San Diego Marketing Round Table

Some of you may be familiar with the social networking site Meetup and, if you’re not, you really should be. Meetup is a great way to get to know people, to learn more about topics of interest and, more importantly, market your business.

Score Consulting sponsors a couple different Meetup groups, one of which is the San Diego Marketing Round Table. In this particular Meetup, among other things, we host a monthly Round Table discussion (hence the name) on different areas of marketing applicable to small businesses and entrepreneurs.

At this month’s Round Table, we discussed using email to market your business. Email tends to be a pretty large draw to people because it’s so inexpensive and offers such a high return ratio, so we had a good group of people show up and ask questions about how to use email in their businesses. One of the attendees, Jessica Barna of Kitchens Resolved, wrote and typed up notes that I thought would be good to share. Enjoy!

The Six Touch Rule: Using Email to Increase Your Conversion Ratio

Email Marketing – general rule: takes 6 times of contacting/”touching” someone for them to say Yes, or NO to your offer

Companies that help you stay in touch:

• Constant Contact (highest deliverability rates, most restricting rules for emails),
• Rate Point,
• Visistat,

BLOG (next month’s topic!): a way to build a following online. Could send an email with an interesting excerpt from recent blog. It is a good way to show expertise. Try to keep information relevant to your audience.

Business Dilemma: How much information is best to share on our websites? Ideally, give people enough information to get them interested, so they contact you, and you can sell them on products personally. However, too much information in a website might lead people to find a reason to say “no.” People have short attention spans and might not want to read pages and pages about your services.

Video Email Marketing:  $20 per month for 1000 email customers or less

For online marketing to be most effective, we must have a way of tracking results from each method of contact. Can do A and B segmenting to see which version of an email receives the most views, responses, forwards, etc. Can segment different groups within your list, and do more demographic/specialty related email lists occasionally.

Email marketing ideas from individuals:

• Susan gets extra responses to having a “monthly workshop.” Workshop sounds like more of a one-time, in depth thing than a class.
• Michael suggests having a video testimonial of a previous customer so your target audience can SEE how happy your services made someone.

Ideas for gathering an email distribution list:

• friends,
• business contacts,
• website (put a subscriber form in),
• clients,
• Twitter,
• Facebook,
• LinkedIn,
• Meetup.comJ,
• hosting events
• form an alliance with another business, and mail something out on each other’s behalves.
• Give a free service, coupon, written report as a reward for people providing you with their email address

SPAMMING:

Not allowed to: buy list of emails and blindly email people things. If you send too many emails that get sent to the Spam Folder, you could get BLACKLISTED by the Internet, and would probably need to switch domain names)

Things can be sent to the SPAM folder right away, depending on how strict their email provider is, the subject lines, words (“Sale” “free”)

These rules are due to a Can’t Spam Act of 2003

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