Hopefully you’re not like most business when it comes to your email marketing and newsletters. Most business just punch out mundane un-informative sales pitches over and over without looking at their stats or asking for their members feedback. Here are a few tips for turning your newsletter into a powerful marketing strategy.

Get your mailouts managed by professionals

1. Determine what your readers want- too many newsletters are used simply to boast. Although your newsletter should promote your business, it’s also a time to build your relationship with your prospects and customers. Be sure to discuss topics of interest and value for your customers and prospects.

2. Personalize your newsletter- there are hundreds of newsletters circulating on the Internet and in the mail. You need to make your newsletter stand out from the crowd. Making your newsletter uniquely you will make a difference. So be real. Feel free to include personality and emotion in your newsletter.

3. Make it look good- the visual aspect of your newsletter can make all the difference. Make it brief. (You only have the reader’s attention for a few minutes.) Use bullets and appealing headlines. And include graphics.

4. Let your readers give you their opinion- ask your readers to comment on the newsletter. They will tell you what they liked, disliked, or want to see more of. Additionally, the interaction with your readers draws you closer to a sale.

5. Include your contact information- the ultimate purpose of the newsletter is to get more customers (through name recognition, relationship building, and promoting your products). However, without your contact information, those potential customers will never appear.

Create a newsletter worthy of your company and you’ll drive your readers to future sales. Make it simple, make it short, and make it a powerful tool that reflects you and your business.

Written by Clate Mask from Infusionsoft

Dont have time to produce and manage your own communications? Let us do it! You will get better results and save money on wasted campaigns and staff time. Go to www.yourconnection.com.au

In recent years, data-based marketing has swept through the business world. In its wake, measurable performance and accountability have become the keys to marketing success. However, few managers appreciate the range of metrics by which they can evaluate marketing strategies and dynamics. Fewer still understand the pros, cons, and subtlties of each.

In this day and age, we have come to recognize that marketers, general managers, and business leaders need an understanding of these metrics… or find someone who does.

What Is a Metric?
A metric is a measuring system that quantifies a trend, dynamic, or characteristic.

Why Do You Need Metrics?
Managers must select, calculate, and explain key business metrics. They must understand how each is constructed and how to use it in decision-making.

Marketing Metrics: Opportunities, Performance, and Accountability
Today, marketers must measure new opportunities and the investment needed to realize them. Marketers must quantify the value of products, customers and distribution channels. Increasingly, marketers are held accountable for the financial ramifications of their decisions.

Mastering Metrics
Being able to “crunch the numbers” is vital to success in marketing. Knowing which numbers to crunch, however, is a skill that develops over time. Toward that end, managers must practice the use of metrics and learn from their mistakes.

Single click participation in marketing metrics! click here

(you will be taken to a page of our website, though with our reporting funtions we will be able to measure how many of you clieked through. results shown next month)

Sign up for our mailouts here to see the stats next month!

We have three Fully Managed packages that provide different levels of service for YourConnection Australia clients to choose from as well as a DIY package. We believe each of these packages provide the best value for money for the client while minimizing the time input from their staff to help create and approve the campaigns.

Each new managed account requires an Account and Template set up.

Account and Template Set Up – $165 incl. GST
• Gets you started, includes
• Account Set Up
• A HTML and Text template designed for your business.

DIY (Do It Yourself) – $ monthly hosting fee.

• Add your own database, choose your template, create your mailout, send and track your own campaigns.

Get started now!

Basic Package – $165 / mailout incl. GST

• Info sheets How to build a database and Database acquisition form
• Content generation from completed online form
• Mailout schedule creation, production and proofing
• One amendment per send
• Sign – up box code for your website
• Database management and segmentation
• Prompted access to Reporting page to view results

Benefits – Very quick, all done online, very low input required by you, fully managed by YourConnection Australia, Access to reports for further development and review of mailouts.

Contact us

Download our Full Price List Here as a PDF

Check out below this very good article that outlines clearly what you should be looking at in relation to builting brand loyalty. when emarketing.

Original post by Dave Lewis Story posted: August 13, 2009 – 6:01 am

Marketers should view e-mail marketing as a valuable channel that can help build a long-term relationship with a brand-loyal customer (as opposed to reducing upfront marketing costs or driving immediate revenue). As much as possible, attune your outreach to your customers’ needs and tailor communications to their particular preferences.

As a guideline, consider the following issues when it comes to customization of digital messaging:

• Transparency: Do you explain to your customers exactly what they are signing up for?

• Privacy: Do you make your privacy policy explicit so that your customers know they can trust you with their information?

• Confirmations: Do you send a welcome message to new customers in a timely fashion after they’ve signed up, and do you use that opportunity to deliver information?

• Relevancy: Do you segment your lists according to customer interests and past behavior?

• Frequency/Timing: Are you being careful about how often you e-mail your customers, and are you sending your messages at times that are most useful or practical for customers to act upon them? More is not always better—marketers that indiscriminately flood their customers with e-mail run the risk of eroding brand loyalty and losing subscribers to e-mail fatigue.

• Channel: Are you asking your customers which communications channels they prefer (e.g., e-mail, Facebook, IM, RSS, SMS, etc.) and making use of those preferences in your outbound campaigns?

Examples of email marketing by YourConnection Australia

In addition to considering these questions, marketers should follow the four golden rules of engagement:

1. Continually refresh permission in order to keep pace with the ever-evolving needs and preferences of the customer. The best way to do this is to build an interactive component into your mailing in which you prompt the customer for a response to continually solicit and eventually fine-tune your messaging just for them.

2. Periodically survey customers to determine if they’d like to continue to receive e-mail communications or if they’d like the frequency of e-mail communication adjusted.

3. Deploy an e-mail technology solution that allows you to segment your messages to a number of different audiences and reach them according to their expressed preferences.

4. Pay attention to the metrics of e-mail campaigns—e-mail affords the unique ability to look at deliverability rates, click-throughs and actual sales. Marketers should look at these metrics and instantly act upon them. By making a dedicated effort to attune to customer needs and leveraging the right technology solutions, marketers can deliver against their immediate revenue objectives while building brand-loyal customer relationships for the long term.

Dave Lewis is CMO at Message Systems

Keep up to date with YourConnection Australias e-news by signing up @ http://www.yourconnection.com.au/

This is a great article that is well worth a read if you have, are thinking about or interested in outsourcing any aspect of your business.

No one will ever do things like you do.

Whether you outsource your customer service to a local provider, a Big 3 firm, or a remote company in India it is always the same: someone can do your work for you better, cheaper or faster.  It won’t be the same, though.

Unfortunately, outsourcing decisions are done based mostly on cost.  Gartner does an outsourcing study every year and it always comes the same: people say they choose the best provider for their need, but in a separate question mention cost as the biggest driver for their decision.  Conversations also go back to Cost – always.

Cost is not always the best method to select an outsource provider.

There is a method to selecting the best outsource provider, and it has two steps:

How do you figure out what to outsource? Simple.  Look at all your business functions, list them, and then mark the core and critical functions – those without which your organization will perish in short time (it may be talking to customers, or selling, or creating campaigns, or fulfilling orders, or anything else).  Once you have your core, critical functions marked make a list of the ones you did not mark or select.  That is your list of potential functions to outsource.  The other ones are to be kept in your organization. No discussion.

How how to know why you are outsourcing? Go down the list of potential  functions to outsource and mark next to each which is the problem you are trying to solve through outsourcing? Speed (too fast, too slow), Quality (do it better, do it worse), or Cost (too cheap, too expensive).  There may be some of them you are not trying to outsource (even if they are not core, critical functions) and that is

fine.  After you marked them, look at the following chart and make sure you can live with the tradeoffs.

Can you live with the trade-off? Are you willing to sacrifice quality and speed for cost?

Although email marketing is acknowledged to have the highest ROI among marketing activities, the channel continues to suffer from under-investment, lack of staffing and resources and a focus on volume over relevance…

Doing our bit to change break the cycle… YourConnection Australia

In this day and age, internet marketing is emerging as one of the most viable and cost-effective marketing methodologies especially for small businesses.

The process of using digital technology in order to sell goods or services is called e-marketing. E-marketing uses the same basic concepts as that of traditional marketing.

The purpose is to devise strategies in order to deliver your message across to your target market.

www.yourconnection.com.au

E-marketing can produce fantastic results in terms of increased market share, high profit margins and repeat customer purchase. It is also ideal for small and medium-sized businesses as e-marketing is more affordable and less effort-intensive.

In saying this though, to launch an effective e-marketing campaign, you first have to create an effective e-marketing plan.

The focus of an e-marketing plan is to ensure high response from prospective customers.

Click here for 3 steps to creating an effective e-marketing plan..

I literally receive hundreds of emails each week from emarketing businesses all over the world with their take on how to get the best results from your emails, sms, facebook and Google Adwords campaigns. There are a lot of similarities from the different nations and platforms, but what works best?

Is it database segmentation? Is it your subject line? Is it the time of send? or is it any of the other hundreds of factors that go into a successful campaign? Though what works best for ‘Jenny the Florist’ will not necessarily work well for ‘Tom the Butcher’ because their needs and target audiences are different.

This is where we are finding the DIY campaigns on generic platforms can fall behind and start costing your business or organisation more money than its making you. What you really need to do is work out what your customers are wanting to hear and when they want it, then schedule them in to receive the information that suits them at a time that suits them. i.e ‘Jenny the Florist shouldn’t keep sending out quarterly emails to her database around key dates in her businesses calendar (Valentines Day, Mothers Day, etc), they should come a week or two before and with large a call to action like ‘Buy online now!’

If you’re sending emails, sms’ or changing promotional content on your website and would like to sit down with us and go over a schedule of your key dates for free, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we would love to hear from you.

Click here to email us or call 1300 503 404 to arrange a time.

James McDonald
YourConnection Australia

This is a great article posted late last year on BtoB online by the Director of Strategic Services for American based ESP Strongmail that, in the current economic ‘crisis’ is very relevant. Here at YourConnection Australia we provide the end to end service of costing, producing, managing and measuring the results from each campaign to ensure a ROI.

www.yourconnection.com.au

At a time when economic concerns are forcing companies to look carefully at marketing budgets across the board, e-mail is still an attractive option given its extremely high ROI. (According to the Direct Marketing Association, e-mail will generate $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008.) To achieve that ROI however, you must look at allocating your spending so that every dollar is working to drive the maximum benefit.

The first step is to categorize and analyze the expenses associated with your e-mail programs, including the money being invested in database development, customer profiling and segmentation, strategy, e-mail creative, e-mail deliverability, e-mail production and e-mail deployment. Because highly targeted, tested and well-crafted e-mails almost always generate better results, you’ll want to make sure that you’re investing properly in these areas.

If you find that a lot of your budget goes to e-mail deployment, you should ensure that you’re leveraging the right solution to meet your needs. While many companies have historically outsourced e-mail marketing to e-mail service providers for lack of a viable alternative, the latest generation of in-house e-mail marketing solutions can enable companies to lower their costs by eliminating CPM fees, which increase alongside e-mail volumes.

The bottom line is that reducing your e-mail deployment costs will allow you to allocate more of your budget to strategic areas that can actually lead to increased conversion rates, such as A/B testing, dynamic content creation, database enhancement, transactional e-mail optimization and Web analytics integration. Spending your money on the areas that can make the most difference is always a smart decision, but even more so in a slowing economy.

Ryan Deutsch is director of strategic services at StrongMail Systems (www.strongmail.com), a provider of e-mail marketing solutions.

This year, the hot e-mail marketing topics were segmentation, personalization and deliverability. As we head into 2009, battling a recession and the associated drop in overall marketing budgets—MPG North America (a unit of the French advertising group Havas SA) predicts a 5%-to-8% drop in overall ad spending—those buzz words will make way for new ones. They have to, said Luc Vezina, head of marketing for e-mail marketing solutions provider Campaigner, a Protus IP Solutions company. “E-mail marketing is going to become even more important than it’s been, but companies are going to need to take e-mail relevance even further,” he said. Here are Campaigner’s four predictions for the New Year—and suggestions for how e-mail marketers can benefit.

1) Automation heats up. Everyone in 2008, it seemed, wanted to personalize and better target their campaigns, which led to better segmentation. However, human beings were still overwhelmingly pulling the trigger on so-called “triggered” campaigns. Next year, as companies start to take advantage of the avalanche of data sitting in CRM programs, triggering will happen automatically. “The difference between this year and 2009 is that now people have CRM in place, the data is there, and e-mail tools are integrated with the CRM system and its data,” Venzina said. And some CRM solutions even have e-mail marketing modules built in.

2) Marketers tap integrated marketing programs more often. E-mail marketing used to be relegated to the Web marketing team or to someone hired specifically to do e-mail marketing. This coming year, as head counts shrink and companies realize the value of controlling the entire message, integration will take a bigger role, Venzina said. “At conferences now, all people talk about is how important it is to think multichannel,” he said. “The results when you do that are greater when someone sees your ad online, gets an e-mail from you and sees a print ad—all with the same message.”

3) List hygiene becomes a must. “As marketers’ budgets are more constrained, people will realize how quality is so much more important than quantity,” Venzina said. “People will become less concerned about how big their lists are or how many people are opening their messages, and more concerned that the people who are opening them are finding that message relevant and are receptive.” To that end, companies will integrate individual e-mail lists into a single, manageable list, he said, which will also make it easier for companies to comply with CAN-SPAM. “You must be able to opt out from all of an organization’s e-mails,” he said.

4) Mobile e-mail marketing becomes a standard option. “There are tens of millions of BlackBerry phones, and people are checking e-mail from everywhere—at the mall [or] driving in their cars,” Venzina said. “People are often surprised at how poorly their e-mail renders on smart phones, and that’s when they make a change.” By offering a mobile e-mail option, marketers will make sure messages are deliverable and readable.

www.yourconnection.com.au

Original article published by Karen J. Bannan