Cynergise - Social Media Consultancy by Chandesh Parekh » Email Marketing

Pay-As-You-Go Email Marketing from MailChimp

Chandesh Parekh — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:50:10 +0000

Email marketing, although a proven and required part of a marketing strategy, can be costly with most online suppliers charging a hefty monthly sum to use their systems.
Those that operate for free have limitations, usually something like ‘100 recipients only’ which is ok for low level activity but unsuitable for a growing business.

Setting up your own system e.g. using something like PHPList is often tedious and takes some technical knowledge to set up properly and working just right.

MailChimp, SurveyMonkey’s little brother (or sister, who knows?!), offers a Pay As You Go plan so that you can budget how much you spend on your email marketing campaign. The price plan goes from $15 for 500 credits to $2,500 for 500,000 credits.
This kind of plan is especially suitable for businesses that don’t have a periodic mail-out as credits can be rolled over and the there are no standing fees e.g. monthly charges.

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BSM and The Apprentice – an example of free marketing using an effective email signature

Chandesh Parekh — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:17:18 +0000

BSM (British School of Motoring), a part of RAC, is using an effective marketing technique by adding to it’s outgoing email signature a link it has made to the first casualty of Sir Alan Sugar’s BBC show The Apprentice.

In a RAC email I received today was the following copy as part of the email signature:

A little note on BSM……..which is part of RAC

Apprentice’s Nicholas passes test with flying colours

—————————————

Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, ruthlessly booted off “The Apprentice” by Sir Alan Sugar on Wednesday, has at least one
reason to celebrate: the driving school which taught him to drive, BSM, today reveals that he has passed his test
first time – with no minor errors.

The perfect test pass, achieved by only 0.85% of learners, comes as the latest success for Brown, 24, who claims
he has never failed an exam and regards his “B” in GCSE French as his biggest failure.

This method of marketing is clever because firstly, there is no cost. Adding a bit of text to your outgoing emails costs nothing. Secondly, The Apprentice is one of the UK’s hottest TV shows, having received in the region of 6.5 million viewer’s for the first show of the 2008 series! That means a lot of people will be discussing it at the water cooler and in the hallway; plenty opportunity for BSM to be mentioned in conversation, or at least remembered, as having done something clever like this tie in.

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Market Yourself With A Free Teleseminar In 3 Easy Steps

Sol Shah — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 03:00:54 +0000

One cool, affordable, and effective way of marketing your services is to run a free teleconference for your current or potential clients and customers.

By running a seminar, you put yourself forward as an expert in the field, whilst reaching many many people at once. This certainly raises your profile, and allows you to serve more clients better.

Here’s how a local plumber can do it…

Step #1: Plan Your Teleseminar

What are the top 10 questions your existing clients ask you about their plumbing or central heating? List the questions and write a few paragraphs for each answer.

Locate and register with a free teleconference solution to run your seminar over the telephone such as www.freeconferencecall.com

Set up a webpage with a registration form where those interested in listening in on your teleseminar can register for it. Once they register, they will receive an email with the details of your teleseminar.

Step #2: Announce Your Teleseminar

Determine a date and time to run your seminar which will be convenient for you as well as the majority of your target market.

Prepare an email which announces what your teleseminar will cover, why it’ll be useful to them, when it’ll be run, and the web link for where they can register for free. Give it a decent descriptive subject such as “Free Teleseminar On The Hottest Plumbing And Central Heating Questions For Your Home”, and then send it out to all your current and past clients, offering them opportunity to invite their friends and family to it too.

You’ll soon see registrations trickling in. 24 hours before the seminar, send all those registered a reminder of the details for the call.

Step #3: Run Your Teleseminar

Simply call in to the number you are given when you register with the teleconference service, ensure enough people have arrived on the call, and aim to start on time.

If it’s a one hour call, use the first 5-10 minutes introducing yourself, where you are based and what services you offer. This’ll help to pad out the time in case there are any late comers. Then use the next 40 minutes to deliver your seminar over the phone – as simple as 10 questions, 4 minutes per question. You can ask a friend help you run like a question and answer session, with you as the expert. Use the final 10-15 minutes to address any other questions that arise for your clients, and then round the call up with details of how they can easily contact you to take up your services.

Hey presto, you’ve now helped a large number of homeowners with their most pressing plumbing and central heating questions, as well as letting them know that they can give their plumbing and central heating work to you. All this exposure for your company and services for just 3 to 4 hours of work from your end.

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freebreakfastnow.com Lets Visitors Register And Receive A Coupon For A FREE Chick-fil-A® Chicken Biscuit

Sol Shah — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 04:59:59 +0000

Chick-fil-A® have done it again by using a descriptive domain name to increase traffic to their promotion by capturing the attention of those who are looking for a free breakfast.

This is yet another promotion being run in the US by Chick-fil-A®, a fast food restaurant, where the visitor can register to be sent a coupon for a free Chick-fil-A® Chicken Biscuit in the mail.

When the site visitor goes to www.freebreakfastnow.com, they arrive at a landing page which asks them to click on an image to enter and register. When they click the ‘enter button’, the visitor gets taken to a form that asks them for their key details such as first and last name, email address, telephone number, full address, date of birth, and gender – and to top if off, they are ALL mandatory questions.

What the company gets from this is vital information about their target market – i.e. where they live, how old they are, what gender – as well as specific contact information so that further promotional material can be sent to them by post, by email, and over the phone.

Beneath these mandatory questions, there are the optional survey questions. Now HERE’s where they get really clever. They start by asking a couple of simple basic questions such as “Have you ever eaten at a Chick-fil-A® restaurant?” and “Have you ever eaten breakfast at Chick-fil-A®?”, which are most likely there to conceal the more sneakier items that follow…

Here come the subtle yet powerful marketing messages disguised as questions: “Please check which Chick-fil-A® Breakfast items you have tried:”. The page then allows the visitor to place a check mark next to any of the 5 items on the list that they may have tried for breakfast. Also, there’s the “Did you know Chick-fil-A® offers reloadable gift cards?” What this does is that even though these survey questions are optional, the visitor will still scan through them (even if they don’t answer) and even if they haven’t tried it, they will probably want to make a special trip into that fast food restaurant to have a taste of one of the other breakfast items, or even purchase a gift card.

Don’t you know, there’s no such thing as a free breakfast!?

In your business or community organisation, how can you model the promotional campaign that Chick-fil-A® have used to:

build your database of customers to directly promote to via email / post / telephone,
learn more about your target market, and
give your customers a subtle message about other products and services that are available?

What will be YOUR free breakfast?

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Use Facebook To Run A Free Marketing Campaign

Chandesh Parekh — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:22:17 +0000

Social networks like Facebook are a marketer’s dream. Social networks, by nature, are viral i.e. they’re built to ’spread’ ideas, photos, video or anything you can think of to your list of contacts within the site, and they to their list of contacts and so on…

Facebook is second only to MySpace in the number of members it has, however it’s built to be a better viral vehicle for marketing. Whether you’re selling a new product or want to get exposure for a social event, it’s very easy to get ‘eyeballs’ on it using Facebook and what’s more it doesn’t cost anything.

The first step would be to set up a Facebook group for your specific product or service and invite all your contacts to join. When your contacts do join, the feed on their friends’ pages will be updated with that fact and will likely lead to a lot of them at the very least visiting the group page to check out if there’s anything of interest for them. “After all if a friend of mine joined a group it’s more than likely it’ll be of interest to me too” is the concept we’re going for here (you want to be sure to have some compelling copy on the group page to make sure your message is getting across to your ideal market to entice people to join). This will carry on for a while and pretty soon the group will have hundreds of members. And by ‘pretty soon’ I mean within weeks.

Whilst this is going on you want to be sure to have a website, preferably with a descriptive domain name that users can relate to the Facebook group, where members can find more details of your product(s) or services or whatever it is you’re marketing. Why? Because the site is under your control; you’re not limited in what information to host on the site or in what manner. Also, having a website allows you to capture the email addresses of your visitors so you can start marketing to them directly.

Drive the members of the group to the website (it could also be a special page you set up on an existing website created just for members of the Facebook group) using teaser information like articles or special offers/discounts. This will lead to more people joining the group so they can take advantage of the special discounts thereby continuing the viral campaign for you.

That’s it! Using this simple method you’ll be driving traffic to your web site in no time.

Here are a few links to help you set something like this up:

If you’re setting up your Facebook marketing campaign and web site and need some advice don’t hesitate to contact us – we’ll be happy to help.

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When is the Best Time to Kick Off your Email Marketing Campaign?

Chandesh Parekh — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 06:10:28 +0000

What is the best day of the week to kick off your email marketing campaign?

Historically, marketing or sales emails that land in your customer’s (or potential customer’s) email inbox on a Thursday morning are shown to have the best conversions.

The thinking behind this is that most office workers, who have regular access to email, start to ‘dial’ down from Thursday morning onward. Thursday is the almost the beginning of the weekend; we’re past the middle of the week and the weekend now looms, getting closer and closer!

Psychologically, this means that our minds are getting set for more fun activity and less actual work. This in turn means longer time spent on the computer doing non-work stuff like reading friends’ emails or checking out the latest on Facebook.

But can we narrow it down even further? A recent survey/study done by a news organisation states that it’s exactly at 3:27PM on a Thursday afternoon that we really begin to switch off from our work. So, could we get better results if marketing/sales emails are timed to land in email in-boxes late on a Thursday afternoon? We’ll try it out and let you know!

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Do you respect your own web site?

Chandesh Parekh — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:58:32 +0000

With the advent of so many social networks like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc, many web site owners are losing focus when it comes to their Internet marketing strategy.

Because such social network sites make it easy most of the marketing is done, primarily, through them and this is foolhardy.

Whatever reason your web site exists; to sell products, raise awareness of your services etc, it needs to be at the centre of your strategy with multiple traffic sources leading back to it.

Why? Because that’s where you, as the web site owner, have full control over content and how it’s presented to your potential or current customers. It’s where you can reinforce your brand and make sure that the next time they come directly to your site and not via Facebook or something similar. It’s also where you can capture their email addresses so you can now market directly to them, tailoring your offers to make them more attractive.

And remember, social networks come and go – you may have experienced some success using them at present but the moment they’re sliding downhill and hemorrhaging users you’ll have to repeat all that hard work on the next big site, where your market has migrated to.

It makes more sense to drive traffic to your own site and keep them there so you don’t have to keep chasing after them.

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FreeTablaLesson.com – How We’re Promoting Drum Classes For Kids

Sol Shah — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:01:55 +0000

As you may be aware, we at Cynergise are very fond of Kavit Haria and the way he continues to serve through his work.

Kavit Haria, founder of Young Drummers, has been playing the Tabla (Indian hand drums) for over 12 years and has trained with Pandit Sharda Sahai of the Benaras Gharana.

Now, Kavit is offering weekly term-time Tabla lessons for kids, and the classes this term kick off with a free Tabla lesson.

To promote these tabla classes, we have set up a 4-page website and promotional domain name that allows parents to get the information they need, register their children for the initial free lesson, and let their own friends know about it.

If you know of a parent in the North West part of London (England) whose kids would be up for learning a new art in a welcoming family environment, how about you ask them to visit www.FreeTablaLesson.com so that their kids can also get the benefit of a free Tabla lesson by Kavit Haria this month.

If you have any questions about these classes, please visit www.youngdrummers.com/faq

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Market Yourself With A Free Teleseminar In 3 Easy Steps

30 Days of Night

Chandesh Parekh — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 17:22:12 +0000

To promote their new horror movie “30 Days of Night”, on the Internet, Sony Entertainment have created a web site at www.30daysofnight.com. On the site are 2 ways that they’re promoting the movie and other wares:

An online multi-player game
A email capture form

The free-to-play online multi-player game is crafted in such a way that players can team together and the object is to stay alive for 30 days. This is literal: the game plays for a total of 30 days and every 6 days that your team stay alive a new level is unlocked.
As marketing goes this is pretty brilliant as it means you, as a player, are marketed to constantly for a total of 30 days (providing of course you don’t die at the fangs of a vampire before then!).

The second, more conventional method is the email capture form where you sign up to the Sony entertainment newsletter and are sent periodic mail regarding news, updates, DVD releases e.t.c., from Sony Pictures.

(You have to be 18 to play the game)

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