Posts about marketing

Email Marketing - PMZ Marketing

Patrick Zuluaga - 26 February 2014

As an owner of an online business, one of your key strategies should be keeping your clients informed: whether you're launching a new product they might like, an interesting sales campaign or simply telling them what you've been up to. This is where email marketing steps in and helps you deliver that message easy, efficient and fast. 

What is email marketing?

Electronic or email marketing is sending a commercial message to a group of people (usually your client database) using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. Email marketing covers promotional advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, brand awareness and increase sales, push products and services.

Email marketing is usually sent to your segmented lists from your current customer databases. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to:

  • Sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
  • Sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.
  • Adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

How does email marketing work?

  • It's a quick method to communicate your message to qualified leads: your audience, clients, users database etc.
  • Allows you to measure the success of your campaigns through custom reports that reflect open rates, click through and bounce rates.
  • Is targeted because you can advertise the correct product, to the correct audience, at the right time for them. In return email marketing builds satisfaction and trust because your clients will receive exactly what they signed up for/what they need/when they need it.
  • Through a correctly targeted email campaign you can increase your return on investment and build a solid database of recurrent clients/visitors.

Email marketing and PMZ Marketing

There are some great built-in tools that will help you maximize the success of your email marketing campaigns:

Email Marketing - PMZ MarketingYou can send three types of email campaigns, in an automated manner:

  • An individual email campaign - one campaign sent to a custom list
  • An email campaign series - dynamic email campaigns based on an event or visitor interaction with your site. For example, you can choose to trigger the campaign 3 days after the visitor signed up for a newsletter.
  • Recurring email campaigns - you can send the same email campaign on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. And you can also put a campaign on hold when needed, easily.

 

Send email campaign to multiple lists – this will give customers using PMZ Marketing’s email marketing feature more flexibility when managing mailing lists.

Customers can choose to send the campaign to all customers, one or moreexisting mailing lists, or to a new list. In the same time, you canexclude lists or custom reports from final recipients. And the greatthing is that the system will automatically search for contacts presentin multiple lists, remove any duplicates and make sure that eachsubscriber receives the email once.

Email Marketing - PMZ Marketing

Email marketing templates - you can either build your custom templates from scratch or get a head start with our set of cross-client compatible email templates for you and your clients to use. These templates cover a wide range of themes and can be accessed from within your administrative console.

Use email filtering for email campaigns - you will want to filter your lists according to categories to get the best possible results: demographics, geography, activity on the website, product purchases, subscriber validity in the mailing list etc. Using filtering the possibilities are endless, as you can always get more and more granular with your filtering criteria. 

Email Marketing - PMZ MarketingMonitor email campaign performance - Gives you a birds-eye view of your email campaign, including the below reports:

  • Email clients customers used to view the campaign. Example: Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, mobile phone, and so on. Keep an eye on this metric, and make sure you optimize your campaign content to look great in the most popular clients.
  • Number of customers that opened the email
  • Actions customer took. Example: A customer submitted a form on your site after viewing an email campaign.

Embed dynamic modules inside email campaigns - embed dynamic modules such as blog posts, news items or event bookings from your online web business presence, right inside email newsletters. These modules are then dynamically rendered when the campaign is sent, so the recipient sees the latest content.

Infographic on Instagram Marketing Planning

Patrick Zuluaga - 24 November 2013

We know that teenagers are moving away from Facebook and any business that is targeting this demographic needs to take immediate notice.  Instagram is one of the strong winners in this trend and businesses need to consider how to promote by sharing picture images on this social network.

Here is an infographic from Bluewire Media on how to use Instagram with only 5 minutes a day.

Instagram 5 Minute Marketing Plan Infographic

What do you think? Can you spare 5 minutes a day from everything your busy day?

Instagram 5 Minute Marketing Plan Infographic by Bluewire Media

A Retailer's Guide to social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) communication channels

Patrick Zuluaga - 12 November 2013

I thought I should share this with you all. It is an American based infographic from Monetate (www.monetate.com), however the information is relevant to businesses here that have both a physical 'brick & mortar' retail shop and a online web store.  I find that most retail businesses that have this scenario have yet to take advantage of the all powerful mobile device and how it is now driving their purchase options and actions.  Why do you think this is the case?

The Retailer’s Guide to SoLoMo

Monetate Marketing Infographics

How can You Achieve Effective Online Marketing?

Patrick Zuluaga - 09 November 2012

In my marketing newsletter for November 2012 I answered the question "How can You Achieve Effective Online Marketing?"

While many in the business world perceive that online marketing is difficult and complex to achieve the desired results, I view the situation as really a lack of understanding marketing principles.

Let us list these challenges for achieving better marketing results for your business whether using online marketing and/or traditional print based-marketing.

We have three key business marketing challenges, these are:

  1. Focused targeting of your potential customers
  2. Compelling relevancy of your offer
  3. Call to action for your interested customers

What is your prospective of these three key points in online marketing versus marketing as a whole?

Clearly the same principles apply and once you understand and master the concepts it will work for your online marketing too!

Let us hear your views.

Marketing Challenges of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Patrick Zuluaga - 29 August 2012

The three of the most common and difficult small business and medium enterprises marketing challenges are:

  • Finding new clients and customers
  • Using engaging marketing messages that generate results
  • Implementing business oriented marketing systems

I have published an article on the Marketing Challenges of Small Business & Medium Enterprises (SME) that provides useful information and tips on how these challenges can be handled.

Many of you that have been in business a number of years will have encountered these challenges and have survived the experience to grow their businesses.  For those of you that have kindly share with us your successes in managing these small business and medium enterprises marketing challenges.

What is Preventing Growth for Small Businesses?

Patrick Zuluaga - 14 December 2011
Did you know that more often it is the things that you may not be doing that will have a much greater impact on your business growth than those that you do? These are areas that I have found as a business consultant as the most prevalent in holding back the growth of small companies:
  • Understanding your Customer Market
  • Adequate Planning
  • Managing Cash Flow
  • Operating a Marketing and Sales Development Process
  • Targeted Marketing Campaigns and Programs

What do you think? In your own business situation have you faced these issues or other more significant challenges? Share with us your views and expereinces.

[Read the complete article]

The 5 Step Roadmap to Successful Email Marketing

Patrick Zuluaga - 01 November 2011
Email marketing is one of the most cost effective communications mediums when used properly to add value and build relationships with your recipients. Here are the five steps to follow in building an effective email marketing program:

One: Define your business objective

You need to be absolutely clear about what you want to achieve.

Two: Build your email list

Put a plan in place to start growing your list.

Three: Prepare your message

Plan ahead and spend most ofyour effort on the message you want to get to the recipient and whataction will result from it.  Follow the AIDA guide;attract the Attention of the reader, generate their Interest, create aDesire for the reader to act and provide them with a call to Action.

Four: Test and test again

Test for open rates with different email subject lines andtest click thru rates for different call to actions.  Once you have theemail that best performs send it to your target list.

Five: Measure and track your results

Use your email marketing analysis tools to measure the resultsof your effort versus the objectives you have set for the emailmarketing campaign.

Share with us your views on how you have used email marketing to promote your business - what works and what does not work.

[Read the complete article]

Why Optimise your Website for Tablets and Smart Phones?

Patrick Zuluaga - 25 July 2011
Some of our readers will note that in landscape mode tablets and smart phones can accommodate websites designed for desktop computers as these devices are fully capable of the screen resolutions that match the desktop.  However, I don't think these are the same! Web content will appear so much smaller and will almost be unreadable without zooming with your two fingers to expand the view.

With desktop computers we use mouse clicks and keyboards while for tablets and smart phones we use “finger sweeps” and on-screen touch keyboards.

It is a completely different user experience for the web visitor that I am sure you will all agree.

What do you think? If your business has implemented optimised web templates for tablets and smart phones, what were the drivers that were considered to making this a priority for your online web business presence?

Use QR Codes to Obtain Instant Responses for your Direct Mail!

Patrick Zuluaga - 31 May 2011
QR codes can be used to increase the response rate of your marketing campaigns exponentially.

They are quick and very easy quick to use.  Use your smart phone to simply point and scan.  

What are some of the benefits for using QR codes with your marketing?
  • Extremely quick responses and conversions for traditional offline marketing
  • You are able to track responses easily
  • Leverage on social networks to reach out to new customers
  • Use premium advertising and marketing space effectively
  • QR codes are so easy to share
What is your own experience with QR Codes?  Have you been a recipient of a direct response piece using QR Codes for the 'Call to Action? Did you use it? What was your impression?

Or perhaps, you have used QR Codes with your own marketing campaign? How did it go? Were the results to your satisfaction?

Better Marketing Results with Integrated Multimedia Direct Mail

Patrick Zuluaga - 26 April 2011
What makes direct mail campaigns successful? 
  • Addresses a specific group of people or targeted audience
  • Uses creative to cut-thru the clatter of the mail box
  • Offers a personalised message that communicates a compelling benefit
  • Creates a sense of urgency and excitement with the mail piece
  • Provides a your clear and visible ‘call to action’
Using this structure approach will achieve superior response rates from direct mail campaigns.

How can we  use integrated multimedia to dramatically improve the results from direct mail campaigns? Consider the following factors:
  • Personalise all communications with the recipient across the different media
  • Using several multimedia channels in the promotional campaign
    • Letter, postcard or mailing piece
    • Mobile phones and other smart mobile devices
    • Web landing pages with personalised URL (PURL – define)
    • Email marketing and auto-responders
  • Using a QR image (QR Code define) image to support the ‘call to action’
Essentially, an integrated multimedia direct mail campaign allows a one to one personalised engagement with the recipient.  It has the ability for the recipient to immediately accept the offer or secure additional information with readily available technology such as their mobile phone or access to the Internet.

What is your own experience with integrated multimedia direct mail campaigns? Let's hear from you.
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