Last updated 1 day 3 hours ago
Despite the rapid growth of social media as a popular communications channel, emails are still an effective way for businesses to connect with and distribute information to consumers. In the U.S., nearly 92% of online adults use the Internet to read and send emails. And with the growing number of smartphones in the U.S., many consumers have constant access to email. In fact, almost 90 million Americans read emails on a mobile device.
So to get a local expert’s point-of-view, we recently sat down with Ashley Ayan, Online Marketing Manager at ReachLocal, to discuss email best practices and how businesses should use email to connect with customers. She describes key elements and strategies for developing an email marketing campaign, from beginning to end.
Q: What is the first thing a business should consider when developing an email campaign?
A business should always define why they want to create an email campaign. If the answer is simply self-promotion, chances are it won’t be successful in today’s environment. People’s inboxes are often cluttered with emails, and if yours doesn’t offer something they want, then why should they read it? You need to provide your subscribers valuable info. A recent presentation by Marketing Sherpa provided this great example: anybody can sell water, but people today want much more than just plain water. They want bubbles and flavors. They want something different. You have to give them something they can’t get from anyone else. It’s the same with email marketing. Other business might talk about the same subjects as you, but you need to provide content uniquely targeted at your audience. So in addition to the goals you will set for your email marketing campaign, you also want to focus your strategy on building a relationship with your subscribers and providing them with valuable information.
Q: How can a business build an audience?
There are many different ways to build audience. If the business has a physical store, they can ask people to sign up in the store. They can also identify their best and most satisfied customers to receive emails. If they have a high-traffic website, they can advertise their email subscription for newsletters, deals, or offers on the pages that have the most visibility.
If a business does not have a physical store, or wants to reach a larger audience, they may need to partner with stronger organizations and showcase their business when developing a new audience. They can then build an opt-in through an email marketing service provider and begin to build a subscription list. For example, a lawn care provider might ask to promote their business in a homeowner association’s newsletter to tap into that existing audience. Those subscribers see the lawn care service’s announcement or advertisement and click for more information. When the consumer visits the lawn care website they would see a call to action asking them to sign up to receive emails with news, tips, and special offers. This is a great way to start building your list from scratch.
It may be obvious, but when using this strategy for audience building, it is important to partner with companies who share the same values as your company and that are relevant to your business. You’re not just trying to collect a list of names; that’s why you certainly don’t want to go and buy a list. That’s not your goal. Your goal is to identify people who want the kind of information you’re providing or would like to build a relationship with you, because these are more likely to become a customer of your business. It doesn’t matter if you have 1,000 people in your list if they are not engaging with you. If you have 100 subscribers who are heavily involved with your business or your content, those 100 are far more valuable. So don’t worry about the quantity, worry more about the quality of your list.
Q: What type of content works best in emails?
What emails include – video, images, special content – depends completely on the audience. And for local businesses, nobody knows their audience better than the business owner. But because every audience’s wants and interests are different, you should always test to see what works best for your subscribers and what the audience responds to. And your audience changes over time, so don’t test once and think you’ve got the answers. Keep testing to see if preferences change, and adjust the content in the emails to match. Your email reflects the personality of your brand – do you want to be the brand that listens and provides a good conversation or just the one who talks without paying attention to anything your audience says?
Another very important thing to consider and monitor is how many of your consumers are accessing your email through a smartphone. Some forms of email content, like large images, may take longer to load on a mobile device. So, for those who are checking email on the go, they might not have the patience to wait for that. This doesn’t mean you can’t have images – images are a great way to attract customers and add interest to emails. Just make sure you optimize your emails so that they are mobile friendly. And, if you are doing mobile-friendly emails, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly also. For example, I once worked on a project that utilized QR codes in emails. QR codes are very accessible from smartphones. But if a QR code directs smartphone readers to a website that is not mobile-friendly, your efforts may be wasted.
Q: How can a business determine if their email marketing is successful?
Regardless of how great the content of your emails is, you’re going to lose some of your audience over time. This is just a natural cycle in email marketing. That’s why tracking and measuring email performance is important. Different email marketing platforms offer different types of email analytics, so make sure to consider the capability to track your emails when you choose a service provider. Ultimately, an email is successful if it achieves your goal, which is why identifying that goal up front is critical. Generating revenue, attracting more people to your subscription list, driving more people into your store, increasing positive reviews online – whatever your goal is, you should define up front what value you want to give your customers and what you want them to do in return, and then find ways to measure this.
When you do look at tactical metrics such as click-through rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe numbers, remember that your audience, your market, and your business are all unique. So there’s no standard you should compare yourself to other than yourself. As a business owner, you always want to improve upon your own metrics. So, make sure to regularly benchmark your results, and every time you make a change to a component of your email strategy, check your analytics to see if it hurt or improved performance.
Q: What kind of follow-up should a business do after they start sending emails?
First, it’s important to understand your responsibility to comply with CAN-SPAM law. For example, if someone unsubscribes from your list after receiving your email marketing, you can’t continue sending email marketing to them. To make this process manageable, select an email marketing platform that will help you manage subscriptions to remain compliant with the law.
It’s also important to regularly ask your current subscribers what content they are interested in so you can keep your messages highly relevant to them. For example, try a survey so you can get feedback directly from your audience.
Q: Any last tips or suggestions?
For a successful email marketing program, it’s important to find the right email marketing service provider and make sure you have the time and resources to manage it. Make time up front to understand your audience, and regularly adjust your messaging based on what they want from you. Emails are no longer a source of one-way communication, so focus your strategy on building relationships rather than using the “spray and pray” mentality of blasting out a message and hoping people respond positively. Today, people want targeted, tailored messaging, so build a program that allows you to provide that.
Ashley Ayan is the Online Marketing Manager at ReachLocal. She has a background in IT, programming, SEO, website development, and online marketing.
About the Author
Tara Banda writes about how small business owners can reach local customers through online marketing for the ReachLocal blog. You can connect with her on Twitter.
Last updated 2 days 10 hours ago
At ReachLocal, we’ve always believed that display advertising and search advertising are closely related. And, using display ads in tandem with your search engine advertising campaign can actually boost your online marketing results.
New research from Pretarget and Yahoo illustrates the relationship between search advertising and display advertising. Though the two techniques are often seen as two distinct online marketing channels with different outcomes, this study indicates that display advertising can increase both search traffic and conversions when running alongside a search campaign. Here are a few takeaways from the infographic:
- On average, search activity rose 155% when the viewer did a search after seeing a display ad
- 31% of users click display ads, while 27% conduct a search after seeing a display ad
- There is a 59% lift in conversions when users conducted a search related to a display advertisement they had seen
Take a look at Pretarget’s infographic “Display Drives Search” to learn more.
These findings demonstrate that display advertising has a positive impact on search advertising. And for local marketers who use these two forms of advertising together, they can work hand in hand to drive more conversions for your business.
What type of results have you seen from a combined search advertising and display advertising marketing strategy? Do you plan on starting display advertising along search advertising in the future?
Tamara Weintraub helps equip small business owners with information about local online advertising, social media, and content marketing as a writer for the ReachLocal blog.
Last updated 6 days ago
As many local businesses know, online advertising tactics like search engine advertising, display advertising, and social media marketing are effective ways to drive local prospects to your website – but how do you keep them there? And an even more challenging task, how do you get those visitors to convert into customers?
One small business website best practice is to include multiple ways for visitors to contact you on your website to increase leads. In addition to offering only a contact form or phone number, you can also add live chat technology to drive more— and better quality—leads from potential customers visiting your site.
What Are the Benefits of Adding Live Chat to Your Website?
By offering an alternative to traditional website conversion methods like a phone call, email, or web form, live chat can turn many prospects who may not have contacted you otherwise into actionable leads for your business.
- Immediate Leads – The visitor can connect with a representative of your business in real time without having to worry about being sent to voicemail or waiting for a response from an email or contact form. Additionally, live chat enables prospects to connect with the business outside normal hours of operation. By engaging prospects immediately and proactively, you’re more likely to convert them before they leave your site.
- Improved Customer Experience – You can use web chat to provide a basic level of customer service and answer questions about your business, such as hours, location, and products or services offered, helping drive the visitor closer to a sale. This can provide a personalized customer experience and leave the visitor with positive impression of your business, so they are more likely to leave their contact information. Then, you can follow up with the visitor via email or phone to provide additional details and close the sale.
- Affordable Solution – Most website live chat solutions provide a pay-per-lead model, meaning you only pay for qualified leads obtained via the chat. That means you don’t pay for visitors who leave the chat without providing relevant contact information.
Live Chat Case Studies
Many of our TotalLiveChat clients have seen a significant increase in quality leads from their online advertising campaigns by adding live chat to their website. For example, two of our TotalLiveChat clients have improved their results by using live chat on their websites. In addition, after implementing live chat and seeing the results, both clients increased their initial budgets to convert even more site visitors. Here’s a quick look at these case studies:
Cutler & Associates
- Cycle Spend: $600
- Leads: 75
“The TotalLiveChat program that Reach[Local] offers is wonderful. What is allows our potential clients to do is speak to somebody when they hit our website. A box pops down, clients click on it, and are immediately engaged with another human being.” Stewart Swanson, Partner, Cutler & Associates
Fast Lane Classic Cars
- Cycle Spend: $2000
- Leads: 250
“The amount of money that we spend with chat, in relationship to the increased revenue that we get from chat is absolutely a wise investment for any business.” – Joe Clark, General Manager, Fast Lane Classic Cars
About TotalLiveChat
TotalLiveChat is our live chat service that uses live specialists to capture leads from interested prospects when they visit your website. Now, this service includes Call Connect, a feature that allows a visitor to connect with the business in real time, increasing call conversions from the site. See more client reviews at reachlocal.com/reviews.
Tamara Weintraub helps equip small business owners with information about local online advertising, social media, and content marketing as a writer for the ReachLocal blog.
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Last updated 13 days ago
Springtime. It’s often associated with warmer temperatures, blossoming flowers, and the widely known, yet often unpopular task – spring cleaning. But homes and gardens aren’t the only places you should consider tidying. As a business owner, setting aside some time to clean and organize your digital life can not only help clear up some computer space, but it can also set you up to run your business, and your personal life, much more efficiently. Try out some of the following tips to get digitally organized this spring.
Clean out your email inbox.
Is your email inbox filled with unread emails? Set aside an hour – or several – to go through as many emails as possible. For those who have hundreds, or even thousands, of unread messages, this may only be a starting point, but developing a habit of cleaning your email inbox on a regular basis can help you get on the right track for managing your emails in the future. If you struggle to get your inbox to zero, address the most recent or important emails in your inbox and then move everything else into an archive or separate folder. This way, you can still access old messages, while creating an empty inbox to make the process more manageable going forward.
If you often receive unsolicited mass emails, marking them as Spam will not only keep them out of your inbox, it also helps email clients like Gmail detect patterns within emails that you and other users mark as Spam to automatically redirect them to a separate folder. Another handy tip to manage your email is to set up folders, rules, or filters that will automatically manage certain types of emails to keep them from filling your inbox.
Organize your computer desktop by moving to the cloud.
Can you see your desktop background or is it covered with countless icons? Cleaning your desktop by creating a filing system for all of your documents is a great way to clear the clutter and helps you find documents at a glance when you need them. And if you aren’t familiar with cloud computing, you should definitely consider using it for your business. Cloud storage services like Dropbox and the new Google Drive provide you with space online to store your documents, pictures, and other important files and easily share them for collaboration. Once you create an account, you can upload files directly from your desktop to your online storage space and access them anywhere you have an Internet connection, even on your mobile device.
Upload your images to a Web album.
Do you have folders on your computer full of business, product, or service photos that you haven’t used? Instead of keeping these photos to yourself, take some time to set up an account on a photo sharing site like Flickr or Picasa. You can also upload images to your business’ Facebook Timeline page, which now makes displaying and sharing images with your fans. Not only can sharing your photos increase engagement with your fans and followers, Google has recently updated its image ranking process to make more relevant images appear higher on image search results pages, even if they are on a lower-performing landing page. This is especially important if images can display your products or services, like photography, construction, landscaping, or even restaurants. So, make sure to include detailed descriptions and appropriate tags with the images you share.
Move your contacts online.
Have you ever noted a business contact’s information on a piece of paper and misplaced it moments later? As a small business owner, you may connect with prospects, new customers, and other professionals interested in your products or services. So, make sure you get the most out of your networking by saving their information digitally. One simple way is to save them as a contact in your email address book or on your smartphone. And if you are one of the growing number of small business owners who have adopted mobile technology to run their businesses, there are many mobile apps that can help you organize your contacts.
Assess your reputation management strategy and respond to outstanding reviews and comments.
Another area you may not have considered cleaning up is your online reputation. When is the last time you checked the status of your business on top review sites? Have your customers left comments or reviews about your business online, but you just haven’t had the time to respond to them or manage your social Web presence? Responding to comments on your social media pages and review sites affects how your business will appear when customers search for your business online. And as more customers value online reviews as much as personal recommendations, developing and sticking to your online reputation management strategy is key to making sure customers see positive results when they search.
Finding the best way to digitally organize your small business may take some time and effort. But much like cleaning out a garage, it gives you a fresh start, allows you to find what you’re looking for, and gives you the opportunity to develop new habits.
What are some other ways you have found that help you organize the digital life of your small business? Let us know in the comments!
About the Author
Tara Banda writes about how small business owners can reach local customers through online marketing for the
ReachLocal blog. You can connect with her on
Twitter.
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Last updated 13 days ago
If you’re running a search engine advertising (pay per click) campaign, chances are you’ve heard the phrase “quality score”. But like many small business owners, you may be wondering what quality score is, and what exactly it means to your search engine advertising campaign. Quality score is an important factor that affects your search advertising, so here are a few things you need to know about it.
What is Quality Score?
Quality score is a rank of how relevant and useful a search engine thinks your business is to someone searching for your products and services online, which impacts both the cost and rank of your pay per click ads. Search engines evaluate your text ad(s), keywords, and landing page, and the higher your score, the more relevant your business appears to be to a related search.
How Does Quality Score Affect My Search Advertising Campaign?
Your quality score affects a number of factors related to your search engine advertising campaign, including the actual cost-per-click of your keywords, the minimum bid estimates of your keywords, and the position of your text ad on the search engine results page. Higher quality scores tend to result in lower cost-per-click as well as lower bid estimates for your text ad to appear on the first page or in the top position on the page. A high quality score means it’s cheaper and easier for your ad to appear in a prominent position when someone searches for your keywords.
How is Quality Score Calculated?
Search engines evaluate a variety of factors when determining your quality score, including your keywords’ clickthrough rate (CTR) history, the quality of your landing page, the relevance of your text ad, and the relevance of the keywords you are bidding on. Google has recently addressed some of these factors that go into determining quality score:
Keywords
Keywords play a major role in determining quality score. Google Performance Specialist Tanmay Arora addressed how keyword relevance is determined, including:
- Keyword Relevance: Keyword relevance is not just determined by a keyword's presence or frequency on the landing page, but also how appropriate Google thinks consumers will find the keyword in relation to the content on the landing page.
- Historical Performance: When you bid on a keyword, Google assigns it a base quality score based on its historical performance on Google’s search engine, looking at factors such as the keyword's clickthrough rate for other search campaigns. Quality score is re-evaluated over time as it gathers data from your campaign.
- Clickthrough Rate: Google takes into account the exact match clickthrough rate, or the number of times the keyword triggers a search ad when the keyword exactly matched a search term and was clicked on by the consumer who searched for the term.
Text Ads
Text ad relevance is also a key factor in determining quality score. In addition to bidding on keywords, you should also include a primary keyword in your text ad. Search engines like Google factor the overall effectiveness of your ad, including how often it is served in relation to a search query as well as how many clicks it receives when displayed on the search engine results page, into your quality score.
Landing Pages
In addition, Google recently announced that landing page quality would have more weight in determining the quality score of a text ad. It’s extremely important for your landing page to display content that a user would expect to see after clicking on your ad, like content related to the topic of your ad such as product or service information.
According to Google’s director of product development Jonathan Alferness, Google’s intent with this factor is to improve the user’s experience when clicking the text ad and visiting the business’ website. According to Alferness, this change means “pages that seem to be about the topic of the user’s search will do better here [on Google’s sponsored results] than general landing pages.”
How Can I Improve My Quality Score?
Because there’s no public formula to tell us exactly how search engines calculate quality score – only an estimate – there is also no single way to improve your quality score. However, there are some best practices you can follow.
Search engines are looking to see how well your keywords, text ads, and landing page work together in getting a consumer to the right place. Because broad keywords are typically more competitive, it’s in your best interest to bid on some geo-targeted and long-tail keywords related to your business. Using local and product- or service-specific keywords in your text ad can help your ad appear in the sponsored results when someone searches for those terms.
For instance, if a consumer searches for “organic fertilizer Houston”, a text ad has a higher chance of showing up if the business is bidding on an exact or closely related keyword, rather than a general keyword like “gardening.” In this example, this likelihood is further improved if the text ad also contains content related to the topic of organic fertilizer in Houston.
It would also boost the campaign's quality score if the landing page linked to from that text ad is related to gardening supplies in Houston. If you include any offers on your ad, like “get a free lawn evaluation”, content related to that offer should also appear on your landing page to increase your text ad effectiveness.
Have you taken steps to increase your search engine quality score? What keyword, text and, or landing page tips have you implemented that have improved the performance your search engine advertising campaign?
Tamara Weintraub helps equip small business owners with information about local online advertising, social media, and content marketing as a writer for the ReachLocal blog.
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