VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Diary of Mad Email Marketing Woman

You know the feeling, that great feeling you get after you send your email marketing campaign out? POOF! Stuff happens instantly. Whether it starts your phone ringing, or it gets people to your site, it's a great feeling. Let me read you a page of a diary from a VR customer, Donna (the name has been changed to protect the innocent.) She sells facial products online.

Two days ago:  Donna sent me a test email campaign. "How does it look?" she asked. I said "Looks great!" It's a huge step for Donna to send her 2nd email campaign out.

9:47 AM Saturday - Donna says "I haven't sent it out yet, maybe Monday morning?"

10:12 AM - We say: "Send it today!"

10:30 AM - Donna launches her campaign, "OK, I did it. It's in pending approval for 11am. Hope it works!"

11:08 AM - Donna: "I did it!!!!"

12:30 PM - Donna: "$400 so far!!!! 1hr and 30 min!!!!! YAY VR!!!!!

I think "YAY Donna". There you have it. Gotta love email.

Quick Holiday Idea From a Local Salon

I ran across this nice idea from a local salon that any services business could really use. On my way out the door, I was given two business cards that had offers  printed on them with a Happy Holidays message. One was for a discount on the next haircut or color, and the other was a free treatment with the next appointment. Those are great offers.

What was really interesting to me was that it was good for January - February of next year. What a great idea for them to get business back in the door in the season that might not be so busy.

These are also pretty cheap to create. It looked like they bought business card stock from Avery, then laid out and printed them right on their business printer.

If you're doing some interesting marketing for your service business let us know what it is!

5 Things To Focus on For this Short Holiday Season

Since Thanksgiving came a week later than last year, it's got both businesses and consumers flustered. Not only is there a week of less sellin' there's a week of less buyin'!  For those of you who aren't retailers this might even be the end of your fiscal year. Couple that with the economy and everyone is freaking out!

So what do you do? Sit down for a moment, relax and let's think about things. How will you treat this short season?

1. Get your email marketing ducks in a row - Because email is so quick, there doesn't have to be a big lead time and a lot of moving parts. However, you need to devote an hour, where you sit down and calendar out your campaigns. Then create them all at once and schedule them out. If you do this now, you can get at least 4 emails out to customers before it's too late.

2. Email your non-responders - If you've sent an email in one week, and you see that 60% of your list have not opened your email nor clicked any links, chances are they probably won't. Create a list of Non-Responders in the Download List section, copy the previous campaign, change the subject line and shoot it out again. It should take you no more than 5 minutes. You'd be surprised at the lift you get on this single campaign.

3. Expiration/Order-by dates - If you're shipping a product, make sure you're very clear about the date someone can order by, to get their gifts to the destination before the holidays. If there is an expiration date on your offer make sure you're clear about that as well.

4. Be honest - The holiday season is normally riddled with flaws. Things don't always ship on time or you might be out of stock on a product. The best thing you can do it to be honest with your customers and do it fast! No one likes to give bad news, but if you tell your customers of an issue, it gives them time to re-adjust if they want. That's superb customer service even if you're telling them something they don't want to hear. I just purchased an in-stock car seat from Target for a couple who are having a baby SOON, Target told me it shipped, however the very next day they told me there were problems and it won't ship for another week. For a big company that's pretty fast.

5. Smile - Sounds cheezy huh? But it isn't! If you have a retail location and it's really busy, great! So you have to work a bit harder, it's better than you being bored sitting around an empty place. Smile and think "How lucky am I?" If you have to deal with an influx of customers calling you around the holidays your customers can tell if you're smiling on the other end of the phone, trust me. It could even turn a bad situation into a good one.

Any other holiday suggestions? Comment!

How Much $ Did Your Email Campaign Make You Today?

When you send out an email marketing campaign, you probably get a spike in sales, so you think it worked right? Right! BUT, wouldn't it be great to track the sale directly from those who clicked on your links in your email campaign?

We use our own feature for Click-to-Conversion tracking here and we love it, it can really be valuable.

If you've got a confirmation page, you can either use the VerticalResponse Click-to-Conversion tracker, OR you can use your free Google Analytics account. Here's how to use the VerticalResponse feature:

Log in > Account > Analytics Settings > Click-to-Conversion

The text for PURCHASE_AMOUNT is provided as a placeholder only in the ROI Calculator code snippet.  This will need to be replaced with the actual purchase amount of the sale, as captured from your website, and must be specially coded by you or your website designer.

Let us know how this tool is working for you!

Is Your Data All Over The Place? Take Control!

With the economy in the dumpster, it's more important than ever to take control of all of your lists. It could be the thing that gets your business through any tough times. Plus, you might miss out on sending email campaigns to certain recipients just because you forgot about them, which means less revenue to you in the long run.

Do you have your lists in more than one of these places?

• VerticalResponse
• ACT, FileMaker, Salesforce or any other contact manager
• QuickBooks or your accounting system
• POS Systems
• Shoeboxes and fishbowls of business cards
• Spreadsheets
• Sign Up Book

If your business requires you to keep separate lists, that's ok, keep them there. It's not optimal, but if it works for your business fine. BUT, once a week, or more often if you choose, make a copy of all of your lists and choose the place that's easiest to access, upload and download your data. If it's ACT or Salesforce, make sure you don't add duplicate records, it could get messy. If it happens to be a spreadsheet, you might consider having customers in one sheet and non customers in another. And if you want to use VerticalResponse, you can do that too. We will de-duplicate on email address so make sure you include those. Any way you choose, make sure you consolidate your lists so you always have one data source to market to.

One more thing, if you've got your lists offline, spend an hour or so a week getting those lists in digital format. Then welcome these new list members with an email. You'll be surprised at how important managing your lists can be to your bottom line.

Email Marketing Idea for Print Publishers

If you live in a print world where you're sending out a publication like a magazine, a printed newsletter or even a newspaper, email marketing can be a great complement to your current print activities. The San Francisco Business Times does a great job at this in my opinion.

This newspaper is delivered on Fridays and each Friday morning they send an email to their subscribers with about 5-6 of the Publisher's Highlights. I'm sure it's a nice way to get their print readers reading the paper and their advertisers happy.

They do a nice job of including an image of what the cover looks like, so that maybe the subscribers will remember it when it crosses their desks. And for paying subscribers they also include a link for the PDF download version of it.

All in all, a nice clean email campaign that drives people to read something offline. Chime in if you're doing something like this for your business.

Day 2 - Governor's Conference on Small Business & Entrepreneurship

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to participate on a panel with David Fischer, VP of Online Sales, Google, moderated by a fantastic young speaker Arel Moodie. Arel is also a great motivational speaker on the college circuit, getting college students excited about the possibility of being an entrepreneur.

The questions we got from the crowd were really prevalent to small  business. We talked about how small businesses can use online tools to help them be a more global business. Questions came about like: "Why should I blog, what will I get out of it?" and "Tell us what we need to do to get noticed by the Google search engine" and more. I'll post the video when it's available.

Lunch was served and I sat with some really great small business owners including, to my surprise, Mark from PetCamp. You may have remembered my blog about his great business and all of the marketing he's doing.

Facebook & WIRED Magazine

revenue will come from in the future. More and more small businesses are looking to other vehicles like Facebook and Twitter to drive more customers. He also spoke about the risk you take from doing something with Facebook is worth it, however I disagree, I don't think it's risky at all, in fact I think it's easy. He did say that because of the transparency that Facebook offers, now small businesses need to be authentic, build a better product, and be real. I couldn't agree more.

Louis Rossetto then spoke. He started WIRED Magazine (and now has the chocolate company Tcho). He showed us his rocket ride to stardom, which was pretty powerful as WIRED has been a real cornerstone of the tech movement for the past 10 years. He touched on the complexity of the new network since he started the publication 5000 days ago. He also talked about how millennials are the largest demographic in the US and it's really their destiny to make the web even more than it is today. He previewed this fantastic Coke video to show the power the millennials have with this new network. It's a great example of millennials in fast action.

Marty Keller, Director, Office of Small Business Advocate, brought the house down with his moving speech about how small businesses should be awakened and get stronger with the power of all of the new collaboration tools to enable us as a group to rise up and take advantage now. Believe it or not, the crowd was teary eyed.

VOTE

Then it was time for the recommendation of issues from the previous day and a vote from all of the attendees.

Using remote voters, we all voted on the issues to put forth to the governor enabling small businesses to have their voice in CA. The lobbying got crazy! 

The day ended with the top 11 issues small businesses are facing today. Here are just the top 3 to give you an idea of the types of issues that are important.

1. Restore investment in programs the support small business.

2. California Air Resources Board needs to assess costs for AB 32 (the Global Warming Solutions Act) while assessing how it effects small business.

3. Small business need to be a larger part of the regulatory process.

The day ended with a wonderful bevy of speeches from small businesses on how this conference could and can change our lives. There was talk about doing this every year and growing it beyond belief because the business power in our nation is in the hands of the small businesses.

I met a ton of great people that I'm sure I'll keep in touch with.

Marty, let's do it again next year, I pledge to bring 20 people!

Governor's Conference on Small Business & Entrepreneurship in California

I'm in LA at the Governor's Conference on Small Businesses & Entrepreneurship. They're launching Global Entrepreneurship Week in conjunction with the Kauffman Foundation. It will be the third week in November. There are over 350 people attending, all amazing businesses and stories, ranging from small businesses to non-profits to policy makers from all over CA. We're convening at the Renaissance Hotel.

It's a pretty amazing cast of people here. From the Governor's office Marty Keller, Director, Office of Small Business Advocate is leading the show and doing a superb job. The conference is meant to put real policies forth to the Governor to get more small business growth in the California economy.

The show got off to an amazing start with Author of Jump Point, Tom Hayes, and Michael Malone, ABC News Journalist. They talked about the role that California's entrepreneurs will play in shaping the future of the new economy.

Lunch came and so did the Governator! Governor Schwarzenegger really inspired the crowd with his story on his life and how he came to America to live the American dream and be an entrepreneur. We also got a few muscle jokes out of him too! Watch the video.

After, there were sessions on different issues that small businesses need to deal with. The interesting thing was that in the breakout session you chose, you actually have a say in policies that will be presented to the Governor. The following were the issues facing California small businesses:

Issue: Clean Air
Issue: Access to Capital
Issue: Entrepreneur Encouragement Group - High Tech
Issue: Healthcare - Cost containment (this was a huge issue in a survey I recently did)
Issue: Innovation & technology - Support business who are seeking state dollars
Issue: Procurement Issues
Issue: Regulatory Reform Group
Issue: Transportation - Rising fuel costs
Issue: Taxation - Conformity state tax code, Consolidation of agencies, energy tax credits
Issue: Education - How can we restructure education so that kids want to work in small businesses.

I chose the Innovation & Technology group where we came up with some pretty good ideas. From this, the entire group of 350 will vote on what is the most important for CA small businesses.

After dinner we got to see 3 young entrepreneurs, from the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour that were really inspiring to listen to.

Notable people I've met:

Kristin Johnson, Regional Director, Northern California SBDC, the SBDC has some really great programs to help businesses grow. I met Terry Hicks, GM, Small Business Group, QuickBooks, and Guy Philips, Head of US Small Business, VISA, (we chatted about the Facebook VISA Small Business Network, check it out) I also met Drew Boyles, Franchise Partner, owning seven 1-800-Got Junk franchises and Brook Taylor from the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, and beloved Oregon Duck fan. Brook had a big hand in putting together the conference. All were great conversations and I look forward to more in the future. 

Next up? I speak on a panel with David Fischer, VP of Online Sales, Google, moderated by Arel Moodie, America's Top Young Speaker about marketing tools that will take your business global.

I'll be back.

Retailers: Great Internet Retailer Survey

Internet Retailer published their Holiday Sales Survey recently. It's a pretty comprehensive survey that might give retailers out there some ideas for the holiday season. It was surprising to me that most of the retailers they surveyed had sales revenue of less than 1 million annually. That really speaks to the smaller retailers weighing in rather than Target or Walmart.

The top three take-aways were that you should start marketing early, you should include gifts with a purchase and include lower priced items in the assortment you offer. Reducing prices across the board was also a big one.

On the marketing front it looks like email marketing is the big winner with regards to the tools retailers will use. A close second is paid search followed by social media in third.

In addition, most retailers will make free shipping conditional, meaning customers will have to purchase $50 or more.

All in all, 81% of the retailers surveyed think that their holiday sales will grow this year, with half of the growth being up 15% or less from the previous year. Sounds promising, let's hope so!

New Features: List Management

A quick note if you're a VerticalResponse customer. Recently we released a range of exciting new list features for customers who have gone through our list consolidation process (it's free btw) . If you're wondering what you need to do, login to your account and follow the simple instructions there.

Upload a list for mass actions

This feature makes it easier for you to target emails, and clean your list.

• Suppress members - Great if you want to temporarily exclude some subscribers from your email marketing campaigns.
• Unsubscribe and Delete - Easily clean your list of data that you are collecting in other places or people you know don't want to get your emails.

Where to find it: Lists > All Lists, and select any list > Tools > Mass Update

More search options

Find email addresses in your account based on their opt-in status. It makes it easy to find subscribers who are single opt-in, mailable, bounced, or unsubscribed. Also easily search on suppression status.

Where to find it: Lists > All Members > List Members > Advanced > Select filter for Opt-in Status or Suppression Status

Get Set Up to Email Unlimited

If you want to join our monthly subscription program (you don't have to), you can send unlimited emails for a low monthly fixed fee. Just check out our pricing page to see where you fit in. Then consolidate your lists if you're an existing customer. (Did we mention it's free?)

It's easy, so what's stopping you?