Like any campaign or marketing effort, there are certain ways you can maximize your ROI. Follow these tips to ensure your email marketing campaign is engaging your audience and providing successful marketing results.

PART I: DESIGN

The design of your email campaign affects your consumer perception as well as the potential engagement from recipients. Some key areas to focus on are:

Theme: The overall look & feel should match your brand image. Any fonts, PMS colors, or graphic elements used in your logo or other marketing pieces should be carried over into your email design.

Style: Use images and ample white space to break up copy and make the message easy on the eye. Images should support content by providing a visual representation of your message. If you’re using a colored background, be sure the contrast between the background color & the copy is dramatic enough to provide clear legibility.

Format: The layout of your email can impact the comprehension of the over all message. The format should be clean, simple, and easy understand.

* Header: You may be inclined to place your logo or an event logo at the top of your email, however, some email clients auto disable images or the reader may be viewing your message on a smart phone that does not enable images. If you’re logo or event title is an image file, it will be lost on these readers. To avoid this problem, write your message title and business name in text at the top.

* Body: Using a side bar menu or too many additional links will clutter your message and confuse your reader about the call to action. Keep the body of your message clean and clear. If you’re creating a newsletter, define different articles or events with graphic dividers and bold title fonts.

* Footer: This is a good place for your logo image as well as contact, subscriber info, and disclaimer.

PART II: CONTENT

The most important goal of your campaign content is to create a message your target audience wants to read about. Your message should be worth saving and or sharing with others. Follow these steps in order to create clear & valuable content.

Determine the Objective: In general there are 3 types of objectives with email marketing-

* Promote: motivate purchases or increase event attendance

* Inform: increase awareness among potential or current customers or for differentiating your brand among competitors

* Relate: build relationships, loyalty, & referrals

Determine the Form: Again, there are 3 types of forms used in email marketing and each has it’s own frequency, content focus, and call to action.

* Newsletters: Regular intervals (weekly/monthly), education info provided in bullets or summary, soft CTA (learn/read more).

* Promotions/Invites/Surveys: Frequency follows sales cycle, limited & direct content, hard CTA (call/sign up now)

* Announcements: Event driven, news, holiday, or thank you oriented, soft CTA.

Valuable Content: The key to a successful campaign ultimately lies in how worthwhile the content is to the audience. Be sure the immediate benefit is clearly defined for your reader. Some ideas for valuable content include:

* Knowledge: Sharing your expertise, use facts & testimonials, give guidance & direction

* Advantage: Discounts & coupons, exclusivity or VIP status, contests & giveaways

* Attention: Acknowledge and response to audience

Keep it Concise: This goes along with ease on the eye- Presenting too much information at once will overwhelm your reader. To prevent burn out and ensure the reader can easily access the information s/he is interested in, follow these guidelines:

* Host large bodies of content elsewhere- link to website or blog, PDF attachment

* Limit to essential info- use bullets, summaries, or links to more info elsewhere

Structure: Getting people just to open, let alone read your emails can be strongly impacted by the external appearance of your message. Key areas to focus on are:

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* From line: Use a name your audience will recognize. For more targeted lists, this could be a personal name. For broad lists use the brand for both the name & email address, i.e. “[email protected]”.

Subject line: Keep it short and simple, limit to 30-40 characters (including spaces) or 5-8 words. Identify the immediate value/benefit of reading the content. Avoid “spammy” grammar such as all caps and multiple punctuation marks.

Permissions: Always be sure to ask people before you send them your campaign. This can be done with a sign-up sheet on location or an opt-in on your website. You can also verbally confirm permission. Be as specific as possible about the content your reader can expect to receive. It’s generally helpful to provide a preview or past email. Also provide an unsubscribe option; this will prevent you from unnecessary aggravation should a reader no longer wish to receive your emails, as well as show your respect for privacy.

PART III: ANALYTICS/TOOLS

Whether your using your own service provider or a marketing agency to develop your campaigns, reviewing the analytics is an important part of measuring success as well as using the information to grow and improve future campaigns. These are some areas to check regularly to optimize your campaign.

Bounce Rates: A bounce rate is the immediate return of your email. There are two types of bounces which can occur. The first is a hard bounce which indicates a permanent error with the email address, i.e. a spelling error or deleted address. If the address no longer exists, the contact is most likely no longer there. This provides an opportunity for you to create a new contact with that company as well as find the old contact and acquire business with his/her new company. Alternatively, a soft bounce is a temporary server issue, i.e. recipients inbox is full or the message was identified as spam & blocked. Generally if the email is re-sent at a later time the message will get through.

Open Rates: Open rates track the interaction with your email, not the delivery. It’s tracked by two codes hidden in your email. One is placed in the body, the other is in the embedded image you might have (i.e. logo). A key note here is if images are not enabled by the user- whether the function has been turned off by the email provider or the reader is viewing the email on a text only phone- the email will be marked as unopened.

Click-Through Rates: Click through rates identify how many people have clicked a link provided in your email and arrived at the designated page. You can use this information to determine which article or topics are of the greatest interest and which you may want to eliminate in the future. You can also create a list of contacts interested in a particular topic, so that you can direct future emails on that subject toward them in the future.

Function Scan: This is a great preventative tool to use before you send out your campaign. It scans your message to test for link and image functionality, as well as evaluate your subject & content for “spam-like” properties, so you can prevent errors which may deteriorate your message.

MLM Network Marketing, instantly the term seem to be familiar with but the intricacies might still not be that conspicuous and clear. Do we really understand the exact functionality offered through this structure? In actuality, the concept offer many significant benefits as compared to any other network or individual businesses.

You might have attended such seminars which explain you about the MLM Network Marketing or Marketing through MLM Network. For most of us, the reality is just the word of mouth and the exact strategies are less known.

This way of doing business is kind of the fastest growing business because it relies on a transfer methodology; that is transfer of the product or the services from Point A to Point B. This type of business has a few negative encounters in the past and had lasting impact on those who were into this but the concept has again grown and become the voice of new business arena.

Marketing MLM Network completely depends upon how you are making up your further customers rather what is exactly taught is how exactly we share our services and products with others. It is definitely different from the Pyramid schemes in which the person will remain on top and rest who joins the group later will remain at lower network. You market yourself, you get the returns.

It just follows a chain through you in which you market the product and take the product from Point A to Point B. Hence the product moves from one level to another level, that’s why it is also called Multi Level Marketing.

You purchase various products from the wholesaler offered at wholesale prices, you directly take that into market and sell it in retail and make money out of it. One misconception which should not be entertained is that every time you sell the product, you need not to sell it in retail; you need to share it with people and make them as your customers.

It is about building a huge downline and the sales are an outcome. And slowly you can actually expand in multiple directions rather than only in a single direction. You can simply talk to people and recruit them for your job, train them how to build the business further, you’re done. Gradually, your team expands as your immediate recruits start building the business.

There are lots of services that are being sold through MLM Network Marketing. For every successful movement of the product from one level to another or depending upon the financial strategies, you are compensated.

Do you want to attract more people to youth hostel? Use postcards! With a myriad of choices in postcard designs and printing solutions, see the following tips to get you get started on using cheap postcard printing for your business.

4 Tips on How to Save On Marketing Printing Costs

1. Focus on a few locations at a time when mailing postcards. Sending them in bulk to a general location will get you greater discounts from the regular mailing prices. Pre-sorting the postcards according to location before mailing them out will save you money when sending because pre-sorting avoids the extra charge for unsorted bulk mail.

2. Concentrate on a certain demographic that would benefit most from your service. Choose postcard designs that are more specific to your target market. Create personalized messages instead of the usual greetings intended for the general public to add a unique twist and make the postcard more endearing to the recipients. Targeted marketing is the strength of direct mail postcard printing.

3. Ensure the correctness of your address list to minimize returned postcards. Minimize the need to reprint postcards because of erroneous addresses. Oversights such as an erroneous mailing list result an unnecessary cost. That’s money that should be going to the campaign and not to fixing mistakes. Never underestimate the power of offline marketing. Postcards that are sent to a carefully targeted demographic will result in a significant increase in sales.

4. Choose a design that best represents your corporate image. It is best to choose designs that are simple yet striking. In printing parlance, spot colors are cheaper to print than full colors so consider this when designing postcards. If your hostel has Spartan surroundings, highlight your services and facilities that others do not have such as low rates, discounts for longer stays or low-cost food services.

Turn to an online printing service that will help you search for a cheap postcard printing

In order to build business awareness and ultimate success, every company must have an online marketing campaign with individual goals for promoting their product or service. Some companies may be trying to promote brand awareness. Others may try to promote a particular product or drive sales to their retail store or website.

YouTube can also be used for other purposes than just sales. You can incorporate YouTube as part of your product or customer support mix, use videos for product training, and even for recruiting and employee communications.

Anything you can say in person or to a group of people, you can say in a video and distribute it via YouTube. Here are a few ways in which YouTube video marketing is most beneficial to add to your business marketing mix:

YouTube For Brand Awareness

Online videos are better at promoting brand awareness than traditional TV ads. A Millward Brown study found that online viewing led to 82% brand awareness and 77% product recall, compared to just 54% brand awareness and 77% product recall, and 18% product recall for similar television ads.

Experts believe this is because online viewers are more engaged and interactive watching videos than passive television viewers are with TV ads.

YouTube For Product Advertising

To promote a product, you want to show the product in your advertising, as Nike did with its clips for Tiempo Ronaldinho shoes. You can show the product in action or used as part of a demonstration or tutorial. Make sure you include plenty of close-up product shots and links back to your own website-where more product information is available.

YouTube For Retail Promotion

Promote your companys’ retail store. These videos can be general in nature ( which gives the videos a long shelf life), or more specifically targeted to short-term promotions i.e. “check out this weekend’s specials!”
Make the video informative, and you stand a better chance of grabbing eyeballs.

YouTube For Direct Sales

Show the product in action or provide a clip of the service in question, and then ask for the sale by directing the viewer to your website. One of the best ways is to showcase the product in an instructional video – the online equivalent of an “old-school” informercial.

The key to converting eyeballs to dollars is to generously highlight your company’s website address or 1-800 number within the body of the video. Put the contact information at the front of the video, at the end of the video, and overlaid at the bottom of the screen during the body of the clip. Make sure it’s easy for interested viewers to find out more information about your product or place an order.

YouTube For Product Support

YouTube is not only for generating new business, it can also be used to support your existing customer base. Consider some of the most common customer problems and questions, and produce one or more videos addressing those issues. If you can help you customers help themselves, you provide them with a useful service and reduce your company’s support costs – all with a free video.

For example: if you record a short video demonstrating how to put one of your racks together and post that video to YouTube, you can direct your customers to that video if they have problems. For that matter, you can embed the YouTube video into your website, using YouTube to host the video.

YouTube for Product Training

You have a new product and your company sales force to train. How best to reach them? Consider using YouTube. Create a series of short video training series, upload them to YouTube (make it a private video so that it won’t be viewable by the public) and provide access to all of your company personnel. Sales force personnel can watch the videos at their leisure, without losing valuable sales time trekking back to the office for training. You save money, your salespeople save time, and you create an archive of product information that anyone can access at any time.

YouTube For Employee Communications

Use YouTube for your company communications. Instead of holding a big company meeting for the CEO to give his annual state of the company address, record the speech and post it on a private channel on YouTube. Employees can watch the CEO give his address from the comfort of their own desks, while they’re on the road, or even at home.

Instead of sending impersonal memos via email, use YouTube to get information out there in near-real time, with all the benefits of a face-to-face communication.

YouTube For Recruiting

Finally, don’t underestimate YouTube as a recruitment tool for new employees. Post a company welcome video on YouTube and make it public. You can link to the video from all your recruiting materials, even from any traditional ads you place. Don’t limit yourself to a single long puff video: produce separate videos for individual departments, as well as to illustrate company values, employee benefits, and company facilities.

There are a lot of ways your company can make use of YouTube videos – from traditional brand and product marketing to customer support and employee communications. Everything you post on YouTube is completely free of charge. Don’t be afraid to get started, even if your first videos are modest with little budget behind them. YouTube makes it easy to dip your toes in the water; you can’t reap the benefit until you get online.