George has five tips on how to streamline your email marketing to make the most of the Christmas retail season…

Get the calendar out:

“The timing of your holiday campaign is crucial. Think about days that might be ‘off days’ for your recipients and schedule your mailing around them.”

“Consider also that during the holiday season, workers might take more half days. Do you think it would be best if your mailing was delivered first thing in the morning? Think strategically.”

Focus:

“Everyone is busy this time of year. Make your campaign easy to remember by focusing on one offer over a longer period rather than on multiple offers over shorter periods. One generous promotion will be remembered better amongst the multitude of competing offers sitting next to it in the inbox.”

Be compatible:

“There are more and more email clients and hosts out there. Your email looks different across many of them. If you haven’t already, open email accounts with as many different providers as possible so that you can test your message on Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook Express, MSN and others.”

“Also consider how your HTML will render in Firefox and IE. Do what you can to ensure that the quality of your message holds firm across multiple platforms. Sometimes, simplicity does wonders.”

“MailChimp.com is a great service that does all of the compatibility for you and provides a limited number of sends each month for free – take advantage of their generosity and great service.”

Clear for landing:

“Don’t forget the ultimate goal of your campaign – conversions. How awful would it be if your holiday email campaign was successful at bringing customers to your site but failed to convert any of that traffic to sales?”

“Make your call-to-action clear and easy to take on your landing pages. Ensure that your shopping cart is working properly and trimmed down to expedite action.”

Be considerate:

“Increasing the frequency of your mailings during the holiday season might irritate some of your recipients who are accustomed to a regularly paced delivery cycle. ”

“They might even think that it’s the start of a more aggressive strategy and request to opt-out. If you are going to increase the frequency of your mailing during the holidays, let your recipients know in advance, and specify what they can expect to receive from you during the period.”

That’s it, but please please please ask questions if you have them and remember Seybold Scientific for all of your online marketing needs.

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We all know that SMS is an opt in strategy – that you have to convince consumers to choose to receive messages
from you. There are three basic enticement techniques that work well:

1) Offer a Big Prize to One Winner

By offering something that is a big prize to one winner you can garner a lot of excitement and get people opting in to win the prize.

Be sure the prize is congruent with your long term offer. Don’t offer the chance to win free ice cream for a year if you want to send them weekly specials about shoes.

Also, know that your list may be most interested in winning the prize and not as interested in your regular contact. Be sure they are aware they are also signing up to get regular communication when they enter the contest or your list building efforts will fail.

2) Give Something to Everyone

Giving something to each person who signs up for your SMS campaign is an excellent incentive to get people who are truly interested in what you offer on your list. As an example, if you are a restaurant and give away a free lunch entrée to everyone, you can be sure these are people who want to eat at your restaurant.

The price of the free initial item is sure to be recuperated quickly in repeat business and you will have built up good will with your customers.

3) Capturing Customers When they Purchase

When is it that customers are probably the most happy with your business? When they are purchasing something. So putting your SMS offer at the point of purchase – either on a counter display or on the receipt or by verbal delivery from the customer service person – is smart marketing.

As the method of enticement you can use a discount on a future purchase or quite possibly offering alerts when discounts are available. These are your customers already, you don’t have to convince them to do business with you, just to receive regular communication from you.

Bottom line, you need to give people a REASON to want to sign up for your SMS campaign. You are, after all, asking them to give you one of their most prized pieces of information – their cell phone number. Make it a good, compelling and interesting reason and your campaigns will do much better.

“There is no better way to create, test, and modify Twitter-based marketing than ObjectiveMarketer. If you’re going to take heat for using Twitter as tool, you might as well do it well.” – Guy Kawasaki

http://objectivemarketer.com/

In the course of a day, someone cancels a meeting, someone misses a phone call, a project takes the back burner, you find yourself waiting for someone else. This time is the time most at risk to being wasted. It’s amazing what we do when the half hour seems free or extra. Instead of just throwing it away, here’s a list of things you could do instead that might improve your business relationships.

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