« January 2008 | Main | March 2008 »
Conclusion
In this Successful Marketing Tool I have gone into depth with three email marketing tools:
1. Email Surveys
2. Auto responders
3. Joint Ventures
None of these tools have high cost. Each takes some time to develop. Each magnifies the power of your email marketing to your existing customers. Once in place, they can significantly increase your sales.
Mistakes to Avoid
Joint ventures aren’t slam dunks for your business. You can waste time, lose credibility and not get the results you want. Here are a couple of pitfalls to avoid.
1. Selfishness. If both partners are only in the venture for themselves, it will usually fail. Be willing to share time and resources. Look for partners who are willing to bring the same level of commitment.
2. Different agendas. While both parties don’t need to have identical goals, they should be compatible and not at odds with each other. If you cannot find a common ground between partners, it’s probably not going to work.
3. Distrust. You are taking some risks with a joint venture (the benefits can outweigh the risks.) Make sure both parties trust each other in the new relationship.
4. Acting too quickly. Take your time in finding the right joint partners. Like a marriage, you want the relationship to last. Take the time needed to find the right partners for your business.
As you develop your joint ventures look at things like the strengths and weaknesses of your business and your partner’s business. Look at business experience and credibility. Perhaps you already know businesses who could be a good partner with you.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Ten Tips for Finding a Joint Partner
1. Look for a partner that compliments your products and services
2. Look for a joint partner who serves the same target market
3. Look for a partner who supplies products and services your customers want
4. Ask—don’t wait for other to initiate—contact them and ask often
5. Be willing to give before you receive
6. Look for businesses that share your values and business vision
7. Explore a variety of different potential partners
8. Don’t take refusals personally--try back at a later time
9. Be prepare to sell the benefits of a joint venture
10. Make sure you get a commitment to the joint venture relationship
Bonus Tip--Apply the success qualities listed above
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Keys to Successful Joint Ventures
Joint ventures are like a marriage relationship. The qualities you apply to a successful marriage are the same qualities you want to bring to a joint venture. Here are four qualities to apply to your joint venture. (Thanks to Glen Hopkins for his thoughts on this area.)
Set a clear goal for your joint venture. What do you want to accomplish with your joint venture? Do you want to expand your customer base? Do you want to make more sales? Do you want to gain cost savings associated with a joint venture? Know what you want to achieve with your joint venture.
While your joint venture partner may not have the same exact goals, they should compliment the results you are seeking. Ever heard of a marriage surviving when the two people have opposite goals for the relationship?
Find the right partners. The best joint venture relationships are build on a win-win situation. Like the healthy marriage relationship, both partners must feel the benefits they are receiving from the efforts. If not, partners begin to resent the arrangements.
One way to help ensure the right partner is to match your business cultures. For example, when I was selling carpet we had a business culture that placed a high value on customer service. When I explored the use of a joint venture with a carpet cleaning company, I wanted to make sure their business believed as much as we did in customer service.
Take your time in finding the right partners.
Plan your joint venture. Map out ahead of time what you want to achieve with your new partner; how you will do it and when you will do it. If necessary create a check list of planning items. If you are the business initiating the joint venture, do some extra work to make it easier for the joint partner to get involved. For example, you may have already prepared a joint endorsement letter that could be used by both businesses.
Manage the relationship. Like a good marriage, communications and trust are important qualities to have with the relationship. Take care to sweat the details of the relationship. If you run into a speed bump, deal with it sooner rather than later. You know what works from your own marriage relationships. Apply the same type of “management” to your joint venture relationship.
Like a good marriage, joint ventures take work. Like a good marriage, the payoffs are enormous!
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
The Benefits of Joint Ventures
Think for a moment about the specific benefits that come from a joint venture with one or more other businesses.
Shorten Your Acquisition Time
In a joint venture, your partner has a special relationship with their customers just as you have one with your loyal customers. Each of you piggy backs your business on the loyalty of the other’s business.
If it took two years to build your list of 200 customers, now a joint venture with another business can double your customer data base. And it doesn’t take you two years.
Improver Your Credibility
People buy from businesses they trust. By gaining access to the loyal customers of the other business and they in turn gaining access to your loyal customers, you are using the credibility that has already been established by each business and bestowing it on the other business.
Create New Markets
Every business has its own markets (groups of customers or territories) that fit their comfort range. By joining with another business, you now have the opportunity to access their territory or market. This allows you to expand your marketing with the typical cost of market expansion.
Developing More Loyalty with Your Existing Customers
By providing more opportunities for products and services via joint agreements with other businesses, you are expanding what your offerings to your existing customers. If you are a small business with a limited number of products and services and now through joint ventures you can offer a broader number of products and services, your customers will increase their loyalty. Your competition will have a more difficult time stealing them away.
Cost Savings
Discounts, the sharing of special information or skills, cutting down on advertising costs, saving time, selling at lower prices, expanding your markets are only a few of the savings you realize from a joint venture.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Joint Ventures
For those who fear their customer base may not generate enough new sales, look to joint ventures. Using your loyal customer base, a joint venture is the fastest and most economical way to double or triple your sales,
In the next few blogs, I will describe the power of joint ventures, their benefits to business owners; how you create joint ventures and what to avoid if you are to be successful with joint ventures.
A joint venture is a partnership where two or more businesses come together to share knowledge, to share a common market, and to share their customer data bases.
• This partnership could be as simple as a thank you note when someone buys a product from you that include an offer from another business that would compliment the sale.
• It could be the McDonalds that locates itself inside a Wal Mart so that both business benefit from the traffic to each other’s business.
• It could be a mutual endorsement email sent between two businesses to each other’s loyal customer base.
• It could be a discount coupon exchange between two businesses to promote each other’s products and services.
• It could be a common electronic newsletter sent to their loyal customers.
A joint venture is a win-win agreement between two or more businesses. It could be for a short time period. It could be for an extended period. A joint venture is the creation of something that is bigger than either of the businesses.
A study in 2005 showed that 25% of business profits were generated from joint ventures or strategic alliances between businesses. As a small business, you cannot afford not to explore joint ventures with other businesses.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Types of Sequential Auto Responders
The better and more robust sequential auto responders are a paid service. Your data base is uploaded to their service and you control your sequence of emails via a control panel.
There are several free sequential auto responders. Freeautobot.com is one of them and there are others. These free services offer less options with their auto responders and may require you to put their advertising on each of the emails you send.
If you are just exploring sequential auto responders, you may wish to try a free service to see how you like it and how it can operate in your business. You will only need to invest a little time to get the feel for this marketing tool.
As you become familiar with sequential auto responders and want more features, you can purchase the service from one of many different companies. Most of these charge a monthly fee around $20.00.
You load your data base of email names into their system. Since they are professionals at this service, they help ensure your emails are received by your customers; they offer tracking services, and a variety of other tools to enable this service to fit into your overall marketing program. If sending two emails per month to your customers generated 10% in additional sales, it may well be worth this additional monthly expense.
Here are some of the more popular services and the features they offer. This is only a partial list. A Google search on auto responders will give you many more options.
FollowingUp
The free service level is limited to a single autoresponder, 2 messages, and a maximum of 100 subscribers. Several paid upgrades are available that remove these restrictions.
FreeAutoBot
This free autoresponder service lets you send out one or several followup messages at intervals you specify. No ads are added to your outgoing messages; the site makes money off ads on the main site, and by sending advertising messages to registered users.
Get Response
Free autoresponder service that offers unlimited autoresponders, no maximum mail length, automatic multiple messages sent over a period of time and much more. While the service is free, a short ad is included at the top of every message you send out. You can upgrade to remove the ads, and gain access to more sophisticated, advanced features.
Responders.net
Free autoresponder and form for collecting information on your site. You can set up an information request form easily, and specify what message you would like to send automatically to the people who fill in the form.
SendFree
Autoresponder service with an interesting twist: SendFree also acts like an advertising exchange service. How it works: you sign up for a SendFree account and set up your autoresponder service. At the top of every automatic reply your autoresponder sends out is a short text advertisement. Half of these are for other members' sites. The other half are reserved for SendFree's advertisers. In turn, your advertisement will appear at the top of messages sent out by other members.
AWeber
Professional autoresponder solution with unlimited follow-up messages, HTML/plain text options, a web form generator, a wide range of HTML email templates, the ability to customize emails with up to 25 fields, and much more. Automated tools to help ensure your emails get delivered and comply with all relevant legislation.
iContact
Use an Autoresponder to Sell to Customers on Autopilot with iContact's Email Marketing System! iContact Makes Setting Up and Using an Autoresponder a Breeze with Enterprise-Level Features At Bargain Prices.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed...
Sequential Auto Responders
A sequential auto responders offers more sophisticated and powerful tools for small business efficiencies and sales generation.
A sequential auto responder is a series of emails you create and arrange in a pre-determined sequence of time. You could send out 7 mails, spaced every three days. You could offer five basic tips, once each day for five days. The sequential auto responder program sends these out automatically based on the time intervals you have established. Why do we need sequential emails? They work because…
• Most people don’t buy on their first visit
• People are busy that does not mean they are not interested
• Customers may not have the money now
• Visitors check out your credibility
• Prospects may still be evaluating their options
• They may have missed earlier emails from you
For these and many reasons, sequential emails keep your awareness before your existing customers. I compare them to the wisdom newsprint ad people gave to businesses years ago. You need exposure 7-10 times on a consistent basis to get your name recognized by the prospect. I once bought a marketing program after I had received the 21st email about the program. I was fascinated by the author’s ability to weave such an effective network of ideas around his product.
Again, planning is the key to effective sequential emails. You need to break down your offer (or create different variations) your tips, your mini-course, your instructions into logical pieces. Then put them together into a sequence of separate emails.
Let’s say that you sell DVD players. Someone purchases the DVD player from you. You start a sequence of emails. The first may be to thank them for their purchase and provide other useful purchasing information. You may follow up with a 2nd email that high lights several of the special features on the DVD player. This could be followed up with some stories about others using the DVD player. You could follow this up with a special sale on speakers that could be purchased to compliment the DVD player. You may follow up with an email with a coupon for stores that rent DVD’s. This sequence of emails helps build the relationship with your new customer.
You create this sequence of emails based on the experience in your business what is needed and what customers want. You may title it “Customer Follow Up Sequence.” As soon as a customer makes a purchase, you apply this auto responder sequence and they begin receiving the emails at the prearranged intervals. Once you have created the original sequence, you no longer have to think about the process. Just apply it using the power of this internet program.
It takes time and planning to create your original sequence of emails. I know of some businesses that create a three month cycle of sequential emails to their existing customers. They set it in motion and they have emails going to their customers every two weeks. Then they modify some of the content and repeat the cycle in the second quarter. What an efficient and convenient way to keep in from of their existing customers.
In the next blog, I will talk about Sequential email programs you can use for this purpose. To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Auto Responders
You have heard me say many times, the real strength of the internet is not in your website. It’s in the power the internet has to make your business more efficient and effective. Auto responders are a prime example of this internet power.
An auto responder is exactly what it says—it’s an automatic email response. You pre-program a response or a series of responses that when triggered are automatically sent to the customer. There are two basic types of auto responders.
Single Auto Responses
There is the single auto responder. If someone buys something from you, they receive an automatic thank you response. You probably have experienced an auto responder when you sent an email to someone and you got an immediate reply, “I am out of the office on Friday. Please forward your inquires to Bill Smith.”
These one time auto responders are not difficult to create. Almost every web hosting service includes them as part of the services they provide with their hosting services. There are very simple instructions to create a response.
Your job is to think of the many places where you can use a single response to questions, inquiries, purchases, etc. Write up a canned version of the appropriate response. It still can be warm and personal. Then set this response to run every time the trigger occurs. It happens consistently, even while you sleep. Once you set in motion this auto responder, you don’t have to think about it again. What could be more efficient—contact with customers without any effort?
For example, someone makes a purchase from you online. Your auto responder sends them a thank you note for their purchase. It could also remind them of additional items they may wish to purchase. It can provide instructions on how to get started with your product. You should always have a specific action you want the customer to do in your auto responder.
Look for places in your business, ongoing contacts with customers, etc, where the auto responder can save you time and efforts.
In the next blog, I will talk about sequential auto responders and even more powerful tool to grow your business.
Your comments are welcomed…
Sample Survey
Here’s the actual email sent and the website landing page for the survey. Some of the boxes and colors from her website did not copy well onto this blog entry. To see for yourself, just click on the hyperlink in Mona's email below and you can see the page in full color.
Email Sent
Subject line: I need your help…
Hi,
WHAT’S YOUR MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION?
I need your help. If you had 30 seconds to ask me your single most important question about how to decorate on a limited budget, what would you ask me?
Think about it carefully and then click the link below to submit your question. (Your name and email address is NOT required)
http://www.monadesigns.com/Myquestion.html
This survey takes about 30 seconds out of your busy day, but my answers may give you many new ideas for decorating projects on a limited budget!!!
With warmest regards,
Mona
Mona’s Website Landing page:
Welcome to ask Mona (Picture of Mona)
What's your single most important question about
decorating on a limited budget?
Directions: Type-in your question in the Message Box
below and click "Here's My Question" button.
Message
Here's My Question
Mona had a box for typing
in the question and a submit
button.
Click on the hyperlink in Mona's email to see for yourself.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed
Recent Comments