email marketing

As you may know from the email newsletters and bulletins you receive from us, we’ve been working on creative ways to keep in touch with our network of customers, prospects, and suppliers through email newsletters and email marketing.

It’s the best way we know to keep a name in front of people, so they remember you when they need your services, know the full range of services you offer, and understand the value you provide.

It’s seven times easier to sell more to an existing customer than to gain a new one. At the same time, 80% of sales take five to 12 contacts with the prospect to close a sale.

But the best way to beat the odds of that conventional marketing wisdom is with email marketing. Email is ubiquitous, even in the social media age. “As long as email remains the collection point for social networking updates, including alerts around new followers, discussion updates and friend requests, it will remain a powerful force in marketing and our lives,” reports the eMarketer research service.

Canright Communications can help you navigate through the powerful yet often confusing world of email marketing, social media, and customer relationship management (CRM). You can find a lot of inexpensive email-blast providers but few firms that provide comprehensive email programs.

Our Network Contact Program demystifies the process and ensures that you unlock the knowledge and expertise hidden in content throughout your business to stay in contact with your network of customers and prospects through:

• List Development
• LinkedIn Profile Updates
• Email Newsletters
• Ebooks

The bottom line: email marketing works. Here’s the menu of services you can select to create a custom email marketing program:

List Development

List Evaluation and Program Consultation……………….. FREE
CALL Collin Canright at 773 426-7000 or email collin@canrightcommunications.com

List Development Consulting……………………………….. $450

LinkedIn Profile Update

LinkedIn Individual…………………………………………… $225
We rewrite your profile to show what you do for your clients.

LinkedIn Corporate…………………………………………… $800
We do the same for your firm and four key employees.

Email Newsletter

Email Bulletin………………………………………………… $650
We write, design, and set up a custom email bulletin
you can use as an ongoing template.

Quarterly Enewsletter………………………………………. CALL for QUOTE
We design, write, and manage a complete custom
email newsletter every quarter.

Monthly Enewsletter………………………………………… CALL for QUOTE
We design, write, and manage a complete custom
email newsletter every month.

Enewsletter Template………………………………………. CALL for QUOTE
We produce one custom issue and train you to do the rest.

Ebook

Ebook Basic…………………………………………………. CALL for QUOTE
We take your presentation and rework it into a 12-page ebook.

Ebook Advanced …………………………………………… CALL for QUOTE
We research your topic, write, and design a 25-page ebook.

CALL Collin Canright at 773 426-7000 or email collin@canrightcommunications.com

Tags: email marketing
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Like a white paper, a pertinent and relevant ebook is a powerful lead-generating tool. Now we are not discussing ebooks as in Amazon Kindle ebooks—and there is some confusion because these days “ebook” means books read on electronic devices.

Instead, we are referring to electronic books, generally published in Adobe Acrobat format, that are used to show thought leadership, explain a subject, or take a position, much like traditional white papers.

The ebook is essentially a unique twist on the white paper format. The format provides a more engaging experience for the reader, builds a case, and uses a more design-intensive format. It’s fun, too. You see a lot of retro ’50s and early ’60s style designs and unique graphics in ebooks. This is definitely not white-paper style.

Just like a well-formed white paper, an ebook tells your prospects that you are a credible source of information, giving you that sought-after expert status. The best part about an ebook is that it is distributed widely for free and is intended to go viral.

In “The New Rules of Viral Marketing,” David Meerman Scott goes so far to say, “ebooks have become the stylish younger sister to the nerdy white paper.” He further stresses the importance the ebook serves by stating that, “ebooks have a great deal of importance to readers. People can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free. In my opinion, ebooks should be material people want to read, compared to the dense and usually boring white paper, which our buyers feel they should read but often don’t.”

We believe that each are valid tools. It all depends upon the specific marketing message and the audience you are trying to reach. And, the release of an ebook can also be a web and social media catalyst.

For more on ebooks and how they are used in marketing, see our Canright Network Contact Program. For more on white papers, download our own “White Paper Basics” report.

Tags: content marketing, email marketing
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Email newsletters remain highly relevant even in the social media age, according to a survey conducted by BredinBusiness Information. Some 79% of survey respondents reported that email newsletters were still relevant while 97% rated email newsletters as an important or very important source of business management advice.

In terms of content, the survey shows that email newsletter readers prefer industry news and “how-to” articles. About 86% of respondents look for industry news frequently or occasionally, followed by technology (78%), and sales and marketing (73%). On a scale of 1 (not important) to 5 (important), the survey shows, how-to content rated 3.6, slightly ahead of case studies, perspective pieces, product information and offers, and company news.

BredinBusiness Information conducted Marketing Online to SMBs August 28 to September 4, 2009 and based its results on responses from 381 principals of U.S.-based businesses with fewer than 500 employees.

Our experience with enewsletters parallels that research and has uncovered the following best practices for enewsletters:

Timing

Stick to the schedule. Of all the best practices, this is the one that counts. Regularity trumps creativity. Every time. Set a schedule and get the newsletter out on time. We tend to graciously or comically acknowledge schedule breaches when they occur, as they inevitably will.

The BredinBusiness Information survey shows that readers prefer enewsletters on a weekly (42%) and monthly (27%) frequency. Our own experience suggests that weekly newsletters must contain highly relevant, almost essential, content in order to retain readers.

Content

• Use a consistent sender and subject tag line.
• Make sure the sender is recognizable to your audience—the BredinBusiness Information survey indicated what “who” a newsletter is from is more important than “what” the subject is.
• Keep the subject line is compelling and short.
• Write one main article that provides the most information.

• “How-to” articles
• Review of industry trends
• Top 10 tips
• List of resources
• Answers to common client questions
• Interviews with associates
• Review of a book/resource we use

• Include a “personal touch.”

• Editor’s note
• Fun/creative section
• Jokes
• Photos

• Using 25% of the newsletter for business promotion is OK.

• Promos for services
• Testimonials

• Weave business success stories into articles/tips
• Write for click-through.
• Include links to other relevant information from all sources, including research reports and other information you drew on in writing your article.
• Add relevant links to your website and offers for better tracking and conversion.

Design

• Design with email reading habits in mind.
• Keep the overall design simple for easy readability
• Put highest value links near the top (easier for readers to take desired actions)
• Move images below the fold (readers with image blockers won’t see blocks in preview pane)
• Guide the eye  by using design elements to make an email or enewsletter “scanable” by the reader.
• Consider the email preview pane as most readers see an email in Outlook’s preview pane, so make sure the most important information displays there.
• Avoid clutter: you only have six seconds at most. Focus your message on what will compel a customer to read and take action.

Tags: content marketing, copywriting, Design, email marketing
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It all starts with the list. Traffic to the website or the blog is nice and essential. Followers and friends on social media are terrific. But a high-quality email is gold. List management is one of the most critical and under-appreciated skills in social media and email marketing.

I read and write a lot about social media and email marketing and how they help maintain contact with a network of customers and prospects, how they can help build a reputation of expertise, and how they can help generate leads. The one basic element that consistently gets short shrift in the thousands of blog posts written each week on social media marketing is: the list.

Many businesses use Outlook as their email program, and each employee maintains a list of the prospects, customers, and vendors they work with. The problem is that a master list doesn’t always exist, and if it does, it isn’t complete.

The first task for any retention and network building program is getting together the list. The list may go into a contact management system, like the Contact Manager edition of Salesforce.com or a list function of a third-party email vendor like Vertical Response or Constant Contact. But the list must exist, must be complete, and must be maintained.

So the first thing I advise to a business new to email marketing is to build as complete an email list as possible. This list becomes the basis of initial LinkedIn contacts and Facebook friends. It becomes the basis of regular emails sent to keep the business top of mind through interesting and educational content. It becomes the basis of public relations and media communications.

Home-grown lists are the best. Start with everyone you email for any reason and build from there. Include vendors, people you meet at networking events, customers, friends and family, current customers, and even past customers. You never know who will need your services or know someone who does.

Your email list is like a relationship: it needs to be constantly tended to. Remember, too, that a list should contain more than an email address or a name and an email address. A list without physical addresses is an incomplete list. You don’t know your customers completely if you don’t know where they’re located physically.

- Collin

Tags: email marketing
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One of the best ways to generate leads is to show what you know, and one of the best ways to show what you know is through great content. By distributing articles, blog posts, newsletters, reports, and other materials, you can become a trusted source on social media sites and feed your social media program with content that educates your prospects. In this way, your business can help theirs.

It’s called content marketing. Content marketing is the use of relevant and educational content to engage an audience and generate interest in an organization and its mission. Here are three content marketing tools you can use to feed your social media lead generating machine:

1. Enter the “white paper,” a ubiquitous and established tool

White papers have become a cornerstone of most lead-generating campaigns, and the format continues to be one of the most thriving campaign tools following the economic downturn. According to the “2009 Media Consumption Report” from TechTarget, the white paper continues to be the favorite content source buyers turn to when evaluating new technology. The content format also continues to have strong viral impact; nearly 93% of readers pass along up to half of the white papers they read and download, according to InformationWeek’s Best Practices Research Series on white papers.

For business marketers, white papers provide a way of generating leads in a way that builds trust and enhances reputations. A well-written white paper indicates that you and your organization are on the cutting edge, that you are a thought leader in your field, or that you know a market or technology extremely well. White papers can enhance your company’s credibility, educate prospects about your services, inform potential customers about ways to improve their business and profitability, and even change the world to make it a better place for your business, friends, and family.

2. The ebook: White paper alternative or replacement?

Like a white paper, a pertinent and relevant ebook is a powerful lead-generating tool. The ebook is essentially a unique twist on the white paper format. The format provides a more engaging experience for the reader, builds a case, and uses a more design-intensive format. It’s fun, too. You see a lot of retro ’50s and early ’60s style designs and unique graphics in ebooks. This is definitely not a white paper style.

Just like a well-formed white paper, an ebook tells your prospects that you are a credible source of information, giving you that sought-after expert status. The best part about an ebook is that it is distributed widely for free and is intended to go viral.

In “The New Rules of Viral Marketing,” David Meerman Scott goes so far to say, “ebooks have become the stylish younger sister to the nerdy white paper.” He further stresses the importance the ebook serves by stating that, “ebooks have a great deal of importance to readers. People can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free. In my opinion, ebooks should be material people want to read, compared to the dense and usually boring white paper, which our buyers feel they should read but often don’t.”

We believe that each are valid tools. It all depends upon the the specific marketing message and the audience you are trying to reach. And, the release of an ebook can also be a web and social media catalyst.

3. And…don’t discount email as a relevant tool for generating leads

When new innovations hit and catch fire, they are exciting partly because they fill a need, and partly because they are new. As each new tool becomes accepted, the old tools, such as steady email, take a back seat. But just because they are in the background doesn’t mean they are not necessary. Where would you be without email?

Each member of the social media trinity—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—can reach an audience, but that audience isn’t necessarily following your updates as religiously as they’re checking their email. People may log in to Facebook several times a day, but their email windows are constantly open. The fact remains: email is still popular.

Indeed, eMarketer reported in November 2009 that college students are holding tight to email use despite the explosion in social networking sites. “These results may be surprising to some, but not if you consider the role email continues to play in the day-to-day lives of Gen Y,” the report stated. “As long as email remains the collection point for social networking updates, including alerts around new followers, discussion updates and friend requests, it will remain a powerful force in marketing and our lives.”

Similarly, SocialTwist, a widget provider, reported in Social Media Sharing Trends 2009 that, “Despite the social media revolution – traditional forms of networking like email and instant messaging continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing content across the Internet. Nearly 60 percent of overall sharing happens over emails.”

So don’t discount the email newsletter and bulletin. For many businesses, a monthly email newsletter, coupled with social media posts, can do more to bring leads in the door than anything else. It keeps your content right where they live—in email—and markets through education, which is the most effective thing any marketing tool can do.

-Collin and Christina

Tags: B2B marketing, content marketing, email marketing
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The most critical element of maintaining contact and building relationships with a network is to touch people as many time as practical using as many ways as possible—from emails to blogs to newsletters to social media to phone calls to face-to-face meetings. Here are some ways to maintain contact with a network that we know, from our own experience, work:

1. Publish a networking calendar.

We’ve created the Canright Calender, a list of networking events in Chicago for executives, marketers, entrepreneurs, and innovators that we consider attending, and send it by email each week. It’s become the thing we do that people comment on and appreciate the most, building goodwill for our firm. We also run into people we know at events we would not have known they would be interested in, but they read about the event in our networking email and come. Several other people do the same thing, and we list their calendars at the bottom of our weekly Canright Featured Event emails and posts.

2. Send a regular enewsletter.

The key word is “regular,” which is a synonym for “consistent.” The content is, of course, the news business thrived for years on familiarity and punctuality, and those qualities are still required to make an impression. We seek to make our enewsletter personal through our staff media recommendations–they’re the more commented on and read portions of every issue of Canright Communicates.

3. Solicit comments for your blog.

In writing our White Paper Basics report, we posted a link with a request for comments on the topic on LinkedIn and sent a request for comments in emails both to people we knew well and people we hardly knew at all, as a way of “crowdsourcing” information. We posted the feedback on our blog and incorporated it into our report.

4. Distribute articles through social networks and media.

We wrote a summary of recent research in the payments market as part of a promotion surrounding the SIBOS 2009 Conference. We emailed the article to contacts we thought might be interested, posted the article on LinkedIn groups and the SWIFT payments community, and even wrote an article about the article in ourAugust 2009 newsletter. LinkedIn became the top referral source to our blog.

5. Continue the “old-fashioned” ways.

The telephone still works as well as it did when the Bell System advertised in LIFE magazine “You could never without a telephone” in 1953, though most people believe that email gets more response. I regularly call frequent readers of our enewsletters and people who register for our white paper report to see what their interests are and whether we can help with their marketing.

I aim to meet with people in person. Indeed, in-person meetings—off-line connections, if you will—remain the goal of most network contacts. Perhaps it’s a predictable backlash to connecting online or to continuing travel restrictions, but Hyatt Hotels is using the slogan, “Great Happens When People Get Together” for its current meetings and events promotion.

Tags: email marketing, networking Chicago, Social Media
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Social media is all the rage and will cement its place in the marketing mix in 2010 as companies realize that people are interested in the “communication” portion of “marketing communications,” whether they are consumers or business buyers. What about good “old-fashioned email,” as I called it in the “Content Marketing Strategy, White Paper Tactics”?

Each member of the social media trinity—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—can reach an audience, but that audience isn’t necessarily following your updates as religiously as they’re checking their email. People may log in to Facebook several times a day, but their email windows are constantly open. The fact remains: email is still popular.

Indeed, eMarketer reported in November 2009 that college students are holding tight to email use despite the explosion in social networking sites. “These results may be surprising to some, but not if you consider the role email continues to play in the day-to-day lives of Gen Y,” the report stated. “As long as email remains the collection point for social networking updates, including alerts around new followers, discussion updates and friend requests, it will remain a powerful force in marketing and our lives.”

Similarly, SocialTwist, a widget provider, reported in Social Media Sharing Trends 2009 that, “Despite the social media revolution – traditional forms of networking like email and instant messaging continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing content across the Internet. Nearly 60 percent of overall sharing happens over emails.”

As perhaps the top social and marketing developments of 2009, social media are adding a personal touch to the public web—at breakneck speed. Or more precisely, at conversational speed.

Yet because of its ubiquity, email retains its position as the wires of online communication. Any 2010 marketing strategy should take that reality into account.

-Collin

Tags: email marketing, Social Media
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At the start of the new year, I set my strategies and goals and plan my tactics on how to achieve them. This year, we are positioning our marketing communications services on content marketing: the use of relevant and educational content to engage an audience and generate interest in an organization and its mission.

A good portion of social media is based on sharing content, whether through articles and blog posts distributed on the social-media trinity of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Or through pay-per-click advertising, website downloads, or good old-fashioned email marketing.

(And if email marketing is old fashioned, what of print? Maybe it’s not wired but certainly not expired. Most of the projects we do happen to be print.)

The first tactic in our own program is a focus on white papers. We’ve updated our white paper report as “White Paper Basics: the Dos, Don’ts, Whys, Whats, and Hows of White Papers.”

The report explains why white papers are written, what they are–and are not–and how to use them to educate an audience and generate leads. We also provide examples of different types of white papers, including a few we’ve written. Our list of white paper and lead-generation resources is excellent.

Feel free to download a copy–no registration required–and pass it on, along with our January Jump Start Offer: 10% off the cost of writing and designing a white paper or report.

Call Collin Canright at 773 426-7000.

Tags: content marketing, email marketing, Social Media, white papers
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