Entries Tagged 'internet marketing' ↓

You are taking your online marketing seriously.

You’ve invested in a great website, you’ve hired a professional copywriter to create some fabulous copy and your search engine optimisation strategy is ensuring you have a steady stream of traffic to your site.

Once people have landed on your website, they love what you have to say and click to your contact page to get in touch.

Then what happens?

If you’ve managed to achieve a website that delivers customers to you, you must ensure your customer service doesn’t let you down.

1. Email

As a customer there is nothing more frustrating than someone not responding to your emails.

If you receive an email from a potential client but can’t answer their question immediately, send a holding email to acknowledge their enquiry and tell them when you’ll have an answer for them—and make sure you fulfil that promise.

Try to reply within 24 hours or sooner if possible. Remember this is probably the first interaction they’ll have with you so it’s vital you make a good impression.

2. Ring ring

Answer your telephone!

When a potential client phones, if you don’t answer they’ll hang up and phone someone else.

If you have an automated system try and make sure they reach a real person quickly. There is nothing more maddening that having to go through umpteen menus before you get to speak to a human.

3. Live chat

The option of live chat on your website is a great idea. It gives someone the ability to immediately speak with you while they are on your website. There’s no need to hunt around for a telephone number or email address—with just one click they can contact you and ask their question.

This transparency and ease of contact will show you as a company that puts their customers first.

4. Knowledge is key

When your prospective customer makes contact (either via live chat, phone or email), make sure the staff that deal with their enquiry are knowledgeable.

If their enquiry is dealt with quickly and efficiently you are going to impress. But if your staff member is uncertain about your products/services or inefficient it won’t put your company in a very good light.

5. When things go wrong

If one thing in life is certain it’s that things will go pear-shaped from time to time.

Despite your best efforts something is going to go wrong, but it’s how you deal with that that matters.

Be grown up about it – apologise, put it right and follow up to make sure the customer is happy with the outcome.

A mistake won’t lose you a customer, how you deal with that mistake could.

Whatever business you are in, customer service is vital. It doesn’t matter how cheap or how wonderful your product is, if the service is bad people will walk away.

The one great thing about internet marketing is that it offers numerous channels through which you can interact with customers and prospective customers.

Never before have you, your brand and your company been so exposed which is why how you present yourself online is so important.

The advent of social media means there are more ways to communicate than ever before. Once upon a time if someone wanted to speak to you, they had to pick up the phone. But now they can send a tweet, post on Facebook, comment on your blog or use one of the many internet forums.

There are many ways you can enhance your online reputation, but here are three simple steps you can take to make sure your company is always seen in a good light.

1. Thank you

‘Thank you’ simple but powerful.  When someone retweets you, comments on your blog or sends a new referral your way, make sure you thank them. It doesn’t take a lot of effort and will show you as someone genuine; someone they’d want to do business with.

It also pays to keep an eye on the web in general to see what people are saying about you. I use socialmention.com to keep track of what people are saying about me or my business. The alerts are simple to set up and can offer a great insight into how you are perceived as a brand online.

Again, should you receive any positive feedback or mentions, remember to make contact and say thank you.

2. Blog

Running a blog is a great way to add value to your business relationships. Through your posts you can provide information and tips to make your customers’ lives easier.

But however well written your blogs are if they are not covering topics people want to read about they will be ignored. For example if you are a holiday company don’t write about your special offers, instead write about the countries you go to, their cultures, their sights, their people – something that will inspire your reader to take a trip there to experience it for themselves.

As a freelance copywriter I use this blog to talk not only about copywriting but also about general marketing issues, social media, email marketing etc.; all topics that business owners find useful.

3. Benefits

Whenever writing about your products you must write about their benefits to your customers, but never lose sight of the fact that most people will buy from you because of who you are.

From my own experience, I will only buy from someone if I like them as a person. Why should I give someone my hard earned cash if they come across as arrogant or disinterested?

People will always buy from people so make sure you use your online marketing to connect with them. If your message resonates with them they are more likely to trust you; and with trust comes cash.

When wrapped up in marketing your business it can be easy to lose sight of what really matters – your customers. You’re so busy trying to come up with new blog ideas you forget that your customers still want that personal touch. Just because they can’t see you or shake your hand doesn’t mean they want to deal with a faceless company.

Go that step further and show your human side online.

As an internet marketer you are spending hour upon hour producing content to promote your business and help build links.

You have a list of topics as long as your arm and every spare minute you have is spent producing blog posts, articles and website copy.

Your dedication is admirable.

Once you’ve uploaded your fantastic value-laden information and hit publish…

…absolutely nothing happens.

No tweets (not even a re-tweet), no comments, no nothing.

Immediately you think “Argh! My writing must really suck.”

But before you enrol in a writing class, just stop and think for a moment. Your writing style is probably perfectly fine, but what about the structure?

You may look at your work and think how proud your old English Teacher would be—stop right there. That’s your problem. When writing for the web and an online audience, you can forget just about everything learnt during your school days.

You need to spend less time writing and more time thinking about how you structure your work.

Writing for an online audience

There is a peculiarity about writing for the web—most people will only scan a web page rather than read every word.

That’s because they are searching for information and if they can’t find it quickly, they’ll move on to another website.

So the trick is engaging your readers and getting them to stay with you until the bitter end.

How do you do that?

1. Snappy

Your writing should be relatively short (long enough to cover your subject). So if you’re writing about a very complex issue it may be worth breaking it down into several posts. Not only will that make it much easier for your reader to follow, it will also encourage them to return to your site for your subsequent posts.

Also when you’re writing start with your conclusion—sounds odd, but by doing that you are immediately giving your readers what they want.  Once you’ve done that, follow up with supporting evidence point by point.

2. White space

Does your finished article, blog post or web copy look like a page from a novel?

If your text is in one long, or several long paragraphs it won’t look very inviting.

Lighten it by increasing the amount of white space on your page. Break it down into small paragraphs (no more than 3 or 4 sentences each).

Or go really mad and use a single sentence paragraph.

3. Sub headings

While you’re following step 2, insert some informative sub headings between your paragraphs. This will help your reader get the gist of your post while they are scanning the page.

4. Bullets

• Using bullet points creates interest
• Highlights important points
• Are instantly scan-able
• Draw the reader’s eye as they break up the rest of the text

5. Links

Don’t only use your post to generate links to your own website. If you have researched your content well you’ll probably have an external source to link to. This will show your reader that your information is well considered (and it may also generate a link from your source too).

6. Bold

Use the bold function to pick out important concepts within your post. These, coupled with the sub headings, should help your reader fully understand the topic you are covering and whether it will be of interest to them.

But don’t go mad—you don’t want to confuse your reader.

7. Numbers

Some people have said that the days of the numbered posts—such as “8 Top Tips to Improve Your Copywriting” are gone. But reader’s still love them.

They help to grab attention and, once reading, retain your reader because they’ll want to make sure they learn everything.

8. Check and check again

Before hitting the publish button, read through your work and make sure it makes sense. Do the headings and bolded words make sense and convey the overall concept of your work?

Of course this read-through should also pick up any typos and other errors.

So there you have it—writing informative posts is one thing, but if you want people to read them they must be presented in a way that:

• Gets your concept over immediately
• Looks attractive and readable
• Gets to the point

Email marketing can be an incredibly effective way of communicating with your customers and prospective customers.

When someone initially opts-in to your marketing list they wait in eager anticipation for your first email to land in their inbox. They continue to welcome your communications with open arms until, one day, the honeymoon period is over.

As time progresses you realise that your emails aren’t being opened as often (or at all); your messages are now unloved, unopened and unwanted.

What do you do?

Panic?

Send flowers?

Nope. When this happens it’s time to take action.

What to do when you get email marketing list fatigue

1. Look at your frequency

When they originally opted-in, you would have made it clear how often they would hear from you.  Are you now sending emails more frequently?

If so, begin to scale back. There are only so many times people will want to see you in their inbox. Don’t be that nosy neighbour who’s always popping in – you know, the one you hide from under the kitchen table so they think you’re out.

2. Gone stale

Take a look at your past few emails. Are you covering the same type of information? Is their layout and content becoming too predictable? If so you may find that the perceived value of your emails has dwindled so it could be time to rethink your strategy.

3. Incoming!

Don’t bombard your readers. If you are launching new products or offers, stagger them. It’s never a good idea to announce 4 or 5 within the same month. Firstly people won’t want that number of emails from you and secondly, they’ll get confused.

4. What’s your subject line?

Have you gotten sloppy with your subject lines?

These hold the key to people opening your emails so if they are no longer appealing, your emails won’t get opened. Perhaps it’s time to have a rethink about your subject line approach (or call in a copywriter to help you generate fresh and appealing content).

5. No one’s home

We all, from time to time, change our email addresses.

If one of your recipients hasn’t engaged with your mailings (i.e. they haven’t opened it) for 6 months or more, send out a ‘reengagement’ email – something that forces an action if they want to remain on your list.

If you don’t hear anything it’s safe to say that either:

• The email address is no longer active, or
• They no longer want to receive your emails

So it may be time to remove them from your list.

6. Spam

When was the last time you checked your emails against spam filters?

It could well be that something is triggering your recipients spam filters so your emails aren’t even reaching their in box.

If you want your email marketing to continue to be successful, regular list maintenance is essential to ensure that:

• Your readers are happy with their content
• All email addresses are active
• You are avoiding spam triggers
• Your subject lines are being effective

As a freelance copywriter about 95% of my marketing activties are carried out online. Therefore I have had to learn the intricacies of search engine optimisation fairly quickly to gain front page rankings to ensure my business (Briar Copywriting) is visible to potential clients.

But it has taken a number of years and a lot of reading and research to really get to grips with the techniques.

What would  you say if I told you there was a definitive guide to SEO available right now?

Yes please!

Well, there is. Google has just released its SEO Starter Guide (am updated version of their 2008 publication). Now before you get over excited let me add this disclaimer:

This guide will not give away secrets that will propel your website to the number one spot in the search results. But it will help you tweak your website to help you gain better visibility to the search engines as well as help you understand the mysteries of SEO.

So, if you’d like to get your hands on this valuable document click on the link below to download your free copy.