What You Don’t Know About Email Marketing

Email Marketing. Doesn’t seem that complicated right? Take a list of email addresses, copy and paste them in. Come up with an email and send it out. Simple, right. Uhhhh, nope.

NEWSFLASH: The challenge in email marketing is making sure the emails land in the recipient’s inboxes. Why is this a problem? The service providers.

The service providers are the companies that operate people’s email. Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. If you didn’t know, these companies operate email for people so they can sell advertising on their websites. Now, if their users (people who use the email) recieve spam consistently, they’re not going to tolerate it these days. The service providers do not want anything messing with their advertising dollars.

So they set strict guidelines. For every 500 emails that are sent out, sp’s require no more than 2 people marking the email as spam. If this happens, your email address becomes black-listed and any email that you try and send will either be not delivered or land right into people’s junk mail folder.So, it’s important that when doing email marketing, that you send email to your customers, people you have good relationships with.

Next week i’ll have a post on how you can do email marketing for people who don’t know you so you can generate new business.

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2011 Will Be The Year Of The Smartphone

According to Business Insider, only 26% of Verizon subscribers, have smartphones! (For those, like my dad and other older people, who don’t know what a smartphone is, it’s a cell phone that has internet access) But yes, only 26%! AND 75% of contract subscribers that are due for upgrades, are currently upgrading to smartphones! AT&T’s has a bigger smartphone customer-base percentage wise, but it’s still only 35%!

Nielsen is also chiming in that by the end of the year, there will be 150 million-160 million Americans with smartphones! How do these #’s compare to how many people who the internet on their computers? The U.S. has a little bit above 200 million users! 200 million pc internet users! 150-160 million smartphone users! Get the picture? Well, if you still dont, here’s a visual:

Let me be unequivocally clear here. THESE NUMBERS ARE CRAZY!!! If you run a small business and your website is not optimized for smartphone users, you’ll be MISSING OUT! In the next year, in my humble opinion, every small business that has a website should have a mobile website. The difference between a mobile website and regular website is that the mobile website is narrow, vertically. The link buttons are especially big. The overall navigation of the site is so easy 5 year-olds and people over 60 alike won’t get lost on it : )   (No offense to those over 60 lacking internet know-how. I, myself for instance don’t even know how to change the oil in my car. Everybody has their skill-sets)

One last thing to keep an eye on is how media buying, aka pay per click is effected. Google is already experimenting with “pay per call” for smartphone users. So in other words, instead of Google charging anytime someone clicks on the link to your site, they charge for every click on the phone # that causes your phone to start dialing the #. There have been a lot of people trying to figure out the right business model for pay per call, but i could totally see it working extremely well with smartphone users. Hopefully other publisher networks will follow suit in doing what Google is. Keep an eye on it.

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Top 9 Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Emarketer recently did a survey with a number of small businesses that have been using social media, to name the top benefits of using it. The following are the results:

At the risk of sounding obvious, it’s always important to have goals and understand why you’re doing any form of marketing. When doing social media marketing, this is good list to start with as far as figuring out what you want to get out of it.

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Why I Started This Blog

For those who don’t know me well, i can be pretty blunt. Some would even say it’s one of my flaws. I just wanted to set the record straight on why i’m taking valuable time out of my day to blog about internet marketing.

Here’s reason #1: TO MAKE MORE MONEY. Yes, I did just say that. Again, if anyone who blogs says they don’t do it to make more money is fibbing. On this blog, you’ll always get my honest take. As a matter of fact, there’s a pretty good chance that whenever I blog, it’ll make some people mad. And that’s great! Because opinions are supposed to be polarizing.

Now, there are other reasons I’m blogging besides wanting to make more glorious profits. There’s a lot of information out there. Tons! Where do you even start?? And how do you even find the time to read it all?? And then there’s bloggers who write about junk because there’s nothing else to write about.

Here, i’ll blog 6 times a week only on the most important stuff that does matter. And in risking people thinking i’m arrogant, I’ll say that if i’m not blogging about it, it’s not important. Cheers : )

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