Have You Considered a Newsletter for Your Clients?
Successful internet marketing involves a number of undertakings. It starts with great web design and professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO), bringing traffic to your site, but it cannot end there. Your web design and internet marketing effort should engage the viewer, leading them to understand that they are getting value for the time spent browsing your site. In some situations, a newsletter can provide this value.
It is true that a newsletter is more labor intensive and time consuming than some other forms of email marketing. An email campaign can be a cost effective way to put your business or professional practice in front of hundreds or thousands of people. However, a well-written newsletter can create a sense of ‘family’ or establish a professional relationship more effectively than email marketing services used alone.
For some business or professional practice organizations, this is especially true. If you provide professional services in a field like medicine, law or accounting, you have a set of skills and a library of knowledge that can be of value to your clients or potential clients. Email marketing services can put these skills and knowledge in front of thousands of people, but to many of them, it will seem like mere online advertising. A newsletter is far more personal and relevant to the reader’s needs.
A group practice and/or individual doctor might publish a newsletter addressing current medical questions in a timely manner. Their patients could be informed about subjects ranging from “The Medical Facts about Zika Virus” to “Changes in Your Medicare Coverage.” An accountant or CPA could inform clients about “2017 Personal Exemptions” or “Calculating Your Quarterly Taxes.”
These types of organizations already have mailing lists and email addresses. You can use this valuable resource to build and strengthen the relationship you have with customers, clients or patients. Direct mail campaigns may accomplish this but only at greater expense. Your business, professional practice or non-profit can employ a newsletter to inform and educate your reader and, at the same time, to ‘soft-sell’ a product or service.
That medical practice might inform patients that, while there is no vaccine for Zika virus, they should check their immunization status for influenza, shingles and pneumonia. A CPA might remind clients to schedule a tax-planning meeting for the coming year while reminding them to file those quarterly statements next month. In subtle ways, a newsletter can inform, educate and sell all at the same time. Both the news reader and the writer will benefit.
Newsletters are important or essential to some types of organizations. These tools can build a positive emotional bond between the reader and the organization. A non-profit or advocacy organization can use this to great effect. For example, a church may use a newsletter to inform readers about Sunday school schedules at the same time as reminding them to contribute to the new building fund. A relief organization can show readers what they are doing in places like Haiti while urging contributions.
Local organizations can make imaginative use of newsletters to cross link other organizations, businesses and professional practices. For example, a church group can remind members to check with a CPA about the tax deductibility of their contributions.
There are some caveats that all users of newsletters should observe:
- Build your relationship, do not abuse it. The primary goal of a newsletter should be to provide value. You must provide your audience with a reason to receive your email communications, including newsletters. Never send a newsletter that does not have informative value.
- Make it look professional. There is software that can help you do this, but if you do not have the time or inclination, seek a web services provider like Axiom Administrative Services. Axiom has the web design, SEO, email marketing, and other web services abilities needed.
- Make it timely, but not too frequent. A daily newsletter would soon be regarded as just another piece of online advertising. If you are going to do a weekly, monthly or other scheduled newsletter, have informative content created beforehand. Do not wait until the last minute and struggle for a topic.
- Get help if you cannot do it on your own. If you do not have the writing or design skills needed, hire a professional.
Axiom Administrative Services has the web design, internet marketing, newsletter, Search Engine Optimization and even the direct mail skills needed to help you succeed. Visit Axiom Administrative Serves today to discover how we can help to grow your business, professional practice or non-profit organization.
Reach Your Target Audience by Email Marketing
Website design, graphic design and search engine marketing through SEO services are all prerequisites to success in digital marketing. A strong website design with intelligent text, good graphic design, and possibly embedded video can make your website stand out. However, a static website can go only so far. To reach your customers on a regular and repetitive basis, email is an invaluable tool.
Consider some of the obvious advantages of a mail online campaign. Because email can be produced and distributed so quickly, it can be immediately responsive to market changes and opportunities. The response rate to any given email may be low, but because it costs so little to produce, the return on your investment of time and money can be large. The low cost enables you to try out many different formats and tactics at little risk and to track the success rate of each. If an offer for a 15% discount on some sale item or service works, you can repeat it as many times as you like. If it fails, you have lost little.
Email marketing enables a business, a professional practice or a non-profit organization to target a particular group or class of clients or customers. An auto repair shop can send one message to the owners of GM trucks and a separate one to Mustang drivers. A retailer can target women who have purchased ‘petite’ sizes in the past and a non-profit can hone in on members or contributors who have responded to a given appeal.
All of this presupposes that the business or organization has a mailing list, and the best source of this information is the organization itself. Collect the email addresses of any customer with whom you deal. Your email list is a valuable asset. Save it for yourself and do not share it. If you have done business over the internet, this should be easy. In other business types, the owner or proprietor can offer a small incentive to get a customer to sign up.
If you are starting from zero, there are organizations that offer email lists for sale, but you need to take care. You are almost certainly better off using the services of an experienced web development and SEO company like Axiom Internet Marketing. These professionals are familiar with digital marketing, search engine marketing and mail online campaigns. They have access to email data bases and can combine social media marketing techniques with programs that target mail online customers.
Axiom Professionals can give you specific advice about your product or service and mail online marketing. Here are some general principles that apply to any email promotion.
- The subject line of an email must be catchy enough to get the recipient’s attention. A subject line like “Special Offer on Dresses” is not specific or exciting enough to stimulate interest in many people. Try “25% off on Size 5-7-9 Summer Outfits” to get the attention of a particular group of customers.
- The most effective emails are not formal, written letters. They are graphics, filled with images of something that interests the customer. A graphic design with pictures of flying toy drones, colorful summer fashions or mud tires gets the consumer’s attention and conveys your message more effectively.
- Don’t abuse email. Never email existing or potential customers more than once or twice a week. Doing so risks getting you placed into their spam filter.
- Include a call to action like “print this coupon and bring it in”, “use this code to get a special offer” or “click this button to order now.”
- If appropriate, use external links and utilize buttons for a more visually appealing external link.
- Test your mail online campaigns to see what your subscribers respond to best. Do they respond to emails that have videos, photos or text?
- Link to social media marketing platforms by including buttons to social media sites.
A few people can do all these things for themselves. For most business owners, tasks like website design, graphic design, online mail operations, and social media marketing are best left to professionals like Axiom Internet Marketing. Axiom has access to the up-to-date databases used to conduct effective digital marketing and mail online drives. Combined with its website design, graphic design, web development and SEO services, Axiom Internet Marketing can add the social media marketing or targeted email power that will put your business, non-profit or professional practice on top. Click Here or call 800-888-6348 to contact AIM and discover what it can do for you!
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Can I reach my target audience?
We have tried a number of marketing campaigns but we have never tried direct mail campaign. Is this something Axiom can assist us with? Check out “Should you Consider a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign?“
Should I consider Social Media Marketing?
You don’t need remarkable social skills to succeed at social media networking. You only need to know how best to deploy your strategy and manage your platform. Axiom Internet Marketing is here to help you navigate successfully with social media marketing services.
Can the Internet help my Medical Practice?
If you are a Dentist, Surgeon, Cardiologist, Primary Care or any other specialty, Axiom has the resources to assist you and your practice. Call 800-888-6348.
Does it matter what industry we are in?
If you are in the Construction, Engineering and or the Medical Industry, Axiom can design your website along with a marketing plan.
How effective can a Direct Mail Campaign still be?
We live in the new age of internet marketing. Axiom Internet Marketing (AIM) is an internet marketing company that helps small businesses and web marketing novices achieve their goals. Marketing online, using search engine optimization (SEO), digital marketing and internet advertising is what AIM does best. As web marketing experts, we sometimes forget that traditional marketing methods like direct mail advertising can still be effective tools.
The fact is that physical mail can sometimes be a more effective business marketing tool than email marketing. The reader must at least look it over before deciding if it is worth opening. Online advertising can be dismissed with a very fast click, sometimes before the viewer can even realize what it is. Social media marketing can be effective but it involves heavy involvement in trend following, keyword searching and search engine marketing techniques. Online video marketing and search engine advertising require the depth of expertise found only at an internet marketing agency like Axiom.
At the same time, studies have found that direct mail has more cognitive appeal than digital marketing materials. It produced more brain responses than virtual messages which may be ignored or even annoy the viewer. Even if the mail item is discarded before being thoroughly read, it may leave a more lasting and a deeper impression on the consumer’s mind.
Think about this. We recently went through a political primary election cycle. How much direct mail did you receive urging you to vote for one candidate or another, or to support some ballot proposal? Unless you don’t have a mailbox, you got a lot. The professional people who send and pay for that direct mail are not in the business of wasting money. They are paid to produce results and they understand that a good direct mail campaign can make a real difference.
A small business or professional practice cannot afford to ignore the direct response feature of direct mail. A direct mail campaign is intended to generate a specific response to a given piece of mail, not to create brand awareness. Direct-response advertising does not require prior time, effort and expense in branding. In its place, a business or professional practice can reach a potential customer “out of the blue.” Calculating the return on investment is relatively easy compared to digital advertising.
Given all this, why don’t all advertisers do only direct mail and not internet advertising? The answer is simple: direct mail costs more. An internet marketing agency or search engine marketing company can reach consumers literally for micro-cents per person. The cost of designing, printing and mailing traditional material is much higher. The cost-per-person advantages of web marketing and social media marketing is so great that, even with lower response rates, they may still be the way to go.
If cost were no object, every business would have a search engine marketing company, printing, direct mail, and social network marketing expert. But cost is an object, a very important object to most businesses. So you must choose.
Fortunately, there is help. Axiom Internet Marketing has a twin, Axiom Administrative Services, which has long experience in traditional graphic design, direct mail, and targeted mailing list promotions. Together, Axiom Administrative Services and Axiom Internet Marketing can help any business, non-profit or professional practice make the most of their advertising or public relations dollars. Axiom professionals can provide communication help from traditional direct mail campaigns to web design and search engine optimization. Contact one or both of them today.
