Archive for March, 2009

4 golden rules for online shopping tips to be a happy buyer

Posted in Web Marketing Strategies on March 26th, 2009 by 2above – View Comments

How many times were you not so sure about what you were to buy and look for re-assurance from previous buyers? I don’t know about you but I always look for those fabulous 5 stars Full StarsFull StarsFull StarsFull StarsFull Stars!

Tip1: always go to reputable 3rd party shopping sites such as Amazon, beachcamera, adorama.com etc., if you are not so sure how big the site is, type the site URL into http://www.alexa.com/, any site ranking above 60k should be big enough, reputable enough
Tip2: don’t just look for price! Many times merchant show a cheap price to draw buyer only to charge more through “handling, shipping, fees etc” hidden charges.
Tip3: this is my gold rule – always look for product ratings from previous buyers; not only look for the number of rating stars, but also pay attention to how many ratings this product has got. The more the better. Most products on this blog have great amount of positive customer reviews:)
Tip 4: if possible, check out the original brand website. Many 3rd party merchant or retailer like Amazon.com, or comparison shopping sites rely completely on merchant/seller to upload product “feed” or information which can be inaccurate. When in doubt, always go to the original brand site to find out more information.
For example: here is Amazon description to Nikon S560; here is the Nikon official site about the same model. Not only Nikon’s information is much more organized than Amazon, but has full brochure in support for the product. Rest sure that the photos on original site are always accurate while product images on Amazon could be inaccurate or even of different product.

In the future blog entry, I will share with you many great customer rating and reviews for certain products, and more shopping tips are coming up.

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How to Generate Revenue Quickly with a Lead Generation Campaign: 5 Steps

Posted in Web Marketing Strategies on March 25th, 2009 by 2above – View Comments

SUMMARY: A long-term, strategic lead-generation plan is essential for complex sales. But when market conditions change rapidly, you might find opportunities for ancillary campaigns that help address your customers’ immediate pain points.

Read how a telecommunications marketer responded to the credit crisis last fall with a campaign for existing customers. The five-week email series generated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of revenue from products with a shorter sales cycle, and took home an Email Marketing Award at this year’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit.
CHALLENGE

“We have a lot of planned campaign activity that has a relatively long cycle,” says Russell Cartwright, Sales Enablement Manager, BT. “Although they are very much strategic campaigns, what that doesn’t do is give us the agility to respond to changing market conditions.”

Cartwright’s team felt those limitations acutely last summer, with the credit crisis emerging in full, and rising worldwide oil prices dragging the economy down. They saw a need for new campaigns that positioned the company’s telecommunications products and services in light of customers’ financial concerns.

With most of the marketing budget already set aside for quarterly campaigns, however, any new effort had to be relatively inexpensive and fast to implement.

CAMPAIGN

The team created a series of emails to offer existing customers advice on surviving the recession. Those messages included links to relevant BT products and services that also had a comparatively short sales cycle, to capture immediate revenue.

Here are the five steps they took to plan and implement the campaign:

Step #1. Create five-part email series on cost-cutting tips

The team wanted a unified campaign theme that would reflect the recent economic challenges. But they also wanted to “turn a negative into a positive,” says Cartwright.

They chose to highlight ways that IT and communications services can cut customers’ costs and improve their bottom lines. They called the series the “Credit Crisis Survival Kit” and selected five specific topics within the theme:
o Managing high fuel costs
o Managing total business costs
o Lowering customer-acquisition costs
o Retaining customers in a slow economy
o Improving cash flow

Each email offered links to advice and educational content, such as existing webinars on the BT website. The messages also provided links to BT products and services that could help customers achieve savings. For example:

- The email on managing fuel costs included links to BT Web conferencing services.

- The email on managing total operating costs included links to BT’s bundled networking and telecom offerings.

- The email on improving cash flow included links to BT’s electronic signature service, which helps close deals faster.

“It wasn’t just a solutions push,” says Cartwright.

Step #2. Select list of existing customers for the campaign

The team wanted to get the program running quickly, so they worked off their house list. They also wanted to provide additional service to existing customers, and position the company as partner that could assist them in turbulent times.

They selected the top 20,000 business customers to receive the campaign.

Step #3. Send personalized emails

The need for a rapid turnaround also led the team to create a simple email template that was primarily text. The only major graphic element was a header image of a first-aid style toolkit and the “Credit Crisis Survival Kit” title.

They also personalized those emails by sending them from the email address of the customer’s account manager.

The result was a message that looked less like a formal BT marketing promotion, and more like a personal note that leveraged existing relationships between customers and their account reps.

- Text was limited to just a few paragraphs, explaining that the company recognized that businesses were facing tough challenges, and describing which BT resources were available to assist them.

- Each email contained links back to the BT site, where visitors could read more about the topics and products being offered.

- The five emails were sent two to three weeks apart, depending on other scheduled promotions from the marketing team. They didn’t want customers receiving too many messages from BT in the same week.

Step #4. Track response rates and website activity

After each email send, the team tracked several metrics to determine customer engagement and gauge interest areas. They measured:
o Opens
o Clickthroughs
o Which page a customer initially visited
o Clickstream to other pages after landing on the site
o Time spent on each page

Step #5. Provide reports for sales team follow-up

The team’s email system provided sales representatives immediate feedback on customer response, as well as cumulative reports on customer activity.

- Account managers received an instant message alerting them when a customer had opened an email or clicked a link inside.

- They also could access the email system to get a report detailing which pages of the site the customer had visited and how long they had spent on each page.

- Account managers used that data to plan follow-up contacts with their customers, to answer questions or discuss products in which a customer had shown interest.

Although sales reps could see in real-time which customers had clicked on Web pages, Cartwright’s team cautioned them not to call prospects immediately, so as not to appear “Big Brother-ish.” Sales reps also were free to analyze customer responses on their own and prioritize follow-up calls.

RESULTS

Rapid turnaround and timely advice resulted in quick wins for Cartwright’s team:

- The five-week campaign secured new contracts worth more than £270,000.
- Email open rates for the campaign averaged 24%, compared to a 21% average for BT’s typical marketing emails.

“That was revenue we’d ordinarily have to wait a lot longer to accrue,” says Cartwright. “The immediacy of the campaign meant we could connect with the right customer at the right time and turn them into sales.”

The team also sees potential longer-term benefits in terms of customer loyalty. The email campaign created a way for account managers to reach out to customers during difficult economic times and start a conversation about their current concerns and future needs.

Useful links related to this article

Creative Samples from BT’s Credit Crunch Survival Kit Campaign

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/btcredit/study.html

The team used Genius.com’s email marketing platform:

http://www.genius.com/

BT

http://www.bt.com

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How to Build a Subscriber List Inexpensively Using Blogs, Contests

Posted in Web Marketing Strategies on March 25th, 2009 by 2above – View Comments

SUMMARY: Don’t want to spend a fortune to build an email list? You don’t have to. We interviewed a marketer who multiplied his subscribers list 20 times by involving popular bloggers in his low-cost campaign.

Find out how you too could expand a marketing file by holding one contest for bloggers, and another for their readers. Includes results and creative samples.
CHALLENGE

Patric Welch, Owner, Noobie, needed a bigger marketing file. The technology education site had a list of well-qualified email newsletter subscribers, but it did not have enough names. Welch wanted his email promotions to have more impact, and for that he needed a larger list.

His team decided to target a specific demographic through well-established blogs. Welch created one contest that required entrants to share their email addresses, and another to encourage bloggers to write about the former one. In October 2008, Welch’s team ran a private contest for bloggers and a public one for their readers.

CAMPAIGN

Step #1: Target an audience

Welch felt that moms could use more technology advice, especially in the digital camera market, he says. He dug into the “Mommy Blogger” phenomenon to find that audience. Many mothers and mothers-to-be candidly share their experiences and opinions online. Some mommy blogs, such as dooce, get well over 100,000 unique visitors a month, according to Compete.

Step #2: Set prizes and rules of contest

o Wii for readers

Welch set the hard-to-find Ninentdo Wii as the grand prize for the blogs’ readers. The campaign ran from October to December 12, giving the winner the option to give the Wii as a holiday gift to a loved one.

“At the time, the Wii was the hottest commodity going, and to get your hands on one involved waiting in line at a store for an hour before it opened,” he says.

Readers submitted their full names and email addresses for a chance to win. They could also receive additional entries (and a better chance of winning) by referring five friends to enter the contest. After December 12, the winner was picked at random.

o iPods for bloggers

Note: This portion of the contest was not publicized. The blogs’ readers were unaware of it.

The bloggers could win one of two prizes: an iPod Nano or an iPod Shuffle — both very popular consumer gadgets. The Nano was awarded to the blogger who generated the most signups for the contest. The Shuffle was awarded to the blogger responsible for registering the winner of the Wii.

“I thought to myself, ‘If someone blazes out ahead, the others are going to give up, so I included the Shuffle as another prize,” Welch says.

As the campaign got under way, Welch realized the possibility that one blogger could win both prizes. He decided to change the rules to prevent that from happening. “No one was upset by it. They all understood,” he says.

Step #3: Set up landing page and auto emails

Welch’s team created a contest landing page (see creative samples below). The page included:
- Explanation of contest and rules
- Picture of the Wii
- 3 text boxes for first name, last name and email address
- Terms, conditions and “agree” checkbox
- 5 textboxes to refer friends via email

Those who entered the contest were added to Noobie’s marketing file. The referred friends were not added to the file unless they visited the site and registered for the contest.

o Auto-email referrals

Welch’s team wrote a script to email the referrals automatically. The email quickly explained the contest and provided a link to the landing page.

“What was nice about the script is that it had the name of the person who had originated the entry. So it said ‘your friend, John Smith, says you might be interested in this.’”

Step #4: Set up coded links and a tracking page

Welch’s team created coded links to identify each source of traffic to the landing page. This way, they could see which sources were driving the most registrations. Sources included:
- Blogs (each blog link coded separately)
- Referrals
- Emails to Noobie’s newsletter subscribers
- Social networks
- Google AdWords
- Link from homepage

o Drive competition

Welch wanted the bloggers – the main drivers of the campaign – to compete with one another for the iPod Nano. He created a page that listed the blogs by their number of registrations in descending order. The blogs’ names were coded, so that they would not be known to one another.

This page was updated regularly. Welch would email the bloggers once a week with an update on their rankings and a link to the stats page. “The purpose behind this was that when somebody sitting comfortably at 500 signups in first place gets passed at 520, it gives them a little nudge to get back and promote it a little better and get back in first place again,” he says.

Step #5: Find and message bloggers

With the architecture in place, Welch started researching and reaching out to “mommy bloggers.” He found them through basic Web searches. When he found a blog he liked, he looked at its “blog roll,” or links section, to find similar sites. “This is where the hours of work piled up,” he says.

o Determine site size

Welch looked at the sites’ number of RSS subscribers (if publicized) and the freshness of its content. Having 500 RSS subscribers was enough, as long as the blog’s content was fresh, he says. He decided not to reach out to stale blogs, even if their numbers were higher.

You can also look at a blog’s monthly Web traffic and Technorati rank to get a better idea of its readership and authority (see links below).

o Send everything in one email

Welch identified about 200 blogs to pitch. Rather than sparking an on-going dialogue with each, he sent everything a blogger would need in one email. This included:
o Description of the contest
o Coded link to the landing page
o Link to the stats page
o Link to an image that could be used as an ad

“I started out by sending the ad as a JPEG attachment. Then I thought to myself, ‘that’s another reason for someone to think I’m sending a virus or something and not bother,’” he says.

Welch looked for contact information for the bloggers on their websites. When all else failed, he submitted to their “contact us” forms. His email was a friendly soft-sell, he says, suggesting that the bloggers write about the contest, or post the ad on their site.

o Be prepared to answer questions

The most common questions Welch received about the contest and their answers:

1. Q: I have four blogs. Can I write about this on all of them?
A: Absolutely.

2. Q: I only do exclusive contests where one of my readers is guaranteed to win. Is that possible to arrange?
A: No.

3. Q: When this post rolls off my page, can I write about it again?
A: Sure.

The rest of the questions were mainly clarifications about how long the contest would run and other minor details, he says.

Step #6: Promote elsewhere

Welch also mentioned the contest in:
- Noobie’s weekly email
- His Twitter feed
- Noobie Facebook group
- Smaller Indiana: a local online social network

He did not push hard in these areas for several reasons. First, his target audience was not in these channels. Second, most of the people in these channels already knew Noobie and its email newsletter. Last, he considered promoting to his email list “self defeating,” but did mention the contest as a courtesy to Noobie’s audience.

He also promoted the contest through Google AdWords, but shut off the campaign after a few days. “The bloggers were driving more traffic for free,” he says.

Step #7: Scrub list, remind new subscribers

The contest’s registration form did not prevent multiple signups. Welch’s team had to scrub the list of duplicate entries before awarding the prizes, and before promoting to the list later on.

o Reminder in first email

Contest registrants were told in the terms and conditions that they would be signed up for Noobie’s emails. Since he knew that most people would not read the fine print, Welch reminded the new subscribers of this fact in the first email sent to them (see creative samples).

The email’s header stated: “Note: You are receiving this email because you are a subscriber to Noobie’s regular mailing list or you recently signed up for one of Noobie’s product giveaways.”

RESULTS

“I was ecstatic about the results,” Welch says. “I probably had five times the page views per month while the contest was running, compared to normally.”

After the contest, the traffic settled down to about double its previous volume, he says.

In all, Welch’s small email list exploded to 20 times its previous size. The blogs were by far the strongest force, driving 71.5% of the registrations. Signups from other sources:
- Referrals from friends: 12.8%
- Unknown: 10.8%
- Google AdWords 2.1%
- Emails: 1.6%
- Social networks: 1.0%
- Homepage link: 0.2%

“Unknown” represents the percentage of registrations that came through without a tracking code.

About 40 blogs, or 20% of those emailed, wrote about the contest.

o Wandering contestants

“Some people who signed up for the contest when they submitted the form, they got a thank-you page on my website. That thank-you page had three hot things I wanted them to know about Noobie, with links. So, some people stayed on the site and navigated around. And some people even went as far as to use the normal email signup box that I have on the footer of every page.”

Useful links related to this article:

Noobie Contest Creative Samples

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/noobiecontest/study.h

ml

FormSpring: Helped Noobie build landing page form and script

http://www.formspring.com/

Compete

http://compete.com/

Technorati: Parenting blogs directory

http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/lifestyle/parenti

g

50 Best Mom Blogs

http://www.onteenstoday.com/2008/03/18/50-best-mom-blog

/

dooce

http://dooce.com/

Nintendo Wii

http://www.nintendo.com/wii

Noobie: Friendly technology coaching and consulting

http://www.noobie.com/

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A great product review

Posted in Web Marketing Strategies on March 19th, 2009 by 2above – View Comments

For merchant, reading a great customer review is like receiving an award, it warms seller’s heart and assure other potential buyers. My friend at TRX sent over a great review he just received, it’s about a great total body workout tool TRX suspension trainer, featured on biggest loser and voted top 10 best total body work out tool on Men’s health’s magazine.
trx suspension trainer

Greetings,

Susanne (not sure if I spelled her name right) from customer service spoke with me recently and requested that I send a testimonial about my experiences with the TRX trainer, so here it is.

I first heard of the TRX trainer through Alwyn, a fitness and fat loss expert who owns Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, CA. He sent an email singing the praises of the trainer and company. I had purchased 3 workout programs from Alwyn and had tremendous success with them, so his recommendation of the product was enough for me. I followed the link to the website and watched several videos demonstrations the various types of exercises possible with the trainer. I incorporate bodyweight exercises and circuits into my workouts and was intrigued by the idea of using suspension to make the exercises more challenging. I envisioned utilizing the trainer with the exercises I would normally use with a stability ball: jack-knifes, rollouts, elevated planks, glute and hamstring curls, mountain climbers, elevated pushups, etc. Several of the website videos demonstrated using the trainer for some of the more challenging bodyweight exercises, such as single leg squats or pistols, dead lifts, Romanian Dead Lifts, and Bulgarian split squats. My wife was kind enough to purchase a TRX trainer for my birthday recently, and I was able to experiment with the exercises listed above while using it.

I’m happy to report my experience exceeded my expectations. Not only was the trainer incredibly easy to set up and adjust, it readily adapted to any exercise I wished to perform. Many of the single leg exercises I was having difficulty executing were now possible and with the added benefit of achieving a full range of motion. Another bonus I noticed was being able to focus more on the muscles being worked with an individual exercise. Whereas this was difficult at times to do with the stability ball, the trainer encourages your body to perform the exercise using proper form, therefore allowing me to focus on the muscles involved with the movement. The trainer adapts easily to workouts involving supersets, circuits, intervals, or tabata-style exercises.
I now use the trainer every time I workout. It is very satisfying to perform exercises I previously could not with proper form, and I feel my efficiency has increased due to the adjustability of the trainer. I would highly recommend this product to anyone looking for an affordable, portable workout tool which can be utilized to improve overall fitness or athletic performance.

Sincerely,
Scott

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Amazon puts money in front of technology

Posted in Web Marketing Strategies on March 11th, 2009 by 2above – View Comments

Amazon’s “product ads” is a program similar to comparison shopping sites like shopping.com, shopzilla.com etc.: merchant opens an account with Amazon, upload product feed and pay Amazon CPC. In this case, Amazon users click to merchants’ websites and complete purchase there: Amazon only gets less than $1 on average for each transaction. It’s cheap: so, why not?

I went ahead to sign up with the program, uploaded about 21 products of mine. However, only 2 products remain searchable on Amazon. I have written and talked to at least half dozen Amazon’s technical support reps and the answers were always: “our engineers are working on this problem…”. How hard is it really to fix a product match problem when Amazon has full control of everything?

Well, I have tried everything and decided to give their “merchant program” a go. Merchant program adds “shopping cart” to the products I listed, therefore, Amazon users are able to buy my products without leaving Amazon’s website.

Two days after I joined this merchant program, all 21 products I uploaded before became immediately searchable. Furthermore, My products rank among the top for the category and keywords. I was like: WTF!!!??? Well, ever since then, Amazon takes 15% to 20% out of every single sales made through the “shopping cart”, I wided up pay them about $100/day, vs. $1/day before the merchant program.

Do you see the difference?

It’s not technology. It’s money! Amazon wants your money, so it pushes my products to the top when Amazon’s merchant program can charge hefty commission, vs. cheap CPC. That is the secret and ugly truth behind those open cases about “not searchable”.

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How to Combine WOM & Email to Create Powerful Brand Advocates: 7 Tactics

Posted in Web Marketing Strategies on March 10th, 2009 by 2above – View Comments

SUMMARY: Tapping into the powerful word-of-mouth potential of engaged email subscribers takes time and energy, but it’s well worth the effort.

Find out how one marketer combines WOM and email to:
o Get prospects to try new and existing products and services
o Get a new audience of email subscribers to opt-in
o Create and maintain a group of brand advocates
o Reach sales goals

Ever notice that certain email subscribers are more engaged than others? When subscribers consistently open emails, enter contests, and provide feedback, they have the potential to become advocates, those who spread positive messages about a brand to others.

And though that kind of behavior is hard to track, it’s undeniably beneficial when as many as 90,000 loyal email subscribers sign up to become part of a WOM program. That’s what happened when Dreamfields, a pasta company, started combining WOM and email to attract brand advocates, says Dan Heimbrock, President and CEO of HyperDrive Interactive.

Heimbrock will be sharing a Case Study at MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit ‘09
His presentation will outline ways to use email and WOM marketing in tandem to build an army of brand advocates.

We asked Heimbrock to impart a few proven tactics as a prequel to his presentation. Here’s what he had to say.

Top 7 tactics for combining WOM and email marketing

Tactic #1. Define the WOM aspect

People talk. They talk about brands whether or not they’re being nudged by companies to relay positive messages to friends, family, coworkers, or even strangers.

Before encouraging positive word of mouth through email, it’s important to find out what people are saying about the brand. That will lead to the discovery of the brand’s WOM aspect.

EXAMPLE: When Heimbrock started working with Dreamfields, he discovered that the WOM aspect of the product – a special kind of pasta – was its low carbohydrate qualities. Low carbs made the pasta healthy for diabetics to eat. After years of giving up pasta, diabetics discovered that they could eat it again. Their excitement about the product made them ideal prospects to spread the word to more diabetics and/or low-carb dieters.

Finding the WOM aspect got Heimbrock thinking about how to create email messages that would inspire subscribers to spread the word about the new healthy pasta option.

TIP: The key is to start with a remarkable product or service, one that is different from the competitors’ offerings, and/or is something that people really care about.

Tactic #2. Create a highly portable message

WOM email messages must be portable enough to easily pass along from one email subscriber to the next.

Some tactics that work include:

-Announcing that you are looking for people to request free samples, try the product, and then provide feedback. Heimbrock’s team sent an email request like this to a few hundred early opt-ins for a new kind of a household cleaner. Within a week, they had 30,000 requests for free samples.

-Introducing an online game to launch a new product. Heimbrock’s team introduced an online game through email to a subscriber list of about 35,000. The game involved conquering four levels to get a free sample. About 350,000 people played the game within 72 hours of the email send, which was the game’s only promotion. The opt-in rate quadrupled.

-Introducing a widget that allows subscribers to get free products or services they’re interested in (e.g., free music downloads). Heimbrock’s team introduced a widget for a music group’s new album. The widget allowed subscribers to download music from the new album and mix a track of their own to submit to the group. The email introducing the widget helped the group reach its sales goal for pre-album-release packages.

Tactic #3. Build context around “Forward to a Friend” buttons

“Forward to a Friend” is the most basic tool to foster word of mouth between subscribers and their family and friends. It allows subscribers to pass along emails of interest with the click of a button.

But Heimbrock finds that subscribers need context. They need an incentive to actually forward an email. If the “Forward to a Friend” button is positioned in the margins of the email creative with no attention drawn to it, it will be overlooked. A very low percentage of those emails get passed on, Heimbrock says.

Some tactics proven to encourage subscribers to use the “Forward to a Friend” button include:

-Creating an email for the primary purpose of getting subscribers to forward it (i.e., the “Forward to a Friend” button and messaging around it are the main focus of the email)

-Creating messaging around the “Forward to a Friend” button that says, “Tell your friend about this [online coupon, special deal] and you’ll be entered to win [x, y, z].”

-Creating a “Forward to a Friend” option that allows senders to add a personal message along with the forwarded email

“All of those things make it more powerful than just relaying: ‘Here’s a button you can press if you feel like it,’” Heimbrock says.

Tactic #4. Ask an open-ended question

Invite email subscribers to talk about the brand by asking open-ended questions. Create an email with an embedded text box that makes it easy for them to type a few words and click send. Ask them to tell you how they discovered the brand, what they tell other people about the brand. Take advantage of special occasions and holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, to ask them why they love the brand.

“Open-ended questions are extremely easy for someone to take a few minutes and dash down their experience,” Heimbrock says adding that his team has found 35% to 40% of subscribers who open those emails answer the question.

The answers can be used in the following ways:
o To provide fodder for the customer-review section of a website
o To help segment the most enthusiastic subscribers from the rest

An ancillary benefit of asking subscribers to write about their interaction with a brand is to encourage their thinking about it, therefore increasing the likelihood that they will share their brand experience with someone else.

Tactic #5. Segment based on enthusiasm

Email subscribers with the most potential to become brand advocates display the following behaviors:

o They rave about the brand when asked open-ended questions about how they interact with the brand
o They use the “Forward to a Friend” option frequently
o They participate in every contest, provide feedback often

Segmenting an email list by enthusiastic behavior can be tedious, Heimbrock says.

“But if you believe that having a customer activated to go advocate your brand in the marketplace has value … then the investment of time to do that analysis is definitely worth it,” he says.

Tactic #6. Invite enthusiastic subscribers to join WOM programs

Once you’ve segmented a list of highly enthusiastic subscribers, it’s time to invite them to do a little more than provide feedback and forward emails to friends.

Heimbrock’s team sends an email inviting them to join a program that encourages an even greater amount of WOM about the brand.

EXAMPLE: Dreamfields’ WOM program, called Taste and Tell, invites highly engaged subscribers to join by entering their name, contact info, mailing address, and answering a series of questions, such as:
-How long have you been using the brand?
-Who do you talk to about the brand?
-Who do you want to talk to about the brand?

As soon as subscribers join, usually within eight to 10 days of receiving the invitation, Heimbrock’s team mails a package including:
-One sample of the product (e.g., a box of pasta)
-One stack of coupon fliers to be distributed to friends and family
-One recipe
-A brief story about the brand
-One card displaying talking points about the product

The purpose is to entice subscribers to cook the pasta, have people taste it, and then disseminate talking points, including, “It’s only five grams of carbs” and “It’s double the fiber of other pasta.”

A couple of weeks after mailing the package, the team sends a follow-up email asking subscribers to report what happened. About 70% of them respond.

Tactic #7. Use a genuine, transparent approach

Often, just blatantly asking email subscribers for help in spreading the word about a brand is a successful tactic, Heimbrock says. Subscribers with some level of commitment to the brand will respond.

TIP: It’s important to give them insiders’ privileges. Make them feel exclusive by providing updates or news about upcoming products, features, and programs before the press release goes out.

Just remember that, after opening the door for subscribers to become insiders, it’s important to be responsive to them, Heimbrock says. When they ask a question, it must be answered. When they have a complaint, it must be handled with care.

Useful links related to this article

Want more email strategies?
Get the latest email research, Case Studies and best practices
Sherpa’s Email Summit, Miami, March 15-17
Full agenda here:

http://EmailSummit09Agenda.MarketingSherpa.com

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