Archive for Marketing Tips
Jason Cardiff Marketing Tips for SEO
Read the latest Jason Cardiff Tips article that highlights the 3 key components of direct marketing according to Jason Cardiff. These are marketing tips and web copywriting strategies that your competitors ranked on the search engines do not want you to know about.
Make a Statement with Headlines
The header statement is arguably the most important piece of text in your direct mail letter or advert. It will grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to read the rest of your copy. Web visitors like details, but they love benefits. Give them a reason to do business with you or buy your product or service.
Call to Action
What do you want your website visitors and readers to do? Read the Original Jason Cardiff Article > 3 Direct Marketing Tips for SEO
Website Optimization and Testing
Online testing is all the rage right now. At a recent conference I asked the audience how many people worked for companies that do online testing (A/B, multivariate, or behavioral targeting); roughly 5 to 10 percent of the people raised their hands. That is about twice as many people who would have said yes 12 months ago. Then I asked how many people work for companies that plan to start a testing program over the next 12 months and nearly everyone raised their hand. On-site testing makes sense. It focuses on making incremental site performance improvements in a very measureable way. It is a great way to increase revenue or profit and a great way to justify budgets managed by Web teams. While more people are getting comfortable with testing, it is often treated as a whole new approach to marketing. But testing is not new. Direct marketers have been performing tests offline for years.
Think about the idea of someone doing direct mail and testing 15 different versions of an envelope to increase the chance that you open that piece of mail in your mailbox. Direct marketers try all sorts of different paper and offers on the outside. They test making the envelope look formal, making it look like it is hand addressed, or adding an actual stamp so it doesn’t look like it’s been stamped by a meter. And that is just the envelope. Direct marketers test all sorts of versions of the content as well copy length, price points, and offers. We have all also seen it in catalogs we get as well. Is it better to offer a 10 percent discount, a free add-on, or free shipping? Which offer will return the greatest revenue and ultimately profit? Marketers have been testing these things for years to maximize their conversion rates.
Let’s take a look at the definition of direct marketing. I found several, but the definition on Wikipedia said it best:
Direct marketing is a sub-discipline and type of marketing. There are two main definitional characteristics which distinguish it from other types of marketing. The first is that it attempts to send its messages directly to consumers, without the use of intervening media. This involves commercial communication (direct mail, e-mail, telemarketing) with consumers or businesses, usually unsolicited. The second characteristic is that it is focused on driving a specific “call-to-action.” This aspect of direct marketing involves an emphasis on trackable, measurable positive (but not negative) responses from consumers (known simply as “response” in the industry) regardless of medium.
Let’s break down this definition a bit, looking at the two key elements:
Delivering Messages Directly to the Consumer
Online, more companies are tuning their messages or Web sites based on a visitor’s profile, previous activities, or anything else known about that person. While many sites are still “one size fits all,” more companies are getting smarter about the way they communicate with Web visitors. Think of some customized experiences you see at Amazon or timely calls to actions you see on other sites when you have been there before.
Driving a Specific Call to Action
This is a big one. What is it we want people to do on the site? Realistically there are a number of things that could define success for any given Web site. When you start to segment your audience, the number of things we want visitors to do on the site can get narrowed down. Your site can be more successful if you narrow down those choices based on your visitors and really look to drive interest in those activities. Think of a banking site when a visitor lands on the home page. If it knows that a visitor has previously logged onto its Web site during a previous visit, it should not dedicate 50 percent of the homepage to getting the visitor to sign up for online banking. It isn’t applicable and she won’t respond. Rather, the visitor may already have an account and the banking site may want to inform her of an add-on service or helpful piece of information about it. Just as the online banking promo might not be applicable to someone who is not a customer, the add-on service promo might not be applicable either. Because the message isn’t targeted, it won’t be successful. More important, the banking site is missing an opportunity to give each audience segment something that makes sense to it. Go back to the definition of direct marketing: the banking site is not giving the audience an applicable call to action to respond to, and thereby, not advancing the visitor as a customer.
But again just like the envelope examples above, the beauty of direct marketing is the idea of testing what works and what doesn’t in order to maximize ROI (define) and profit. Read the original Click Z article online.
Voice Broadcasting for Increasing Leads and Sales
In a recent article, Christine Harrell writes about the benefits that voice broadcasting can have for boosting sales and leads.
Using Voice Broadcasting to Boost Sales Leads
Every type of business is best suited for different type of lead generation. For many businesses such as real estate agents, college loan refinancing lenders, landscaping companies, and more, cold calling is undeniably effective. No matter how many business owners and self employed people cringe at the thought of making cold calls, they work incredibly well in generating leads.
Sidestepping the hassle of cold calling
A little known and highly effective solution to the many hurdles of cold calling is voice broadcasting. Voice broadcasting allows you to prerecord a message that will be delivered to your targeted call list through a completely automated process. Sending your marketing message through voice broadcasting eliminates the discomfort of a cold call while still achieving the same highly effective results.
Lead generation is a numbers game
Even for those who enjoy reaching out to new customers, cold calling is incredibly time consuming. Generating leads is a numbers game: the more you reach out, the more leads you will make. Using voice broadcasting, you can set aggressive business goals without hiring an army of people to generate qualified leads.
Set new leads goals based on your call success ratio
If your goal is to generate 50 new sales leads per week and you know that you have a call success rate of 1 in 30, you can consistently reach your goals. Simply multiply the 50 leads you desire by the 30 calls it takes to gain one lead (50×30=1500 calls) and let your automated voice broadcasting message do the work.
Creating an effective voice broadcasting campaign
Your success ratio depends on the quality of your voice broadcast. When creating your voice broadcasting message, keep these tips and ideas in mind:
· Sound natural: The key to a voice broadcast is to engage the caller immediately and this is best done by using a natural phone voice. When a recipient thinks they’ve received a faceless automated machine, they have a tendency to tune out. When people sense sincerity in the voice and message, they tend to listen.
· Introduce yourself: Give your name at in the first line of the call to further personalize the experience.
· Speak in terms of customer benefits: When creating your message, speak in terms of how the recipient will directly benefit from your product or service. For example, instead of saying “our current home loans rates are 5.2%,” try “the average Californian saves over $7,000 per year by switching to our low interest home loan.”
· Get right to the point: State the benefit to customer very early on in the call. The sooner they understand how they will benefit, the more open they will be to your message.
· Entice the customer to find out more: Don’t reveal everything in your voice broadcast message. Instead, entice prospects with the most interesting and beneficial points and encourage them to take an action to find out more. Encouraging a prospect to make the next move is a critical step in turning a prospect into a client.
· Include a call to action: Decide on the precise action you want the caller to take after hearing your message and ask them to take the action throughout and/or at the end of the call. The action may be to call your direct line within the next 24 hours or fill out a form on your website.
For those who have never tried cold calling because of fear, doubt, or time constraints, voice broadcasting is the solution for eliminating all of cold callings most unattractive points while still reaping the full lead generating potential. The cost of a voice broadcast is miniscule compared with the cost of live personnel, but can achieve the results of an unlimited sized call center. By using these few tips and ideas, you can easily build a marketing campaign to drastically boost your sales leads.
Author is a writer for Unix USA which specializes in fax broadcasting and generating sales leads. For additional information about these services you can visit http://www.unixusa.net. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christine_Harrell
Outside of the Advertisement Thought
Why should it be accepted that the only way to generate revenue for your site is to bombard your audience with ads that your audience eventually ignores? Far too often, publishers have come to the conclusion that making money has to come at the cost of compromising user experience. The crafty publisher has realized this and embraced new forms of monetizing their traffic that their audience actually welcomes.
Free offers such as free magazines subscriptions, white papers, free downloads for trials for software, podcasts and webinars have proven to be an extremely lucrative way for publishers to not only generate an incremental revenue stream, but also reward their visitors for their continued support. Tapping into human nature and the impulse of requesting something that is free has turned the traditional revenue generation model on its head for many publishers.
Gone are the days where you constantly have to rely on selling your audience something or sending them to a site that’s only going to ask for their credit card shortly after visiting. Think about it…giving your audience a free subscription to Oracle Magazine or sending them over to Amazon to buy a book on Oracle. What do you think would perform better?
The conversion rates on free products are statistically off the charts in comparison to traditional commerce/transactional based affiliate programs. While many publishers realize this to be the case, they struggle to find ways to monetize free content efficiently. Read the full article> Article was written by David Fortino for NetLine. Get more financing and investing tips at tips online.
