Online Email Marketing – A Very Easy And Effective Method Of Marketing Your Products

Online email marketing is a very easy-to-understand concept. It is a tool that cannot be ignored if you have an online business. If you want people to know about your goods and services, then there is nothing better than email marketing. To make use of email marketing all you need is a computer and access to internet and you are ready for 24/7 email marketing campaigns.

No Downloading

However, before you start you do need to understand few factors relating to online email marketing. First of all email marketing is very user-friendly. You do not need to download anything onto your hard drive. An email marketing service provider will host everything online. So now, when you need to look for contact lists, you do not need to dig into your hard drive. All you need to do is upload the list and store it on the server of your email marketing service provider. And now you can access your contact lists from anywhere in the world. Is that not wonderful and really convenient?

Customer Statistics

There is another great advantage of using online email marketing service. Since you are marketing your product you obviously want to know how your customers are responding and how well you are doing. Most email marketing services offer real-time reporting that you can view any time of the day. As soon as a customer clicks on a link in your email, you will be able to view who the customer is and which link he/she clicked on. You can do a statistical analysis of your customers and then figure out your next step in improving your returns.

Online email marketing service is so easy to use. You can use the templates and online editors provided by your service provider to create plain text and HTML emails and newsletters. With email marketing you can segment your customers list based on their likes and dislikes, location, age, and other helpful information. Then you can target your customers with your emails accordingly.

Targeted Market

Online email marketing is all about targeting the targeted audience. However, before you use email marketing services you need to make sure that you have a market that you can cater to. In other words, are there people out there looking for your services and goods. The best way to find out is by typing the keyword or keywords relevant to your business and hit enter. Then find out how many people are searching for the information relating to your keyword(s) and other related keywords. If you know that there is an audience out there, you can definitely use an online email marketing service.

Effective online email marketing depends on how you sell. In other words, through your emails you should be able to explain properly why people need your services and products. You need to provide quality information. Finally, once you know the finer points of email marketing, you will be able to use it to your advantage.

Developing An Email Marketing Plan

Dont Work Rudderless – Develop An Email Marketing Plan

Without an email marketing plan, you could well end up waiting for the prospective customer to find your site by accident. Or you could send out so many untargeted emails that you are simple classified as a spammer and all your mails end up in the trash can of cyberspace. An effective email marketing plan is the first step in your path to entrepreneurial success.

Think Like Your Customers
To develop an email marketing plan, think from the point of view of the prospective customer. If you were a subscriber on your own list, what information would you like to see? How much of that information can you give away to your customers at no cost? How often would you contact your contacts? How do you establish your credibility? These are just some of the essential features of an email marketing plan.

It is also a fact that there is no shortage of frauds on the net that are simply waiting to make a fast buck. In this context, building credibility becomes an essential part of an email marketing plan.

Use Automation Sensibly
Using automated tools is essential to an email marketing plan because any good business soon collects so many email IDs that keeping track of your contacts becomes a database management task of such magnitude that you can either do that or run your business. Most auto-responders handle the initial contact emails well. Routine orders can also be handled by software. You only need to intervene for exceptions. But remember that it is in the exceptions that your greatest opportunities lie. Suddenly out of the blue, you may get a mail from another country where someone opens a totally new line of activity for you. You had better be having an email marketing plan to capitalize on that opportunity.

Analyze Your Data
Many entrepreneurs underestimate the importance of weekdays in developing an email marketing plan. Many people simply don?t respond to promotional email during weekdays. If your business is sports related, for example, you will get better responses nearer the weekend as compared to on Mondays or Tuesdays. If you dealing with office related goods and services, obviously your mails will tend to be ignored on weekends.

Nothing great was ever achieved without planning. An effective email marketing plan is a must if you want to help your business grow.

So, why don’t IT and business groups talk to each other in the same language? I would say, in many organizations:

• They don’t take the trouble to understand each other
• They have their own respective priorities and budgets
• There may not be anybody whose job is to ensure that these groups talk to each other (No strategy officer, no business development/strategy unit)
• The general thinking is so compartmental that people fail to see beyond their immediate problems and tasks
• Bridging this gap is pretty lower in the priority lists of the executive management

There are several other reasons that could be listed. The simple fact is that people like to be in their comfort zones, as long as there are no major incentives to break through them.

Traditionally, most companies have always created numerous inefficiencies within their walls. The hierarchies, process controls, policies and the bureaucracies associated with them hinder the smooth sailing of all departments within these organizations. They could afford to ignore such issues till recently. But, times are changing. The current economic scenario puts a lot of pressure on organizations to cleanup their acts. With the workforce shrinking and pressure to perform in difficult market conditions increasing, businesses have to look at better and smarter ways of doing things. So, it is paramount that companies try to bridge this divide.

You might wonder as I do if there is a magical way to solve this issue? If there was a way, somebody would have succeeded by now. So it is more about questions than answers:

IT is a support group within companies. So, why do they need separate budgets? Should they derive their revenues from their internal customers? Why would a company year on year set aside x amount of money only as a cost budget? If there is a customer-vendor relationship between IT and business groups, will there be improved interactions between them? Why aren’t the executive management trying and testing such model?

Do companies follow a process of discussing about newer IT initiatives to all business groups within the company? Are there initiatives to share what has been learnt from one group’s experience with the rest?

Did anybody try to create a bridge group with leaders from IT and business, thus forming a small team with the sole responsibility of formulating IT solutions for business problems?

Has any organization tried to utilize the skill levels of IT services vendors in bridging this gap?

How do you handle unexpected events which cause your schedule to extend or your project to cost more? If you hope to address such events as they happen, you must expect to either spend unallocated funds, or give up on quality. Neither choice is too good: spending unplanned funds will surely be frowned upon by your MD, and sacrificing quality to ease unexpected overruns is always bad.

To address situations such as these, you need to allocate special funds called contingency reserve. For the astute IT managers that can challenge Management on this, kindly proceed.

Contingency reserve are funds allocated above the project budget, which are intended to be used when unexpected events occur, to reduce the risks of cost overruns. It cannot account for everything unexpected in a way to cover any unexpected costs, but a properly created contingency reserve should be able to help a project go smoothly even when costs go over budget.

One way to define a good contingency reserve is through risk management processes. First, you need to identify the risks which can result in cost overruns. Then you need to qualify the risks to identify the most critical ones, or those worth focusing on. Finally, you need to quantify those risks and express them in terms of financial impact on project budget and probability of their occurrence. The product of impact and probability is a monetary value called exposure.

To define a good contingency, you simply sum all exposures: the result is amount of funds you need to set aside to be used whenever something unplanned or unexpected happens. Since contingency is sum of exposures, and probability of all risks occurring is the product of all risk probabilities, statistically a contingency reserve defined in this way should do for majority of projects.

Let’s see how projects work with and without contingency.

Imagine you had N500K budget to build a server. And the truck conveying the parts has an accident, losing you N50K component.

Without contingency, you don’t have extra N50K to finance this loss, and the only way to get the loss compensated and get project on track is to reduce the quality by cutting costs somewhere else on the project, such as ordering lower quality component, or using less material than required or something of the sort.

With contingency, you have extra funds available to you specifically for such occasions. So, you simply tap into contingency reserve funds, and finance those extra N50K, get the needed components and stay on track. Quality stays unaffected, because you don’t need to compensate for anything, and you don’t need to cut costs anywhere.

Contingency is necessary on any project which is likely to exceed its allocated budget, and IT projects are very likely to do so. With such reserves you can execute your projects smoothly, without panic when (not if, when) risk events occur and cause budget overruns

For the typical project manager – when thinking of a project plan, the first thing that comes to mind is a project schedule as represented on the gantt chart image above. The Bad news most people don’t know is that this is not the project plan. This is a combination of an activity list and a gantt chart, and is basically a project schedule. Your Activity list and your task time schedule is important, but it answers only the question of when things will be done and not how things should be done.

If you have had major project management challenges, you can only blame it on the attitude you’ve attached to the term project plan, I had the same issues so I did some little research on the term.  Project plan evolved from a project management plan, a key document used to define how the project (including schedule) will be managed. Somehow, over time it lost the word management, and became just project plan. This is not that bad, but the meaning was probably lost by most IT project managers who did not understand the origin and now it is referred to as project schedule. And this is dangerous!

You might wonder why this terminology is relevant. If it was all about terminology, I wouldn’t care at all. But unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s about first-time project success that can elude you when you go with the norm.

Here’s why:

• A lot of project management happens within tools such as Microsoft Project. You should not start a project by opening a Project file. If you do so, you’ve skipped many important steps. Microsoft Project comes later.
• If you think of project schedule as the only important element of a project plan (which tools such as Microsoft Project can easily trick you into), then you’ll start planning your project from the schedule. Schedule development happens much later into project.
• Knowing that project plan is important, but not knowing what a project plan should include, can easily result in many important things not being planned for, which can only lead to a badly managed project.
• Throughout project, with project schedule as your only project plan, you focus primarily on schedule management and neglect or even ignore other project areas.

I don’t have anything against Microsoft Project. It is a great tool, and it helps with time management, scope management, cost management and resource management etc. However, it doesn’t address everything there is about these four major functions above, and it doesn’t help you at all with integration management, quality management, communications management, risk management or procurement management. All summed up, it covers a tiny part of project management, and therefore also a tiny part of what project planning should be about.

When things are done is not the most important question in project planning. The most important question is how. How do you define scope? How do you change it? How do you estimate duration? How do you identify risks? How do you distribute documents? How do you control quality? These are some of the questions that project planning strives to answer. And this is the primary concern of a project management plan, or a project plan.

Project management planning includes risk management planning, risk identification, risk analysis, risk response planning, quality planning, communications planning, human resources planning, purchases planning and contracting planning. Has your organization thought of implementing simple systems to handle this tasks your Microsoft project cannot handle?

Of course, depending on your project complexity and goals, not all of these have to be done, or at least not in too much detail. But if you just focus on schedule, how successful do you expect your projects to be?

Website promotion is an integral part of marketing for any online business venture, and what better way to do it than by availing affordable SEO services. The word affordable connotes competitive pricing, a dedicated team, well-organized work with desired results. The SEO team should be result-oriented with special focus not only on the quality of work, but also in keeping updated with the currently introduced engine optimization techniques and trends.

Though many businessmen do not have an idea of how they can outwit the competition with SEO in this age of stiff competition, there are a number of consultants available that provide strategic and affordable SEO services. It is also important that such specialists are hired, unless you want to incur heavy expenses at a later stage due to faulty web-designing. This could cost you your business as well as search engine ranking.

Some Facts About SEO Services
More than 85% of internet users use search engines to find information on certain areas or products. And out of this, 75% do not look beyond the first page of the engine. Such is the importance of a website’s ranking on the topmost search engines.
The number of websites currently being hosted on the internet is more than 200 million. And each one is fighting hard for visibility on the major internet search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo.
Online business is growing in geometrical progression. At an average rate of about 20%-25%% each year. So, your website’s ranking and visibility is very important if you want a good share of this cake.

Because of all these reasons, it is very crucial that one appoints the services of a search engine optimizer, so that you land up with an engine friendly website. And all this is very easily possible because of the growing affordable SEO services driven by market rates, today. There are 3 types of SEO available ?

1. white hat employing permissible optimization tactics
2. grey hat employing semi-permissible techniques
3. black hat employing restricted procedures

Your business volume completely depends on what type of practices your SEO follows. The darker the SEO technique, the higher is the risk of getting penalized, to the extent of getting excluded from the search engine. Most well-known companies take a minimum of at least 4-5 months for generating a good traffic to your site. A promise of overnight visitor volume is misleading, and can cost you your investment.

What To See While Hiring A SEO Consultant? Try to ensure that the SEO  consultant provides ethical services, using white hat techniques. It should carry out proper research and a technical analysis, code optimization, content analysis, keyword research etc.  All the basics required to properly and legally promote a site on a search engine. It should also provide link building services for a good volume of visitors. An experienced company will definitely provide affordable SEO services and good business returns on your valuable investment.

Anyone who is involved in doing SEO has often wondered what the secret is to get a good SEO ranking. Website optimization itself involves a number of different techniques and strategies, many of which take a lot of time and effort. Wouldn’t it just be easier to find out what makes those search engines tick? Unfortunately, when it comes to the search engines, the system isn’t that easy to beat.

Understanding SEO Science

To understand SEO ranking better, it helps to put yourself in the shoes of the search engines. While Google is still the biggest player, there are a number of different search engines available out there. So what makes a good search engine? One that gives the user relevant results- if you type in shoes and get nothing but spam sites, chances are that you won’t use that search engine again. This is a loss not only for the search engine, but also for the relevant sites that remain hidden in the results. In the past, the search engines had a lot of problems with sites over-stuffing their pages with keywords and spammers.

Today, search engines use algorithms to determine a site’s SEO ranking – each search engine has its own unique algorithm designed by a team of computer engineers. Those sites that use unethical practices are immediately blacklisted. This is pretty much the death blow for any website- if you can’t be indexed by the search engines, nobody will know you are out there. A more effective option would be to work on your optimization techniques.

The Right Process

If you have hired a company to improve your SEO ranking for you, make sure that you know what they are doing. A number of SEO consultants often resort to illegal practices to get the job done. If your SEO consultant won’t share his optimization strategies with you, then you’d better start looking for another consultant.
In basic terms, you can improve your SEO ranking by concentrating on link building, index inclusion and coverage as well as web page optimization. Remember that while your site needs to be keyword enriched, it shouldn’t be overstuffed. The content should be relevant with the keywords and key-phrases placed in the right areas. Studies have shown that sites that are regularly updated with unique and relevant content rank consistently higher on the search engines.

The bottom line is that when it comes to search engine rankings, it’s better to leave the algorithms to the experts. Trying to crack them will take up valuable time and money; aside from that, the algorithms tend to change periodically. To boost your SEO ranking, it makes more sense to concentrate on other optimization strategies.

What Is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) allows people find your business website through search engines using related keywords. There are a lot computer jargon on website optimization online and they sometimes get confusing so I prepared a basic introduction on SEO you should easily relate to. What many people do not realize is that SEO is based on traditional advertising and marketing techniques. While the methods might be different but the objectives and the end results are the same.

Before getting into the workings of SEO, it is important to get a few things clear about SEO. SEO is one of the fastest growing fields in the world today.  As more businesses find themselves online the need to be easily found via geographic search engine services is evolving at a rapid pace. Doing effective SEO can be very tasking so If you do not have a degree in computer related discipline there is a bleak chance of your being able to manage the latest in SEO techniques yourself. Doing SEO on your own can also take up a lot of your time as optimization methods changes every day, it makes more sense to hire a professional to take care of your SEO needs.

This does not mean you should have no idea about SEO tools and strategies. It is important to have the knowledge of the basics of optimization tools and how they work. It helps to see your online presence (website or blog) in the terms of a shop on an ordinary road. You need to do a couple of things; 1) to make your presence known to the customers and 2) attract these customers to your shop. This is exactly what SEO does. It steers traffic to your website using a number of different methods.

SEO Strategy Basics

One of the most important SEO techniques involves the design of your website. The site should not only be pleasing to look at and easy to navigate, but it should also be keyword-enriched so that it can be picked up easily by the search engines. Most web designers will ignore this, unless they are told. Make sure that key words related to your services are used on your website.

Site promotion tools are another important feature of SEO. These are basically the tools that you will use to direct traffic and advertise. Initially, you may have to rely on something known as Pay Per Click advertising to move the traffic towards website. This is a fee-based method of encouraging people to visit your site.

When it comes to SEO, it is also important to build backlinks. You can do this by creating a blog or joining industry forums and interacting with other people.

SEO does not stop only with directing the customers to your site. You need to give them an incentive to look around, subscribe, or buy something. Offering freebies  is a good option. It is also important to have an email database by encouraging your visitors to sign up for newsletters. By getting a good understanding of SEO, you will be able to make effective use of SEO methods on your website.

The different aspects

Over the past few years, the CRM debate has shown pros and cons for installed as well as hosted CRM. Installed CRM advocates generally point to the extreme customization for the specific company and control as leading factors in desiring in-house solutions. Another concern is security, which some feel installed CRM can uniquely provide. However, in-house development is not easy. The company takes on the responsibility for all costs associated with the build, including hardware, software, setup, maintenance, and an IT team.

Hosted solutions stand on the other side. The development of the CRM software is done by an outside company, which specializes in CRM. Hardware is stored externally. The solutions already exist as developed by the host company, meaning hosted CRM is ready-to-use “tomorrow”. Quick installation and cheap costs make hosted CRM attractive and can save companies 60-70% on up-front costs. The cost factor alone is leading many small and mid-sized businesses to shift to hosted CRM solutions because only larger companies have the resources and money to spend on the high cost of installed CRM development.

The Trend Towards Hosted CRM

CRM decisions would appear to come down to a company’s priorities: customization, control, and security on the installed side versus the speed and low price of quality CRM on the hosted solutions side. Yet, closer inspection of the two approaches reveals why hosted CRMs have been adopted by more and more companies over the past few years.

The time and money saved through a hosted CRM solution can’t be stressed enough. When developing an installed solution, companies have to hire software developers and form a robust IT staff just to undergo the development process, not to mention the constant maintenance. Add that to the costs of hardware and server space, and the opportunity costs of waiting for your CRM to come to launch, and the economic advantage of hosted CRM is clear.

With hosted CRM, years of experience and development already rest behind the product being offered. Top CRM host companies worldwide have spent billions of dollars investing in their platform. These third-party developers are constantly refining their solutions and passing the advantages on to their customers. CRM is what they do.

Top CRM host companies are also ISO certified, offering the best security the market has to offer.

What Can Hosted CRM Do For You?

One of the biggest advantages in the installed vs. hosted debate is the ability of hosted CRM solutions to provide customization and control to companies. Quality CRM allows for special features and applications, such as workflow engines, quarterly upgrades, streamlined and automated customer experience, internal and external visibility, and multi-channel management on a single interface. While installed solutions would have to develop all of these features separately, companies who sign on to use hosted CRM are finding that they can customize their system. Rather than giving rigid, prepackaged software programs to companies, the best CRM hosting companies allow users to choose applications and formats that they want from the broad options available on the host platform.
As hosted CRM continues to improve, the tradeoffs of installed and hosted CRM are disappearing. When you can have the time and cost effective solutions that hosted services provide and a customizable platform for extreme control, the question of installed vs. hosted is really no longer a question.

What  should you consider when deciding between hosted and installed CRM applications?

One of the fundamental decisions an organization faces in its choice of CRM software is whether to use an installed or hosted application. The right answer depends on the situation, and there are important issues to consider in each case. CRM software can be installed on your LAN or your web server while the hosted CRM is provided by online CRM service providers.

The following are three considerations for each approach that will help an organization determine which might be the better fit for its situation.

Installed CRM Applications

1. IT Capabilities. If the organization seeks to install CRM software, it must be confident that it has sufficient IT capabilities to handle the installation and ongoing support. Of course, some basic small business CRM applications are designed to be easy to use right out of the box, but as the complexity of the application goes up, so do the IT demands.
2. Flexibility of Scale. Installed applications can be sensitive to changes in scale-that is, adding users beyond a certain number may be cumbersome, and some systems aren’t designed to go beyond certain limits. A company which expects to remain fairly constant in size shouldn’t have to worry too much about this. However, a company which experiences seasonal fluctuations in users, may find an installed system lacks sufficient flexibility of scale.
3. Willingness to Commit. Purchasing software represents a commitment-not just the cost of the software, but the time and trouble of installing it. Unless a company has enough prior experience with CRM software to be confident that it knows what it wants, avoiding a big upfront commitment might be a good idea.

Hosted CRM Applications

1. Stability of CRM Organization. With a hosted CRM application, the user company trusts the CRM provider to house not just the software, but more importantly, the data. This means the stability of the CRM provider is an important issue. It is worth asking how long its been around, how large it is, and if is it one of the companies that is picking up market share in the CRM business.
2. Integration with Other Technologies. A small business CRM application may be able to operate as a self-contained system, but as a company grows, it may find the need to integrate its CRM system with other technologies. Hosted CRM systems, almost by definition, are not integrated with other information technology functions at the users end, but hosted CRM providers are making an effort to increase their compatibility.
3. Comfort with Security. Implicit in the outsourcing of data storage is the outsourcing of security for that data. Hosted CRM proponents like to point out that there have not been any data security incidents to date. Fair enough, but it is also worth remembering that hosted CRM applications are relatively new; most of their history has yet to be written.

Clearly, this is a choice that go beyond the generalization that hosting is primarily a small business CRM solution. There are considerations other than size, and an organization will make the best choice when it starts by examining its own plans and business strategies.

Is the answer to CRM success found in selecting the right technological solution or is the business’ strategy and objectives for CRM more important?

A recent survey conducted by Comcity found that 95 percent of responding SMB decision-makers not only had not implemented CRM, but did not know what “CRM” meant. And among medium-size and larger businesses that have pursued CRM, lack of success, more online interactions with customers and competitive pressures are driving those companies to seek new ways to improve customer interactions.

Success with CRM promises many potential benefits, including the following:

• One central location for customer information, so that anyone who picks up the phone can address each customer’s unique needs in a personalized way
• Greater efficiency for sales team members
• Improvement in close rates by allowing sales people to leverage best practices quickly and consistently
• Management visibility into sales forecasts, sales rep activities and marketing ROI

However, every business will realize these goals and others in very unique and specific ways. In fact, most businesses fail to achieve the stated objectives of their CRM implementations. This happens despite exhaustive technology selection processes in which an array of features is reviewed. Even after weeks and months of implementation and training most of the seemingly most valuable tools on the system are not utilized significantly.

This is mostly caused by failures or inconsistencies in the strategies used to promote CRM adoption internally. For example, salespeople and other end users are not likely to appreciate the value of “management visibility” in the same way that business leaders do. While it may be obvious to all involved that this or that new capability will benefit the business, it is always more difficult than expected to change the habits of the people involved.

If the business cannot identify the benefits of CRM implementation and use in very specific and measurable ways, end users will fail to change their behaviors and user adoption will be uneven at best. Senior business, marketing and sales management, meanwhile, will fail in maintaining focus on and motivation toward consistent adoption of the CRM solution. This will constrain or eliminate the business value of the visibility into and measurement of CRM effectiveness and sales and marketing performance promised by CRM solutions.

Thus, an ineffective or incomplete CRM strategy can make even the most powerful CRM solution all but worthless to a business. Herewith, some specific steps to developing a CRM strategy for your business that avoids such pitfalls.

1. State the high level objectives that you hope to achieve through use of a CRM tool.
2. Decide how you will know if you’re achieving your stated objectives – What measurable results should you expect to see?
3. Consider what changes in end user behavior will be required in order for the business to reach these objectives and to capture and measure these results
4. Weigh the costs vs. benefits for each end user role. This is not about the cost or benefit to the business but rather, for each end user, how will their individual productivity be improved compared to the “price” they pay as an end user in terms of learning new processes and software.
5. For end users for whom the “costs” outweigh the “benefits,” either adjust your expectations accordingly, find ways to add “benefits” into the process for those users or get prepared to provide strong motivation and training and accountability for them.

The objective is to tie the high-level business objectives and strategy to detailed expectations and goals of affected and involved end users as specifically as possible.

Once these end user expectations have been documented, you have a perfect set of “requirements” which can be used in selecting CRM technology.  Any technology that cannot enable the appropriate end user workflows should be immediately taken off the list.  In addition, awareness of these user needs and expectations can aid initial set up, customization and training tremendously.

For businesses that have already invested in CRM technology, the process of identifying and prioritizing user needs yields first and foremost an objective accounting of whether the current technology can support the business going forward.  If the “costs” in lost opportunity or productivity of staying with the current technology are significant, then it’s time to start searching for a new solution.

Conclusion

CRM technology does not solve problems or provide a competitive edge on its own.  In fact, the technology is simply an enabler of processes and strategies.  A business must first invest in deciding upon the desired strategy and processes before expecting a CRM solution to yield anything other than inconsistent results.  The good news is that considering and documenting best practices within a business is always a healthy one and comes easily once its started.