Category: General Article

Reconnecting After Recession

Economists all over are now predicting that the end of recession is near. While the Feds won’t still acknowledge that, it makes sense for your company to be ready to play the game again. But, the recession has caused a paradigm shift in consumer behavior. Consumers will now think twice before parting with their dollar and expect more value for money. What should your marketing strategies be so that you are all set to face the recovering markets? Read on…

1. Reconnect: It’s great that your company managed to stay afloat through the recession. Reconnect with your customers and tell them you are still around. Something as simple as e-mail flyer would do. Since your customers will now look to stretch that dollar to the maximum, offering online discount coupons is also a good idea.

2. Learn more about your customers: This is a good time to understand and get to know your customers better. This way, you are better equipped to meet their needs once the clouds of recession lift. Use this time to study customer patterns. If you are using a marketing automation software, start generating relevant reports and studying them. If your firm does not use a marketing automation tool, this would be a good time to migrate to one.

3. Be selective: One common mistake companies make at this time is getting too desperate. Don’t fall into this trap and bombard all the prospects in your database with marketing e-mails that resemble junk. Instead, target those areas intensely, which are expected to be brimming with opportunities once recession lifts. A good example would be sending personalized HTML e-mails or e-newsletters to your best prospects rather than sending a generic e-mail advertisement to everyone on your database. Do not compromise on customer privacy or permissions. Try too hard and you may be perceived to be as annoying as the telemarketer who calls up during dinner time…

4. Provide value, restore faith: Provide value to your customers. The term value here doesn’t only mean monetary value. Define value from the customer’s perspective. The first step involved in doing this is to understand what the customer values. Recession has caused an erosion of faith in all corporate brands. To regain that trust, you have to enhance customer experience at every chance you get. Remember that by providing more value, you can create more business.

5. Changed conditions: While it’s true that no pessimist can be an entrepreneur, don’t expect things to return to normal too soon. You might have to make changes in the way you currently conduct business. Do majority of your sales happen online through credit card transactions? Post-recession, you may want to offer other payment options to your clients, as many of them may be wary of buying too much on credit. Anticipate your client needs and start working towards satisfying them.

The ideas mentioned above will not require any major increase in your marketing budget, but, on the other hand, can offer …

Market to Succeed in 2010

2009 saw marketers experiment with varied strategies in the hope that something will yield results. These experiments along with the current economic conditions have shaped the marketing strategies for 2010. This article outlines some of the up-coming marketing trends.

1. Value addition: The recession is just lifting and people are still cautious. They don’t want to spend too much too soon. People are willing to put their money only where they get real value addition. What you need to do is position your brand in such a manner that it reflects value.

2. Meet expectations: We spoke about value addition above, the next challenge is to meet consumer expectation-ensuring that what you offer is of value to your customers. People now want more for less. To make your brand truly successful, it is important that you offer them what they perceive to be of value and importance.

3. Enhance consumer experience: Does your company perennially put clients on-hold? Does your site take too much time to load? Now is the time to look into these areas and fix any discrepancies. People are still lethargic when it comes to spending money. You need to be proactive and make every interaction your prospect has with you, a positive experience.

4. Use Social Media effectively: We all remember the buzz created by e-mail when it entered the marketing world. Today, it’s the Social Media that seems to be all-set to take the center-stage. In fact, a report published by the Social Media examiner states that a startling 64% of marketers spend over five hours each week on social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Blogs, You Tube have become solid platforms for networking and improving business relations.

5. Content: Update all your customer touch-points with relevant content. Whether it’s your website, blog or your social networking profile and wall, make sure it reflects the latest on your brand. If you send newsletters to your prospects/clients, ensure they reach them consistently. And last but not the least, try and keep the content customer-centric.

6. Personalize: Don’t want to spend too much at Pizza Hut? How about the pizzeria at the corner of the road? More and more people are turning towards local businesses. This is time to make your presence felt locally. Get to know your customers, personalize your communication with them.

7. Intelligent Marketing automation: So you have a marketing automation software program or intend on using one to take the pressure off you. Sounds good, but make sure that the program you deploy is intelligent. An archaic automation model that helps you send mass e-mails won’t suffice. What you need is an intelligent marketing automation tool that can integrate the various modes of customer contact and thus enhance your marketing efforts.

Marketing in 2010 is not shouting from roof-tops about what you have to offer. It is all about anticipating what your prospects want and giving it to them even before they ask for it.…

Streamline Your Sales by Switching To a Marketing Automation Solution

A manual process is time-consuming and has a high rate of errors whereas an automated system enables one to get rid of redundant data and focus on quality data, leads as in this case.

With a marketing automation solution marketers can manage all the complex and time-consuming tasks of lead management, lead scoring, lead nurturing and CRM integration. Thus marketing automation is the optimization of the complete marketing process right from campaign planning to lead winning.

What does marketing automation software do?

Marketing automation software studies a prospective buyer’s digital body language and can assess their level in the buying process and zero in on their area of interest.

The automation software also assists in scoring leads by carefully categorizing the readings and letting a marketing person know if the buyer is ready to talk with him or whether his Digital Body Language shows his disinterest in the product.

Delivery the right content

The content to be delivered needs to be highly personalized and the buyer has to feel important. Furthermore, this data needs to be cleansed and standardized periodically. Delivery the right message at the right time can be done through marketing automation. With automation, workflow is streamlined and time saved.

Campaigning

Marketing automation software allows aligning the campaigns with the sales teams in an efficient way. The software targets, builds, executes and measures the success of the campaign, the issues therein and converts good leads into qualified ones. The software further helps to customize email messages and campaigns that match the customer needs.

Creating promo offers

The software helps create discounts and promo offers based on the buyer data and interest. This is a smart way to manage your leads.

Post sale – The automation software organizes post-purchase actions like helping you develop better customer relationships and follow-up.

Automating the billing process – The software’s billing automation features manages your billing and collections processes. In addition it automates multiple accounting tasks that otherwise eat up a lot of time

Inventory tracking – Automation software tracks your inventory and sends alerts if the product is out of stock. It also sends delivery details directly to the person eliminating any error.

Thus the best part of marketing automation software is that organizations can use it in different ways to meet their specific needs. They also use marketing automation tools for creating, executing, managing and measuring online marketing programs.

An automation software ensures that marketing and sales can work together to ensure the right follow-up of each potential customer. Automated workflows analyze and deliver automated responses based on the customer’s area of interest. The moment the marketer knows that the customer is showing interest, the software further helps him in narrowing this customer and organizing the next step of lead nurturing. This automatically turns into lead scoring and finally lead winning.

The above shows that a automation software helps marketers to focus on managing demand rather than following – up. It …

Internet Marketing – Will Your Business Benefit From Internet Marketing?

Every day more people turn to the internet to find information to solve their problems and to network with others online. We also hear about numerous offline businesses finding further success by creating an online presence. However in order to work out if your business will benefit from internet marketing you need to find out what is really happening in your business niche online.

How do you find out what is happening in your business niche online?

The first thing you must do is find out how likely your targeted audience is to look for your products and/or services online. It stands to reason that if no one looks for your products online then internet marketing will do little for your bottom line.

Conducting market research will help you determine whether or not you should market your business online. You could survey your existing customers with suitable questions to find out if they use the internet to research information about your products and/or services. Alternatively you could hire a market research company to carry out this research for you. They will conduct research quickly for you, gain a lot of valuable information and give you their opinion of the outcome you can achieve marketing your business online.

They will be able to tell you things like whether your targeted audience only searches for information about your products online or they actually make online purchases. Without this research you may have little idea of whether or not internet marketing will benefit your business. So a little time, effort and money spent on research first may save you wasting more time, effort and money on marketing that will have little effect on your business.

If your research indicates that an online presence is worthwhile for your business then you will need to work out how you are going to advertise your business online.

How do you advertise your business online?

Your research will also give you a good idea of whether people search for information about your products and/or services online or will actually buy from you online. With that information, unless you have a good knowledge of marketing online, it will be extremely worthwhile to seek the help of professionals. They will consult you to determine which online marketing strategies will be the most effective, design advertisements for your campaign, help you implement the campaign and evaluate the results of your online campaign.

The success of your online marketing is only limited by your ability to execute effective marketing strategies to promote your products and/or services. Some strategies you might employ may include optimizing your website for relevant search terms, placing links to your site elsewhere on the internet, writing and publishing articles and newsletters and using affiliates to promote your products.…

Automating Sales Follow-up

How many times have you called on a “small business” owner/prospect only to be told that now is not a good time to even talk, much less buy?  After a few more follow-up calls and no progress made, you are ready to give up. In fact, most salespeople give up before they call five times. Yet 80% of all sales are made at or after the fifth call. 

How do we get to that magic sales closing time without irritating the prospect?  After the second follow-up call we are beginning to feel that we are too intrusive, yet we know that the prospect needs our product and will probably eventually buy it – unless we are too irritating in our follow-up initiatives and are told to stop calling.

Here’s a suggestion.  After the second follow-up call, mention that you don’t want to regularly intrude into the prospect’s busy schedule, but would like to keep in touch by sending an email periodically that provides information that is of interest to business owners.  Close by saying you’ll call again in a few months and see how things are going.

For the next few months, maintain contact automatically with Marketing Automation Software.  You will have already prepared a series of 8-10 emails that can be used for this period of time in almost every situation.  Each email in the series was designed to provide useful information and to be a gentle reminder of what your product can do in that particular situation. 

Add this prospect to the mailing list and let the software keep in touch.  It is likely that the prospect will reach that pivotal point when he/she is ready to buy and your product will be fresh in his/her mind.  If that hasn’t happened at the end of the series, you will automatically be reminded by the software to make that promised follow-up call.

When you call, you will already have your lead-in pitch ready.  You have been providing him/her with a service.  Talk about the emails you have sent and the information they contained.  Inquire regarding any other information needed to make the purchase decision.  Then branch out into your sales-closing routing.   

Visit ES-Review for more information on the best Marketing Automation Software.…

Infusionsoft Versus a Marketing Assistant

Before you read this, remember that we created computerized solutions to save ourselves the work. In many cases we used to hire people to save ourselves the work, today we can choose either a biological solution (an employee) or a digital solution (a piece of software.) With that thought out there for your consideration, consider this…

As of 2009, the median expected salary for a typical Marketing Assistant in the United States is $37,471 or $3,122.58 per month (excluding all the other costs an employer must bear.)

Assuming a typical 37 hour week this equates to 160 hours a month of “working” time, about $18.74 per hour. There are approximately 1600 working hours a year for a typical employee and 8,760 total hours in a year.

We work for about 20% of the year when you compare total time to work time. So it’s fair to say that if you made your marketing assistant work every hour of every day then you’d have to pay them about 5 times as much or about $187,000 a year!

Currently Infusionsoft Pro costs $499/mo or about $5,988 per year. Already this is about 6 times cheaper than the media salary of an marketing assistant but Infusionsoft works 24/7/365.

If you run the numbers you’ll find that Infusionsoft is about 30 times cheaper. Put another way, you’d need at least 5 full time marketing assistants to handle the workload. And frankly I’m unconvinced they’d match the speed and efficiency of a computerized system which operates at millions of cycles per second.

My point (for I know this is a somewhat “silly” comparison) is that if you think of Infusionsoft as a person hired to your team, they’re the best value you’ll ever get for your dollars. They won’t quit. They won’t get sick or demand a pay raise. They will not need vacations and won’t ask for double-time on statutory vacation days. And the quality of their work will remain consistent day after day, year after year.

Nope, for a mere $499 a month you’ll get the digital equivalent of staffing nirvana (or pretty close to it… nothing’s perfect!)

So, for those who wonder about the price consider this, $499 is the PRO level. If you are sending less volume through the system (upto 75,000 emails) you can pay $299 a month – it’s cheaper still. And if you didn’t want ecommerce, a shopping cart, affiliate management or sales force automation then you can use the $199 service (upto 25,000 emails a month.)

It’s really a no brainer when you look at this way.

*Disclaimer* Infusionsoft will not give you super powers. You do need to take this powerful system and implement it. This will require some planning on your part. If you are a fan of process and systemization then you’ll enjoy the experience. If you are not, then you will need some help either directly from Infusionsoft or from one of their Certified Marketing Automation Coaches (like …

Customer Relationship Management Software – Taking Utmost Care of Clients

Today, maintaining a good relationship with your customer is one of the only ways to ensure that your business grows and that you are actually able to add on more customers over time. Unless you take the effort in ensuring that your existing customer base is being taken care of in an appropriate manner, it is hard to build a reputation and add on more clients. Hence, one of the practical solutions in this regard would be to go in for customer relationship management software, which can significantly help in making the entire process more efficient. In a number of ways, companies have gained significantly from going in for this option.

Empowering the marketing department

If you want your customers to be happy, then you should give your employees the necessary tools for doing so. Simply giving them an objective and not providing them the tools for achieving these objectives is going to be a pointless exercise. Hence, implementing marketing automation is definitely a recommended task here. Not only will your employees be able to get things done faster, but you will also be able to ensure that the company is able to grow without problems. Just focusing energy and resources on individual aspects will not help with growth. Even your marketing department will need some attention.

Choosing the right software

Ensure that you meet with your marketing department and discuss a plan for them to follow and ask them for their requirements. Depending on what has been decided, you will need to invest in appropriate customer relationship management software that can help in achieving all of the listed tasks. There is quite a lot of software out there that claim to help in automation but only a handful that you can actually count on. Hence, ensure that you are able to get something that can live up to its claims and actually help your marketing team get more things done.

Automating replies and giving time

Customers always tend to have a lot of queries. Hence, it is important to make sure that the queries are taken care of and that they do get a reply right away, when they have posted a question. Similarly, potential customers too would want information right away so that they can make the decision to go in for something or not. In a number of ways, having the automated replies helps in building confidence and making sure that their queries are not gone unheard. With the right kind of customer relationship management software, this is an assurance.

Hence, with all these things factored in, it is safe to say that getting the right kind of customer relationship management software is quite an important thing to take care of. Don’t neglect the option and simply go in for something that you might not really be able to completely take advantage of. Read reviews and go only to reliable websites that can help you in getting …

Experiential Marketing – What Is It and Is It Right for My Business?

Small business marketing takes many forms. You can reach out to your customers via direct mail; get to know them on social media; and tell them about your latest offers in their email inbox. But these techniques are missing something.

We’ve lost the personality from our businesses. The ‘real’, ‘human’, element that made us so unique has gone. We’re hiding behind our computer screens and it could be damaging business. Your customers want to see the real people behind your company. And this is easier than you may think.

What is Live Event Marketing?

Experiential or event marketing is a great way to reach out to your customers on a personal level. Your customers get the chance to see your products for themselves, and try them out. They get to see the real person behind the company, and have all their queries solved there and then.

There are a whole host of locations where you can market in this way. Large, national exhibitions, localised trade fairs, even street markets; each of these events holds something different for your company.

What could be a better way of promoting your products? Getting to engage with your customers, and letting them see for themselves just why they need to buy from you. If you’ve never exhibited before, it is easier than you may think to guarantee success.

Top Tips for Trade Shows

The first secret to trade show success is a great display and stand. You need to grab your customers’ attention and lure them over to your stand. Once they’re at your stand, your products need to do the talking. Make sure visitors can test them out and get the full impact. Give them space to convince themselves they need to buy.

Secondly, you need to give customers an incentive to stay at your stand. If they’re not buying right away, you want time to convince them too. If they have brought, you don’t want them leaving just yet. Offer freebies, competitions, or refreshments as a way to hold their attention. Try and cross sell where possible, or at least get people to sign up to your mailing lists.

Thirdly, you must be aware of your sales technique. Hard sells can put people off pretty quickly, whereas going in to soft might still loose you the sale. Give customers time to try out your products before asking if they’d like help. You need to be able to assess their body language, and time your sales pitch perfectly.

Is it Right For My Business?

Live event marketing is a great method of offline promotion for any business. Whether you sell a product or a service, you ought to be integrating this method into your campaign. This is the easiest and most effective way to show your customers the face behind your business.…

10 Ways Lead Management Can Help Your Business Grow

The goal of a good Lead Management program is to nurture and build up a trusted relationship with your leads so that when they are ready to buy they actually reach out to you. Done well, it can help generate many more qualified sales opportunities for your sales team and maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Here are 10 ways Lead Management (LM) can help your business get the most revenue from your marketing-generated leads.

1. LM ensures that all new leads are followed-up with in a timely manner and none fall between the cracks or are (essentially) lost.

2. LM allows you to easily capture all web leads directly into your CRM database and to immediately respond.

3. LM educates and informs leads who might be familiar with your product/service but not ready to buy now.

4. LM saves you time by automating the follow-up process with lead nurturing tracks based on of pre-written email templates.

5. LM helps close more deals by providing your sales team with sales-ready opportunities rather than unqualified leads.

6. LM automatically assigns leads to your sales team so you can track their status/progress and re-assign to someone else if needed.

7. LM grades your leads by monitoring their activity (email opens, downloads, etc.) so you know who to call back first.

8. LM allows you to keep your partners up-to-date on your products so they can easily refer your business (when appropriate).

9. LM can be used to re-engage past customers who have not purchased from you lately.

keeps track of the actual sales revenue from each lead so you can optimize your marketing strategies for the best ROI.

These are just a few of the many benefits of a well-thought-out Lead Management program. Every business should consider implementing an automated Lead Management program to ensure you get the most sales revenue from the leads in your database.

For more information check out the CRM and Sales Management tool from LeadMaster.…

Article Marketing Automation – Can it Really Help You?

Article marketing automation is considered to be the best tool to make money, if you wish to provide publicity for your articles in a restricted period of time to a large group. Most individuals, who are involved in affiliate marketing, use article marketing software so that they can expand their outreach.

In most cases, people using this option are pure crazy about it owing to the manner in which it simplifies a large amount of work and completes it in a record time. However, there are also others who have had frustrating experiences with this tool and decided to never use it again.

A key reason for this is because people fail to realize the perfect situation to make use of an article marketing automation tool.

When should you use this option?

If you wish to boost the page ranking of your site, this tool will work like a charm. A key function of this tool is link building and you can be assured of good results in case you make use of this. It is possible to insert up to three links in the body of the article without much difficulty.

When search engines come across this feature, they are much more likely to push your page ahead in the results as it ensures that your page is actually credible and worth coming up in the list.

When else should you use this tool?

If you are aiming to launch a marketing scheme for your articles, ensure that you are including this tools as a part of your article marketing schemes. This option alone can associate your articles with blogs that have contents, which are in tandem.

Consider the case of an article talking about different diets, when you use an automation tool, your article will be linked to the blogs that talk about losing weight.

When should you avoid using any automation tool?

If your aim is to rewrite original articles, then any marketing software is not for you. People that have tried to do so managed to get thoroughly annoyed and gave it bad reviews in the end. The amount of time that an automation system needs is significantly higher than the time needed by a person to redo the article from scratch. Therefore, avoid using this tool, if you want an article to be rewritten.

When else should you avoid using this option?

There are some people out there who would like to be aware of the location of their article and where it is going to be submitted. This tool can do nothing beneficial for them.

It is next to impossible to track such blogs and find out where essays are being submitted. A common grouse with users of this tool is that articles tend to get submitted to blogs that have not been regularly updated from a long time.…