Tips for small to medium-sized businesses getting started with marketing.
A/B testing sounds a lot more fancy than it is. In reality, several tools make testing your marketing techniques very simple and very, very useful these days.
One of the things we highly recommend testing as soon as possible are your email marketing subject lines. Email marketing is one of our favorite (and most effective) digital marketing channels for both B2B and B2C organizations.
So why not constantly be improving it?
If you were an investor, would you spend money on a lot of different stocks or put your funds into several different companies then not track the results? Sounds crazy, right? You want to see how your investments are doing. You may do well in some areas and poorly in others, but you want that data.
So why on earth would you spend money on different marketing channels and not track those results? And then wouldn’t you spend time reviewing what you tracked and optimize your investments going forward?
Tracking and testing is just as important for marketing as it is for investing your personal money. Here’s a guideline for getting started or improving your existing processes.
So we’ve talked about the importance of adding forms to your site but doing them well is a whole ‘nother story. Here are some tips on the best practices for your site’s forms in 2017.
Fewer, specific questions are better. It’s easy to want to ask people all of the things beforehand but think about your own experiences – are you likely to fill out a form that asks for too many things?
No. You’re going to click away or be perturbed that this company wants so much information from you, like your email address and phone number and social security number and blood type.
For a small business and sometimes even really large businesses, forms are an afterthought or overlooked.
Web forms, however, are one of the most important components of your website. They are the vessel for which people can get information to you, whether it’s about a purchase or a question or anything in between. It’s a simpler method of communication that’s often overlooked.
But it shouldn’t be.
Marketing automation is a relatively newer, shinier thing for smaller businesses. It’s the process of automating repetitive tasks, like email campaigns or lead notifications.
For example, every time someone signs up for your email list, it would be nice to send them a welcome email, right? Marketing automation enables you to create a template email so that the system you’re using does that for you.
So, this would help you out rather than you getting a message every time someone new signs up and you having to write something new or copy and paste an old message you sent to the last sign-up. Or even worse, getting no message every time someone new signs up and you having to manually check the system.
The biggest problem with marketing automation is that it’s too big and too expensive for most small to medium sized businesses. Until now. Hatchbuck, a marketing automation and CRM tool, is our current go-to recommendation for marketing automation.
Even though it has a pretty stupid name.
When it comes to marketing, most people have assumed it is like a magical black box – marketing goes in, and business results may or may not come out.
During the age of reliance on TV ads and print ads, where measuring your ad spend was a very nebulous experience, it makes sense. It’s very hard to gauge the effectiveness of a TV ad when you don’t know how many people truly saw it, how it influenced their buying decisions, whether it stayed on their mind or not…any of those variables.
Fortunately, digital marketing makes things a lot more clear for marketers and business owners alike. And you wouldn’t put money in the stock market or invest in a company without keeping tabs on their performance, now would you? So why would you put money in a Facebook ad or two and not record those results alongside your website’s traffic?
Everyone who’s engaging in marketing should be tracking and measuring their metrics. The question is – how do you determine what to track?
When it comes to email marketing, we’ve helped businesses use a ton of different tools at Exothermic. Depending on your company means you may have different priorities and needs. Fishbowl, for example, is one of the main email marketing programs for restaurant and food-chains. Bronto and Listrak, on the other hand, works more with larger e-commerce corporations.
But if you’re a small business getting started or even a larger one doing your first email marketing push – MailChimp is currently our go-to recommendation.
MailChimp was one of the first email marketing providers who created a free plan and then stuck with it. To date, they still have a “Forever Free” account tier where you can have up to 2,000 subscribers and send those subscribers up to 12,000 emails per month.
They don’t require a credit card, a contract or anything other hassles.
If you’re using WordPress or another common content management system (CMS), any of the top e-commerce tools (Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce), Salesforce or other notable customer relationship management (CRM) tools – the list of compatible integrations with MailChimp goes on and on.
Integrations are important for tools in your “marketing stack” so they can play nicely together. You wouldn’t want an email marketing tool that can’t connect with your website, for example, because then you’d have a really hard time providing an easy way for people to sign-up. Speaking of…
MailChimp does a really, really great job of making it easy for you to add people to your system. A lot of systems we’ve used before have very convoluted sign-up processes or data migration processes if you’re taking names from one system and adding them to another.
Sign-up forms and other methods for getting contacts actually into your database are key to growing your email marketing efforts. MailChimp does well at holding your hand through this process and making it easy for nontechnical people to set these components up.
They’ve also come a long way. MailChimp used to be the go-to for start-ups and more technical people because although they had a free plan, it used to be ideal only for teams that were able to upload their own HTML into the system to send it off. Which meant you had to have someone savvy with HTML to make good use of it.
Now, they’ve made continuous improvements to make the user interface (UI) more intuitive and enabled people with no technical skills to get up and running.
It’s still not the most intuitive but with some guidance (and actually taking the time to read their really excellent support materials), just about anyone can get by.
If you outgrow MailChimp’s free plan, they make it very easy to upgrade but also to move on to another system. MailChimp used to be a stepping-stone service but they are doing more and more lately to keep users within their system – and being very transparent about it, too. They even opened their own business and used MailChimp in their “What’s in Store” series to walk people through their own experiences.
All in all, it’s our go-to for getting brands new to email marketing onto a system over other tools like Constant Contact, AWeber, MadMimi, MyEmma and Hatchbuck.
That being said – if you’re new to email marketing and you have the money to invest (rather than opt for free), you may also want to check out Hatchbuck, a relatively new player in this scene that we’ve come to really like.
Email marketing may seem passe by 2017, but it’s still one of the most effective digital marketing channels to date.
Nearly everyone has an email address, whereas social channels are scattered across different demographics. There are hard, trackable numbers you can associate with email marketing and a ton of different ways to use them, regardless of your business’ focus point.
Here’s a quick overview on using email marketing for a small to medium-sized business.
In the US, the primary law you want to familiarize yourself with if you’re doing email marketing is the CAN SPAM Act of 2003.
Each and every separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $40,654.
For the most part, the law is in line with common sense and helps your relationship with your customers in the long-run. But here’s a breakdown of the main components.
Search engine optimization (SEO) has had a mixed rap for many years now. Several people claim to be SEO experts while failing to effectively help sites boost their search rankings. On the flip side, small business owners have been intimidated by the a lack of HTML and technical knowledge in order to utilize the basics of SEO.
There’s also a fear of messing things up and Google (or other search engines, like Bing or Baidu) “punishing” your site.
But truth be told, for most businesses…experts aren’t needed here. If you’re a small business owner with a small team running the majority of your operations, there’s a simple way to manage SEO.