• HR - Job description, application for employment, offer letter, employee termination report & more.
• Legal - Consulting agreement, confidentiality agreement & more.
• Marketing - Marketing plan, creative brief, press release template, marketing budget & more.
• Strategy - Strategic plan outline, SWOT analysis, executive summary & more.

So have fun with them but remember, the forms are to be used only as a starting point. VerticalResponse makes no claim that these forms are legally binding in your state, country or part of the world so first consult your attorney!

Thank You Emails

A thank you email to your customers after they buy your product or service is always a great idea. When was the last time you checked into what you have for a thank you email? Is it outdated? Thank you emails can be as simple as the one below. This is a great email after a hotel stay.

What I really liked about it was its timeliness. I received it the day that I checked out, so the experience was still top of mind. You can also incorporate this into your confirmation emails after someone bought to find out how the experience was online or in person. You can even use a link to a survey (check out VerticalResponse Surveys) and asked a few more questions within this email.

   

Anyone have any other great experiences with email follow ups?

A Great Use of Alt Tags In An Email

I was on a plane going through my email the other day and the use of alt tags in emails caught my eye. Why? Because of course images don’t display in my reader when I’m not connected to the Internet, so I got to see a ton of email with images not displayed. Great info for B2B marketers!

If you don’t know what an alt tag is, I talk about them here in a previous post I wrote. They are especially important if your email is made up of one image, or a lot of images. Generally we all never really think about alt tags and usually just input the name of the image when asked to. Admittedly that’s what we do at VR. However I saw some really creative uses of alt tags in emails.

When you choose to add an image to an email using most email service providers, you should be asked to input alternative text or "Alt Tags" like you see below. You might want to get creative and really input an offer on the alt tag instead of just a name of an image.

Even though this Lenovo Thinkpad mailing was pure spam, I think they use alt tags in a great way to those who don’t receive images. The email almost looks like a plain text email.

CB2 also gets creative with alt tags in only parts of their email.

Do you have any great uses of alt tags? We'd love to hear them!

Use Your Friends & Neighbors to Build Your List

Want a great way to build your email marketing list? Use your friends and neighbors to advertise your newsletter and they’ll use you to advertise theirs! What am I talking about?

Here are a few examples:

1. You’re in retail and in a neighborhood where there are other retailers, service businesses or restaurants where people visit.
2. The product that you sell has complementary products offered by other businesses.

Everyone wants a bigger list right?

First - ask the other businesses if they’d like to grow their email list.

Lists - Find out how many each company that wants to be included has on their email lists. You’ll want them to be close to the same because if one is 10x bigger than the others everyone else will benefit from the big guy but they might not benefit in the same way.

If everyone is using their own VerticalResponse account, great! But if you’re going to be doing the email marketing on behalf of these other businesses you should create separate accounts for each business so each business has their own unsubscribe list.

From Label - Make sure the email comes FROM the list owner. If you are doing the mailing to your list it should come FROM your business, if your neighbor is doing the mailing to her list it should come FROM her business.

Creating Your Message - Include a paragraph as to why you’re doing this. For example:

“The merchants of South Beach all got together and decided that you need to know about everything that’s going on here. So opt-in to all of these lists and be the first to know!”

And if each business can give the new people who signed up an incentive, even more fuel to form new lists.

Links - Get links to yours and all participating business’s email opt-in form pages and include these links in the email with a note as to what the new registrant can expect. If it’s specials and discounts make sure you include that along with a logo or image for your neighbor’s site. If you can send your clickers directly to an opt-in form page it’s better than sending them to a home page, they may get lost and forget why they’re there.

Make sure that all of the other business have the correct links then send your email campaigns out and watch all of your lists grow!

 

Time Saver! Create Your Emails in Bulk

Time is always the number one reason for small businesses not to get an email marketing campaign out the door. One of our customers says that when she has time to send a campaign for her products in a given month her sales go from $16,000-$24,000!!

Here's a quick time saver that I've done when creating our email campaigns.

1. Set aside an hour of time (this is the hardest part).
   
2. Create your first campaign.
3. Copy that campaign however many times you'll want to send your campaign in that given month.
4. Make your changes to the copied campaign, swap out pictures and replace copy.
5. Schedule your campaigns out all at once.

BAM! You only needed to do it once and they'll all be automatically launched without you having to do them one by one. Remember once you've sent your campaigns, you can still copy them over to resend again in the next month. So there you have it, bulk email creation. It's simple!

Bulk email creation should work with most email service providers.

Back to the Basics of Email Marketing

I was thinking the other day that often times even the best direct marketers forget the basics of doing really great marketing and all it takes is a little reminder. So today I'm going to take it upon myself to remind us all (I need it too!) of a few basics. With the holiday season fast approaching all of us email marketers have to be on our A game.

So here it is, three things to consider when creating your email marketing campaigns. It's simple. Offer-List-Creative.

Offer

Your "offer" is very important to your response so the bottom line here is that you need to make it crystal clear what you want your recipient to do. Do you have a compelling call-to-action for your audience? How do you know, have you developed a baseline offer to test against? You don't always have to be selling in your emails but more often than not you want your recipient to DO something. Whether it's attending a webinar, buying a product, or reading an article, you need to make it so that your recipient wants to do more. If you are offering a savings, you'll want to highlight that, especially in this economy! And make sure that if there is an expiration date you highlight it.

Don't forget the subject line! Many people I talk to wait until they've created their work-of-art email and then decide what the subject line should be. Why wait? If you put your hottest piece of info "above the fold" in your email, lead with that as the subject line.

A few things to remember:

1. You have about 40-50 characters to make a first impression so make it good.
2. You need to really think about what part of your email is going to be the most compelling. Then include that in the subject line.
3. You need to be careful not to get caught up in spam filters.

List

I posted about what data to capture on your opt-in form. But after you capture that info are you using your customer list to the fullest extent? Can you target your list better? If you know people who buy product A also buy product C, then segment your list and offer them product C. You won't believe how much of an increase you'll have on your open & click rate. BUT: See above, Subject Line.

Creative

Try to avoid using one image as the sole content of your email campaign, images in your recipient's email reader could be turned off by default so your content won't be seen. If you do use one image (or a series of images) take a hint from a savvy VerticalResponse customer: he includes the text from the email (i.e. what's on sale) right underneath the image so that when the image isn't shown at least the text is.

You'll also want to have a hosted web version of the email in case it cannot be seen in your reader's inbox and don't forget to include that forward to a friend link, it's a great way to have your recipients build your list for you.

Link often! Make sure all of your images are linked and include multiple links in your copy, even if they go to the same place.

We all need a little Back to Basics training, now let's put it to work!

Coach Will Miss Me?

I am on Coach's email list and I got an interesting one today. The subject line read "Coach Will Miss You". Apparently I've not purchased anything from their emails in a while but I know I open and click on their email marketing campaigns, and have even gone to a store because of something I saw in an email. So they must have just done a search on email addresses that haven't purchased.

Interesting that in order to continue to get emails I need to click a link. I'm an active email recipient, all they need to do is look at their click and open report. I think they will likely lose some store traffic by doing this.

What do you think?