Exclusive Tips to Successful Email Marketing

As interviewed: Gail Goodman, Chairman, President and CEO, Constant Contact

　

What are some ways to keep your customers opening and reading your emails?

1-Compelling contentwill engage your readers and make them more likely to keep reading. It’s important to send personalized communications that address your audience’s concerns and needs without being overly sales-oriented. This will position you as a source of valuable information and even as an expert.

2-Use your newsletter as a tool to share all types of important information to your client base. Share information about what new merchandise you have in your retail store or a recipe off your new menu. And, have an interactive Q&A section.

3-Everyone loves images, so include graphics, photos, or links to online videos. The more knowledge you can share helps to create a better customer relationship.

4-A monthly contest in your newsletter is a fun and interesting way to engage your customers. Try asking questions about what their funniest do-it-yourself home improvement story is or draw them to the website to submit an entry for a contest.

　

What should a business keep in mind when creating an online survey?

The most important consideration when getting started is to define your objective. Before you start developing questions or building out a survey, you must ask yourself these two questions:

What do you want to survey so you can accomplish this goal?

Who  do you want to discover/explore/track, or what problem do you want to solve?

　

Exclusive Tips to Successful Email Marketing

Electronic Commerce and the Transformation of Marketing part1

THE LOGIC OF ELECTRONIC MARKETS
The concept of electronic markets is not very new. Electronic marketplaces have
been around since the 1970s. Consider the computerized airline reservation systems such
as United Airlines’ Apollo or American Airlines’ Sabre. These allowed customers to
book flights on almost every airline via travel agents around the world. Access to these
systems, however, required the special expertise of travel agent. Or, consider J.C.
Penney’s Telaction, an electronic home-shopping system that allowed customers to shop
via a cable television channel and a push-button phone (Malone, Yates, and Benjamin
1989).


Growth of the Internet
None of these electronic marketplaces, however, created an air of excitement
comparable to that created by Internet-based markets. The tremendous growth of the
Internet has led millions of companies to set up shop on the Internet and over 100 million
consumers worldwide are eagerly participating in the global online marketplace. The
arrival of easy-to-use Web browsers transformed the Internet from a specialized, textoriented
medium to the multimedia, massive, and global cyberspace. Internet traffic is
approximately doubling each year, which represents extremely fast growth, much faster
that increases in other communication services (Goffman and Odlyzko, 2000). By
December 1997, about 1.5 million domain names had been registered (Friel 1997). By
early 1999, the registered domain names numbered 5.3 million and by February 2000,
there were about 11 million sites (Tschong, 2000). By mid-2001, the number of Internet
sites exceeded 100 million (http://www.isc.org/) and Internet users globally were almost
500 million (. Easy, inexpensive wireless access could push the number of global users
beyond 1 billion in just a few years. The number using the Web in English had fallen
below 50% by 2000 and would reduce to fewer than 30% by 2003.

Electronic Commerce and the Transformation of Marketing part2

ELECTRONIC COMMERCE: DEFINITIONS AND TYPOLOGY
So what exactly does electronic commerce in electronic marketplaces mean? It
includes the notion of paperless exchanges of business information using EDI (electronic
data interchange), electronic mail (E-mail), electronic bulletin boards, electronic funds
transfer (EFT), and other similar technologies (Strader and Shaw, 1997). Electronic data
interchange is often seen as the foundation cornerstone of electronic commerce. “EDI is
a common industry standard for preparing, processing and communicating business
transactions electronically with other companies, regardless of their different computing
platforms” (Anon., 1995a). Although electronic commerce can be conducted over many
different systems – cable shopping networks, the French Minitel system, various
Videotex systems, or online services such as the America Online – none of these
mechanisms has the far reaching scope and potential for transforming the marketing
function as the generic, Web-based Internet (Hoffman and Novak 1996; [Weiber, 1998
#2271]).
Definitions of electronic commerce have been around for while and have evolved
over time, resulting in ever more sophisticated characterizations [Greenstein, 2000
#2297]. One of the early definitions for electronic markets was given by Malone, Yates,
and Benjamin (1989, p. ES24) who referred to it as “networks that let customers compare
and order offerings from competing suppliers.” Later, Bakos (1991, p. 296) introduced
the terms “electronic marketplace” and “electronic market system” which he defined as
“an interorganizational information system that allows the participating buyers and sellers
to exchange information about prices and product offerings”. These definitions were still
somewhat vague but Rayport and Sviokla (1995, p. 75) rendered a much more
comprehensive definition of what they called “marketspace”. They saw marketspace as
“a virtual realm where products and services exist as digital information and can be
delivered through information-based channels.” This definition reflected to a greater
degree the rapid development of the Internet, the new global medium that no longer
limited the environment of electronic commerce to organizations as Bakos’s definition
did. Even more precise were Hoffman and Novak (1996) who introduced the term
hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CME) which they defined as “a dynamic
distributed network, potentially global in scope ... which allows consumers and firms to
1) provide and interactively access hypermedia content (i.e. ‘machine interaction’), and
2) communicate through the medium (i.e. ‘person interaction’).” While this definition is
clearly restricted to hypermedia environments of which the World Wide Web is certainly
the most popular at the moment, all the other terms encompass a wider spectrum of
platforms for electronic commerce. For the remainder of this paper the term electronic
marketplace is used for networks that allow the exchange of digital information for the
purpose of conducting business. This includes global networks such as the Internet as
well as local, proprietary networks.

Electronic Commerce and the Transformation of Marketing part3

Electronic Customer Relationships
In cyberspace, producing or service providing firms also have to stress
relationship-based marketing plans in order to achieve customer loyalty. Electronic
marketplaces offer a variety of ways to do this through direct technology links (Sarkar,
Butler, and Steinfield, 1995). Establishing a site on the World Wide Web to advertise
products, provide customer service, or elicit comments is just one option. Companies
operating in both the electronic marketplace as well as in the physical marketplace have
the unique opportunity to “sense and respond” to customer needs rather than to simply
make and sell products and services (Haeckel and Nolan, reported in Rayport and
Sviokla, 1995). USAA, for example, uses intelligent sensing methods to match a
customer need to an appropriate source of supply (Rayport and Sviokla, 1995).
Successful actors in electronic marketplaces will also try to re-impose switching
costs in the form of loyalty programs similar to frequent flyer accounts. E-Trade, for
example, awards allows those customers who are heavy traders to use its convenient
“Power E-Trade” site. Schwab provides its preferred customers with access to special
stock research reports via its “Signature Service” link. New and innovative switching
incentives like the idea of a “cool site”, a “sticky” site, or a must-visit portal have
developed rapidly and are playing an important role in attracting new customers in the
electronic marketplace. Such categorization may confer power to third parties or
cybermediaries designating these sites, especially in a situation of information overload
(Dholakia, 1995). For example, services such as Media Metrix (http://www.mediametrix.com/),
Nielsen Netratings (http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/), and CyberAtlas-Watchfire
(cyberatlas.Internet.com) have emerged to measure the traffic to, “stickiness” of, and
response efficiency of leading websites.

INTRODUCTION TO STRATEGIC MARKETING IN PRACTICE part4

TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE MARKETING MIX
Regardless of stock market upheavals, electronic markets are here to stay.
Companies wanting to maintain or gain a competitive edge can no longer neglect
electronic marketplaces and the Internet. But how can companies make effective use of
this new medium? Simply transposing traditional marketing strategies into the world of
electronic marketplaces will not work. The Internet is not a place for sending out blatant
advertisements to E-mail accounts around the world as fierce consumer debates on
listservs and in discussion groups evidence. Where companies quickly see the benefits of
“viral marketing” consumers see nothing but spam (unwanted email). Aggressive push
marketing strategies not only prove inefficient but detrimental on the Web and will
increasingly give way to some form of permission marketing [Godin, 1999 #2256].
Frustrated by the low click-through rate of advertising banners on the Web, companies
become more aggressive again. Recently, many e-companies have changed their
advertising policies and allow now for much larger banner displays on their Web-sites. It
is too early to tell but chances are that this strategy is headed for another disaster. As
Richard Mandeberg, President and CEO of iQ.COM puts it, “[T]he Internet was never
meant for spewing banners – it’s at its best when it provides true interactive
communication between brand and customer. The Net has already proven itself an
effective, measurable direct marketing vehicle and will ultimately become the most
efficient channel for managing two-way customer relationships” [Anon., 2001 #2383].
But for this to happen, it behooves companies to adopt an attitude that is in line with the
culture of conversation that characterizes the Internet [Levine, 2000 #2282].
This global network has a strong culture of free discourse and a bias against
anything resembling a sales pitch (Cronin 1994). Yet it is uniquely suited to develop
strong relationships, establish dynamic customer communities, and enter into two-way
communication with highly involved lead users of technical products (Cross, 1994;
Levine, 2000). Internet and other electronic marketplaces, however, seem to pose
opportunities and threats that do not fit very well in the traditional marketing concept of
the four P’s (see Table 1). What is needed is a new and extended framework. In
electronic marketplaces, the boundaries of the marketing-mix elements are getting
increasingly blurred.

INTRODUCTION TO STRATEGIC MARKETING IN PRACTICE part1

Marketing drives the business agenda

Marketing is a set of activities concerned with creating value for shareholders and other stakeholders by
creating and capturing exceptional value for customers. Organizations expect professional marketers to
develop an increasing sense of ownership for the whole customer experience; this requires them to be
more aware of the operational business agenda.
Professional marketers in publicly quoted or limited companies have to:
 * Focus on the long term – While other business functions can maximize economic profit through
    efficiency, marketing is the only way to create value. Marketing typically creates three times more
    value than other functions.
 * Create and Capture value for customers – Marketers create value by increasing the value perceived by
    customers in an organization’s products and services. By increasing perceived value, marketers create the
    opportunity for premium pricing through which economic profit is increased.
 * Take charge of the business agenda – Marketing uses its activities and assets to create customer
    value. Shareholders measure the value that the business has created for them as the sum of dividends
    paid and increase in share price. Marketing has to take charge of investment in marketing assets and
    the activities that create value.

 Marketing activities in organizations can be grouped broadly into four models:

Sales Support
Common in SME’s and some B2B contexts, the
emphasis is essentially reactive with marketing
supporting a direct sales force and including
activities such as tele-marketing and responding
to inquiries.

INTRODUCTION TO STRATEGIC MARKETING IN PRACTICE part 2

Marketing contributes to corporate and business plans and develops its own functional plan at an operational level.

Areas of focus for SMIP

The SMIP module is designed to test the application of knowledge gained within the other three Post-graduate
modules, alongside the more contemporary marketing issues that affect a range of marketing activities.
These include:

Globalization
Many multinationals have operated globally for years
but technology is driving change, enabling smaller
companies the opportunity of operating globally. The
introduction of the Euro has lead to the development
of pan-European markets .

Organizational Issues
The culture and nature of the organization, due to
inappropriate structures or personnel, can lead to the
success or failure of the planned marketing strategy.

Sustainability
Increased concerns over climatic change and
environmental deterioration are of critical importance
to marketers. It is important that constraints imposed
by the environment are considered.

Constraints
Resources available, either financial or HR related,
can significantly restrict an organization’s ability to
react within its market sector. A sound knowledge
of basic financial statements is essential