Create a Gauntlet Welcome Series to Retain New Leads

Seeing your email list grow is a great feeling. You’ve put in hard work to get quality leads and now they’ll stick around and buy your products or services, right? Not necessarily!

Once you’ve got a captive audience, you need to make them want to stay on your email marketing list. A great way to do that is to create a multi-part gauntlet welcome series to help new leads familiarize themselves with your company and to set expectations for future communications.

Every business is different and depending on how often you send emails, you might do a one-part series or a five-part series… or something in between! Regardless of how many emails your gauntlet encompasses, there are some problems you may encounter and some solutions that will help make it successful.

10 Tips for Split Testing Email Campaigns

Marketers know there is no magic formula for an ideal email marketing campaign. The secret to an effective email campaign, whether it’s to get more web traffic, grow sales, or increase donations, is through testing and optimizing emails. If used correctly, email marketing offers a great opportunity for brands to increase subscriber satisfaction and retention, and drive results.

An effective email campaign is targeted and tested. Targeted, to ensure the message is relevant for the recipient. Tested, to ensure the message is as effective as it can be within the constraints of the campaign. With so many different variables you can test, here are the top 10 tips for split testing email campaigns:

Become a Trusted Source: Nurture Your Leads

Lead nurturing is the process an inquiry goes through once it is received by your company. This process has the goal of converting as many of your leads into qualified prospects as possible. Depending on your business model this process could also result in immediate sales. With an intelligent and automated lead nurturing program in place companies can see a huge return on investment.

An effective lead nurturing campaign can increase the number of qualified prospects in your pipeline and decrease the time a possible client spends in a sales cycle. But even more important than this, a great nurture program can demonstrate to your potential customer base that you are trusted source of information. Once a prospect views you as a valuable source of information you have deepened your relationship with that potential customer.  If you have a deeper relationship with your customer from the beginning, a solid foundation has been set and you will likely be able to retain that client for a longer period of time.

Successfully integrating a nurture campaign into your email marketing efforts takes some planning. You don’t want to just start pushing material out to your leads. You want to serve them timely information. Each email should be seen as a way to provide your prospects with valuable insight, not just as an opportunity to influence their buying decision. In return this train of thought could result in lasting relationship with your buyers. Reports have shown that acquiring a new customer is 6 to 7 times more expensive then retaining an existing customer.

Pinterest: Can it drive your business?

Pinterest: Can it drive your business?Is EVERYONE a photographer?

Pinterest! It’s the latest shooting star in the social world, and if you don’t know, it’s a place to post and share photos. REALLY GOOD photos. It’s basically Twitter if you throw out 90% of the users and keep only the serious photogs, then instead of a stream of text, display a wall of pics.

There’s only one problem: Have you seen the web recently? There’s a lot of bad photography and worse Photoshop, and we’ve accepted it. I admit, my idea of photography is to make sure I carry a phone around so I can take a quick shot of something cool. I always figured a lot of people were like me, ready to post a quick image to Facebook or some other social site without worrying about F-Stop, framing, lighting, and other technical minutiae.

As I browse Facebook and other social platforms, I see pretty much the same type of stuff: Here are the kids at the ballgame. Here’s our company picnic. Here we are at the beach. Few of my friends are serious photogs. I assume most people have a camera that takes decent shots, and they treat it like a serious piece of equipment, but they don’t lug it around all the time.

Not so, Pinterest.

Make a Splash: Surfing Etiquette for your Email Marketing

Make A Splash: Surfing Etiquette For Your Email MarketingWhat does surfing have to do with email marketing? Well, both disciplines require a strategy, timing, preparation, and best practices, or what we surfers call surfing etiquette, to make a memorable surfing session.

Speaking of surfing; that’s a photo of me at one of my favorite hometown breaks in New Hampshire. I know what you’re thinking; surfing in New Hampshire… do they even have beaches there? The answer is yes, we sure do! But lets get back to email marketing.

Off the Record: Google Privacy Policy & Tools Simplified

You received an email from Google, saw an ad featuring a new privacy policy or keep hearing about Congress griping over Google’s new privacy policy; but all you want to do is read your email, search stuff online and chat with your colleagues without sharing your information for the world to see.

On March 1, 2012 Google will start adhering to a new simplified privacy policy across most of their products and services.  We’re going to quickly explain the highlights of Google’s simplified privacy policy and how it affects your use of their tools (certain products like Google Wallet are regulated by industry-specific privacy laws and will continue to keep their own set of policies).

Facebook Friends Wall Street: What Does this Mean for Its Users?

As early as today Facebook will announce it is going public. To most of us who use the social network as a means to communicate with friends and family we are wondering what the buzz is all about. So what if Mark Zuckerberg wants to file for an IPO (an initial public offering, if you were wondering, likely to be anywhere between $5 and $100 billion).

Being an end user and not someone who is considering buying stock in Facebook when it becomes available, I am curious how this will affect me. Here are some facts and opinions I have managed to scrounge up about that very topic.