10 Reasons to Market Via Email

Email marketing has one problem: it's not as appealing or shiny as Social Media. Fortunately for your business, that's the only problem because when it comes to comparing them as marketing vehicles and return-on-investments. Email is by far the most effective way to directly affect your bottom line and actually grow your business.

Here are 5 of 10 ways that marketing emails will help your bottom line. I'll finish up the other 5 in my next post.

1) Penetration
There are more than 3.2 billion email accounts today. 95% of online consumers use email, and 91% check their email at least once a day. Simply, there is no competition. More importantly, it is such an integral part of life, no person walks around saying he will quit email.


2) Reach
The idea of "reach" is completely different between Social Media and Email. In social media there is the "potential reach" that refers to the number of followers. Granted, email is only opened by a fraction of subscribers, but the difference is that the actual message will reach its destination and then there is the option to read it.

In in the first half of 2013:

• 18% of all email messages were either blocked or went missing
• 4% were delivered to the spam or junk folder

Even if 22% emails get lost, there is still a higher potential than posting on Facebook where 74% of your messages are potentially missed.


3) Life Span
75% of Facebook post impressions were achieved in just two hours and 30 minutes and 75% of the "Reach" happens in only one hour and 50 minutes. The life span of a Tweet is so short, its popularity can be predicted in the first five minutes. Emails don't die. Email sits inside the subscriber's inbox waiting to be acknowledged, even if it's just to delete it.

4) Return-on-Investment
60% of marketers say email marketing is producing ROI and 32% believe it will eventually. For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. Both email and social media have costs, the difference is that most email providers have a monthly fee or some kind of cost and most social platforms don't. But social media isn't free.

5) Analytics
Social media has proven that measuring success is still under discussion and, many companies have different ways and systems to do so. Measuring ROI produces hundreds of blog posts every year without coming to a solid conclusion. Even the simply task of tracking traffic from social media is complicated. Email on the other hand has a set of solid metrics that have been standard for years: growth, open rate, click rate, complaints, unsubscribes, and you can take it from there and even track sales and revenue. A simple formula can tell you what the monetary value of your email subscriber is. Best of luck figuring out the value of the Twitter followers.

So what do you think so far? Do you think emails are a good way to advertise and to help your bottom line? Or do you think they are a waste of time? What happens when you have an advertisement pop up in your email? Do you open it or delete it?

Stealing Your Fingerprint

Apple released the iPhone 5s back in September, and one of the newest features was the fingerprint recognition. The fingerprint recognition allowed the user to unlock their phones with their fingerprints. Sounds like a great idea; very secure, fingerprints are one of a kind. A man in Germany however proves that is far from true. Fingerprints are everywhere. Anything we touch leaves a fingerprint, and with technology today all one has to do is take a picture of the fingerprint and they can make a copy of your unique one-of-a-kind fingerprint to use to unlock your phone. Granted not everyone in the world is smart enough to use this technology to gain your fingerprint, but the main point was to show that you should not rely on fingerprint security to hide important information. Your average Joe could use it on their phone because they probably are not running a business or have top secret information on their phone, but people who have very important data on their phones should not rely on the security of fingerprint recognition.

Do you have the new iPhone 5s?
Have you setup the fingerprint recognition?
Have you ever used a device that had fingerprint recognition? (i.e. computers, car locks, etc.)

How to Grow Your Business Network with Social Media

Before you can sell a product you have to project yourself as company or business and you have to create a trusted relationship with your future customer.  In this article, you’ll discover four ways to use social media to find and establish relationships with new prospects and leads for your business.

 

#1: Join a Conversation on Twitter

Tweet chats are great for person-to-person networking on Twitter and they can act as one of the single best lead generation tools in social media. You can consult a number of lists to quickly locate chats that are relevant to you. These lists include hashtags and other key information like date, time and the name of the host or owner of the chat.

The best thing about tweet chats is that while almost everyone starts out a stranger, over time the participants begin to know one another and develop relationships that extend beyond the regularly scheduled chat. During the chat, you’ll find people who ask questions you can answer. Your replies will be limited to 140 characters, so they’ll need to be as concise as possible. Use the opportunity to let participants know you’re open to accepting a follow and a direct message from them and carrying the conversation further by phone or on another platform.

 

#2: Participate in LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups hold a lot of opportunity for networking with people who fit your prospect profile. There’s an easy way to find the groups you are interested in. Hover on Interests in the header navigation and click on Groups. From here, click on More>> in the Groups You May Like box. From here, use keywords specific to your industry to search for and find groups relevant to your business. You can filter your search results by Relationship, Categories and Languages.

Visit the profiles of those folks and see if any of them fit your prospect profile. Follow them on LinkedIn to get to know them better and when the opportunity arises, ask them to connect with you. Use tags to sort your new contacts into one of two groups—prospects and strategic partners who can refer prospects. The tags will make it easier for you to keep track of the relationships as they evolve. If there’s not an existing group that fits your needs, create one to network with your current prospects and attract new ones.

 

#3: Share Insights From an Event

When you attend trade shows or conferences, share the highlights and notes with people who can’t attend and you’ll attract people interested in the same niche. On Twitter, share your notes in real time with your followers. Use the official event hashtag in your tweets so they are included in the larger conversation, and they’ll be visible to people who don’t follow you. Make sure you pay attention to new follows during this time, as they could well be new prospects for you. You can accomplish the same goal with your company’s website. A tool such as Storify will help you consolidate your notes into a blog post with a rundown of all of the most important points made during the conference.

Pay attention to the folks who follow along, comment or retweet your information. This is a simple way to surface invisible prospects that you might otherwise miss. Connect with each person on the platform or network that makes the most sense, and when the time is right, reach out and offer your help.

#4: Interview the People You Want to Work With

Use social media video tools for more strategic networking.
Here’s how it works. First you create a list of people with whom you most want to work. Arrange to do a quick interview with each one. Interview your subjects at industry conferences, launch events, maybe even in an airport during a layover. If you can’t be there in person, arrange to do the interview on a Google+ Hangout, then publish the video to YouTube. Don’t introduce your own product or service into the equation; rather let your interviewee shine. Ask a question that encourages your subject to showcase his or her own expertise, then turn those interviews into helpful content and share them on your social networks.

So what about you? Would you use Linkedin or Twitter to put your business on the map? Would you be willing to keep up with the responsibilities of posting and answering comments to keep your business thriving?

 

 

Video Meetings

Smaller businesses tend to communicate differently than larger entities. Instead of internal meetings, you spend more time reaching out individually to customers, prospects and partners. Making calls can be costly, especially if you’re talking to colleagues and customers on their mobile phones or when they’re in other parts of the world. Keeping costs to a minimum is vital to improving your bottom line. Do you think large business should use Skype to communicate, rather than taking time and effort to try and gather employee's to have a business meeting across multiple departments?

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard gives you a display of the most important information of a company. It shows you the objectives you need to achieve consolidated to a single screen. This is so the information can be easily monitored at a glance. So in essence it is just a single page comprising of a businesses most important performance indicators. It helps not only executives, but the general workforce to see where the business is under performing and areas where they need to work on, or areas they are doing well in. 

The essential goal is to have it all on one page for easy access, just like the dashboard of your car. The dashboard in your car is there for you to look down at quickly and know what is going on in your car (such as check engine lights or speedometer). A businesses dashboard works essentially the same way. It's primarily used to find correlations, trends, outliers, patterns, and business conditions in data.

- Have any of you ever heard of dashboards before?

- Have you ever seen a businesses dashboard, or used one before?

- What could be some potential problems with a dashboard?

http://www.dashboardinsight.com/articles/digital-dashboards/fundamentals/what-is-a-dashboard.aspx