Why Your Marketing Efforts Are Failing

j0387302Have you ever heard the phrase, “It goes in one ear and out the other?” well, besides referring to my 4 year old daughter, I secretly think this of my clients or potential customers at times. In this case I’m referring to your marketing plan…you know that somewhat seemingly great plan you drafted when you first began your business. Or maybe you meant to or, as one client tells me, it’s all in her head. Well, in her head it will stay unless she actually puts the plan in writing and puts it in motion. (She’s heard this all before by the way)

So where is your marketing plan? There is no other way to say this, but marketing is constant. It is a process that never ends. It is not a one-time project. When you stop marketing, people WILL forget about you, or never know you exist. Keep your name and message in front of them and it doesn’t matter if you’ve done business with them before or not, the next time they are in need of your service or product, they will think of you first. Why? Because you’re consistent and have established a relationship with them. If they only hear from you once or twice a year, chances are you’re not going to hear from them.

One of the biggest mistakes a business can make is maintaining this mentality of only marketing when they need the business. Not only is this a very dangerous road to follow, but it is ineffective, time consuming, and this will not solve your problem. Sure it might get you one or two customers, but then there you are again a few months later wondering where you’re going to get your next client from to pay the bills.

If you’re like the client I mentioned earlier, then you might be thinking, “I don’t have the funds to market all the time.” I’m not sure why business owners discount marketing as a way to save money. I’m going to throw another well-known phrase at you now, “you have to spend money to make money.” Now where this phrase is somewhat true, it is not entirely accurate as I’m pretty sure it was coined before the Internet existed.

The fact is you can do a whole lot of marketing, direct or indirect, that costs you absolutely nothing, and almost all of them are using the Internet. A few examples are:

These are just a few ideas to get you going. If your marketing efforts are failing, then it’s time to reevaluate your methods. Of course there are plenty of ways to market using paid avenues. But that’s another post for another day and the point to this one is there are plenty of ways to market your business without paying a dime.

As a side note and to give you a perfect example using 2 of the above methods, I follow a local restaurant called Sal & Mookies on Twitter. A few weeks ago I saw a Twitter message from them – they were giving away 2 $100 gift cards to their restaurant. To enter all you had to do was to re-tweet their message using Twitter or leave a message on their FaceBook page. I of course sent a tweet out and then left a message on their FaceBook page…not expecting to win because I NEVER win anything. Guess what? I was one of the winners! Hubby and I loaded the girls up last weekend and headed over to Sal & Mookies for dinner. What they didn’t know was that we have never been to Sal & Mookies prior to this visit and all because I won a gift card. We’ve heard of them of course, we see their name all over town…they’re kind of famous around here, but we had just never been in all our years here. The point to all of this is that they will have a customer for life. Not because we won a gift card, but because they got us into their establishment, we had fantastic service, and the food was OMG good!

So be creative and don’t drop the ball on your marketing plan. Oh, and if you don’t have one, then now’s the time to draft one out and start implementing it immediately. You don’t have to do everything at once. Start small and work your way up to bigger things.

The Key to Subject Lines

keyIn design and marketing, it’s all about image and getting your message across. So brainstorming and offering advice to my clients just comes with the territory when you design logos, websites and various other printed marketing materials. But what about email marketing campaigns? Because I help set up and manage eZines, broadcast messages, and drip campaigns, the subject line always seems to be a hot topic…and the hardest to come up with at times seemingly.

So what’s my advice on subject lines for email campaigns? Simple…the subject line of your email should describe the content of your email. Sound stupidly simple?

Besides those who use their subscribers to only sell, sell, sell, I believe the masses would totally agree with me. Nothing is more annoying than a confusing or misleading subject line. You’ll simply aggravate your subscribers and in turn lose them all together. Case in point: I received one this week titled ” did you blow up my server??” (written exactly like that). Needless to say I unsubscribed immediately because all their subject lines were seriously that stupid.

If you’re sending a newsletter, then put the name of the newsletter and date or issue number in the subject line. If you’re sending a special or promotion, let them know what’s inside via the subject line. If your subject line sound salesy, chances are they won’t open it anyway which really defeats the purpose, right?

The bottom line is when it comes to email marketing, the best subject lines are direct, to the point, and tells what’s inside. Your subscribers will appreciate it and won’t be so hasty to drop out all together.

Did You Know?

Did you know that you can create a backup of all your active lists in Aweber?

aweber-logo1If you didn’t, it’s super easy and takes just a few minutes.

  1. Login to Aweber
  2. Click on the “Home” link
  3. Click on the “Create and Manage Lists” link next to the “Current List” drop-down box.
  4. Click the “Back Up & Export All Active Lists” link. You will get a pop-up window at this point. Select the email address to send the backup notification to and click “Export All.”

For now, that’s it. Once Aweber has created your backup file, you will receive an email message…the one you chose above…letting you know it is available for download.

At that point, follow all of the steps above, only when you get the pop up window this time, there will be a “Link to Download.” Click that link to download and backup all your active lists. This link is available for 2 weeks from the date it was created.

So how often should you backup your lists? I think it depends on the amount of lists you have, the number of subscribers, and how active your account is. I’m sure Aweber has backup methods in place, but nothing is infallible. Of course it also depends on what you’re comfortable with. Me being the queen of backup, backup, backup, I do this monthly on Aweber. However, if I had a ton more subscribers (hint, hint), I may begin doing a backup more frequently.

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Google Feeds Gone Wild?

I’ve probably mentioned several times how much I love Aweber. Nothing has changed, but this last week I was shocked to see my blog broadcast, that is released to my subscribers every Tuesday through Aweber, was…well a little off. One of my good friends, and subscribers, forwarded the broadcast to me asking, “What the heck?”

Well it didn’t take me long to see exactly what she was referring to. Seems instead of sending only the last week’s new posts, it included a slew of older posts from December…ten of them to be exact. I’m sure my other subscribers were just as confused and wondered why on earth I would send these old posts from last year.

Racking my brain, I couldn’t figure out why this would happen all of a sudden. I hadn’t changed any of those blog posts, I hadn’t changed my blog broadcast in Aweber, so what happened?

I immediately put in a support ticket to Aweber to see if they could help figure this problem it out. After investigating my problem, their reply alluded that it looked as though my RSS feed had changed. Well it only took me a few seconds to realize they may actually be right. Just the week before I had logged into my FeedBurner account, only to be met with the following message:

feedburner

Now, this was a little weird. First of all I have never received any communication via email or otherwise that Google had acquired FeedBurner. Second, there was absolutely no information on this page, just an ultimatum basically, to move my feeds to a Google account.

This is not exactly the right way to go about doing things, Google. I mean I’m a pretty big fan of Google, and use many of their applications, but the least they could have done is give someone a head’s up on what is going on and about to happen, especially on something that is this sensitive to my business and can potentially affect my subscribers.

So I go through the seemingly quick process of moving my feeds – I mean I have no choice in the matter after all. There is no work around here, no way to view my feed information, no way to access my actual FeedBurner account, until I go through the process of moving them to my Google account…and all seems well.

Until of course my blog broadcast goes out the following Tuesday with ten old blog posts from December, most of which were a series from my 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway promotion. How could Google be so careless to allow this to happen? I mean Google isn’t exactly a Mickey Mouse setup…they are Google for heaven’s sake.

So to my subscribers, I do apologize for the hiccup of last Tuesday and hope that you didn’t miss the actual new posts that included Freebie Friday – Douglas Vitkauskas Fonts and Creative Spotlight: Wee Walk for Clyde’s Hope. As for Google, well, I hope they have fixed the problem for others by now instead of letting everyone fend for themselves in a situation that we had no say so over.

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