Email Marketing is one of the cornerstones of online relationship building

Things have moved on a bit (about a million miles actually) since the days of rainbow coloured text emails and using the BCC field for your list while sending the message to yourself, although unbelievably some of these still occasionally drop into my inbox (bless!).

There are many excellent Email Service Providers (ESPs), including Mailchimp (we are fans & affiliates), Constant Contact, Vertical Response and AWeber. Which provider you choose is down to personal preference, but there are compelling reasons why you need to choose and use a professional ESP for your business Email Marketing.

Get More of Your Emails Delivered

Many people think that pressing ‘Send’ is all that’s needed to get their email message to its various destinations. Not necessarily so. For people still using their computer email packages, deliverability is unknown and open & click-through rates are unmeasurable.

Using your web domain host or shopping cart email service isn’t a guarantee of getting delivered either. These are OK for occasional mailings but messages are less likely to get through spam filters, so it isn’t a good idea to use as your main ESP, if you’re serious about Email Marketing.

The number of people reading their emails on SmartPhones is growing rapidly, so making sure your Emails are mobile friendly is becoming increasingly important. The main ESPs have this covered with special templates for the publisher to use and options to receive emails in a mobile friendly format for the reader.

Benefit from their Good Reputation

The best providers have a good reputation they’ve worked hard to establish. Not only for deliverability (over 99% is their proud claim), but also, importantly, for their adherence to the CAN-Spam Act, which they take very seriously.

I was chatting with an Email Marketing colleague recently and he told me the sad story of two clients who had their email accounts suspended as a result of using their computers to send out campaigns. This could have been as a result of the large number of emails going out, or because they fell foul of the Spam filters.

I don’t know about you, but the thought of being without email in my business sends icy shivers down my spine. It’s one of my primary communication channels and I’d really struggle without it.

Professional ESPs use a ‘double optin’ process to further protect their reputation – and yours by association! This process replaces the practice back in the ‘bad old days’ when you simply added all your contacts’ email addresses to a spreadsheet and sent out uninvited and unexpected promotional emails to them. “But wait,” I hear you say, “I still have some of those emails arriving in my inbox.” Yep, me too – and I report them as ‘Spam’ because that’s what they are. I didn’t ask for them.

A Double Opt-In is when you enter your details (usually just Name & Email address) onto a web based form, press Enter and are then taken to another screen with a message telling you to look out for an email which you need to act on. The email usually arrives within seconds and has a link you have to click in order to confirm that you really did fill out that form and want to receive the emails from that person.

The above are just a couple of reasons why using a professional Email Service Provider is so important for the small business owner. Check out our Guide for more information on Email Marketing, and please ask your questions in the comment box below.

Although Facebook introduced the Subscriber feature last September,

Intended primarily for ‘public figures’ like celebrities, journalists and political figures, the Subscriber feature is also a boon for those small business owners who ‘are’ their brand. Indeed when I joined Facebook back in 2007, I used my personal profile for business as well as private contacts because there wasn’t another option. Until Pages came along.

I believe one of the reasons for business owners’ understandable reluctance to set up and manage a Business Page is the extra task of keeping it regularly updated, attracting people to ‘Like’ it and the effort involved in building a community. This is all additional time to try and find in an already full day.

In the past we’ve always advised against using a personal profile as a business marketing channel, not only because Facebook frowns on it, but also because using a Business Page provides so much more visibility (as a unique web address which can be easily found by the search engines as well as on the newsfeed of all ‘Likers’).

Another advantage of having a Business Page is that you can have multiple ‘Admins’ to help maintain the page, post updates and respond to comments, so for our Savvy Marketers page this is the best option.

However now, while a personal profile should still be set up as a personal account, enabling the Subscriber function means you can be more selective about who you connect with as a ‘friend’, keeping to only close friends and family. What’s new is that you can now also connect with more casual business acquaintances, for example fellow networkers, by inviting them to become Subscribers to your personal profile instead. One benefit of this is the increased reach of your profile updates which can be seen by all subscribers in their newsfeed (and on the ticker).

You do have to turn the Subscriber button ‘on’, the default is ‘off’.

So, should you enable ‘Subscribe’?

It’s certainly worth considering if you’re nearing or over the 5000 friend limit, because there is no limit to the number of Subscribers you can have.

It may be a good alternative to a Page if you are the only person in your business, and have already connected with other businesses via your personal profile.

A few points to consider before you click to allow the feature

Subscribers will be able to see everything you share as ‘public’ or to ‘everyone’ so it’s important to check your privacy settings BEFORE turning the feature on. Make sure you’re happy for all your photos (or albums) to be seen by everyone and make any changes if you aren’t.

Look through the privacy settings of your contact details carefully. For example, is your mobile phone number set to public? That may be fine for close friends, but do you really want everyone to know it? I don’t mind who contacts me on Facebook but deliberately keep my other email addresses and phone numbers private, as you can see by the little padlock symbols in the screenshot below.

Once you enable ‘Subscribers’ you will automatically be subscribed to all your friends as well. You can choose between receiving ‘all’,‘most’ (the default setting) or ‘only important’ updates to avoid being bombarded with too many.

Anything you post as ‘public’ on your personal profile wall will be seen by your Subscribers in their news feed. The screenshot below shows that ‘public’ is my default for sharing updates but you can opt for ‘friends’ or ‘custom’ by clicking through and changing your privacy settings. You also have the option of selecting who you share individual updates with too.

Do you have the Subscriber option turned on? Do share your experience or opinion in the comments below – we’d love to know what you think of it!

One of our most popular Q&A Calls was about Facebook

They’re using a Personal Profile instead of a Page

This used to happen more than it does now. The standard introduction to Facebook is signing up for a personal profile. Before you know it, you’re connecting with business contacts and prospective clients as ‘friends’. So you figure you might as well get on and promote your business to them anyway. This will never be totally satisfactory as you’ll miss out on all the brilliant features of having a Page – for example anyone can access your Page like a normal web url, even without a Facebook account, whereas if you use your personal profile, only people who are Facebook members will be able to find you.

They set up a Page – and then forget about it

Let’s say you do get around to creating a Page for your business. You upload a logo, put a few words on the info page with a link to your website and then ….. so many people run out of steam at this point and leave their pages unfinished. Because they don’t know what to do next, they do nothing and it starts gathering virtual dust. Unfortunately there are many abandoned Pages on Facebook.

They believe their clients aren’t on Facebook

With over 800 million users (at the end of 2011), it certainly makes sense to leverage the might of this social network to get your message in front of potential customers, whether you’re a B2B or B2C business. Of course there are some target markets who don’t belong to Facebook, but make your decision based on solid research rather than ‘just a feeling’. After all, if 9 in 10 marketers are using Facebook, they’re doing so for a reason!

They don’t tell anyone about their Page

Just as you need to help people find your website, you have to direct people to your Facebook Page and ask them to ‘like’ it. And it’s an ongoing process, so while a big splash when you launch the page will quickly get you plenty of initial likes, numbers will soon stagnate if you stop telling people about your Page. Keep numbers climbing by making it part of your overall marketing campaign to take regular, consistent action to build your community.

They don’t engage with their Facebook community

We’ll admit to not always being very good at this ourselves – but we are trying! It isn’t enough to automatically pull in your blog posts and do nothing else. And don’t be tempted to duplicate your tweets by the way, because your Facebook ‘likers’ often aren’t the same as your Twitter followers so you can’t treat them as if they were. Engaging with your community means chatting with them on the wall, asking questions, sharing other people’s stuff as well as your own. Here’s an excellent article from Denise Wakeman with some more ideas to try out.

What would you add? Please share your tips below.

QR Code Generator – what you need to create your own QR code. Here’s a post with a useful list of code generators to choose from. (I’ve just used QRMobilize to set up my personal QR code and found it quite easy to use.)

We’re also experimenting with Goo.gl which is a URL shortener combined with a QR code generator. The benefits of this is that it lets you track the number of visits to the page where the QR code was read. Make sure you’re logged into Google and just type the URL of the page you want to direct people to. You’ll then see your newly shortened URL. Once you have your shortened URL, click on “details” and you’ll see your very own QR code has been automatically generated for you. You can then right click and save it as a JPEG (for best resolution) or take a screen shot of it. Then you can use it on any of the materials listed below AND you’ll be able to see clicks generated from the QR code and track what’s working for you.

QR Code Reader – which one you choose depends on which smartphone you have. For my BlackBerry, I’ve downloaded the free lynkee.com which was quite straightforward to do, and seems to work well. However I do find that you have to be very precise (and have a steady hand) when capturing the code to enable it to be read.

QR Code Applications for Small Businesses – While some TV ads are sporting QR Codes, personally, I’d struggle to snap the code in the very few seconds it was on-screen!

Perhaps their best applications are to be found offline, on printed media, such as:

• Business Cards
• Trade Show Literature
• Posters
• Direct Mail Postcards
• Take-away Menus
• Magazines and Newspapers
• Product Instructions
• and many more!

The QR code you can see at the top of this post is for our own Savvy Marketing Tips! In this case, we’re using it to encourage people to subscribe to our newsletter, and the link will take you to a sign up box.

If you’re using QR Codes, what’s the best application you’ve seen so far? Please share in the comments below, we’d love to know!

We’re all for creating lots of different streams of income,

You don’t want to dilute the expertise you’ve spent a lot of time, energy and money building up. Being a Jack (or Jill) of all trades may be useful, but people prefer to deal with a specialist when they have a problem they need help with.

You do want people to remember what you do. If you have a long and diverse list it will be harder to make your message clear and succinct, especially when you’re out networking.

You will have to work so much harder!

If you’re effectively running several different businesses, you’ll need to market each of them separately. Imagine the plate spinner who has to keep checking and adjusting to keep each plate from falling.

Your website will be a mess if you use it for several unrelated products or services. I remember visiting a life coach’s site a while back and being surprised and confused to see a page about candle-making! Even a hobby deserves to be separate and there are many completely free ways to do this.

It’s perfectly possible to have more than one business provided you take care with their organisation, presentation and with your time. The alternative is to ensure your additional revenue streams are clearly related to your existing business in some way, so you don’t confuse your prospects!

Have you come across a website that confused you with unrelated offerings? Please let us know in the comments below…

I love learning, and am fascinated by all the possibilities the internet provides for small businesses.

The internet provides more information than I can possibly take in. Not even a lifetime will give me enough hours to read all the blog posts, articles, and eBooks that attract my attention and cause me to lose track of time!

When I fall behind with other work because I’ve been reading, watching or listening to yet another great piece of content, I make excuses (mostly to myself) that it’s research to help clients

While the information was available just to read, I was largely able to contain it by downloading and storing until I had finished my working day, and then read it in my ‘free’ time. That worked, and continued to work reasonably well even when audio information came along.

But my self-discipline seems to desert me when it comes to how-to videos and I find myself irresistibly drawn to watch them. Even when I know they’re ultimately trying to sell me something!

So now, I’m not only falling behind with work, I’m also putting off launching my own products! What a crazy situation! And that’s before I own up to the time spent on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ …….

I’m not blaming anyone here – this overwhelm is totally a problem of my own making. So what’s the solution?

Well, just as email was once the enemy of business productivity and needed to be put in its place, now the overload of available information has become my personal ‘bête noire’.

One of the problems with digital information is that storage is not a problem. If I had to find space in my office for physical products, I’d be much more aware of just how much was accumulating! So, another step could be to have to cancel a subscription, or delete one product, before ordering or subscribing to anything new.

Because I’ve been falling behind on business building tasks (shame on me!), finding out which projects need immediate attention and focusing on getting them completed makes a lot of sense.

So here’s a summary of the first three steps I’m going to implement immediately

1. Clean up subscriptions to online newsletters and blogs
2. Put into place a ‘one out before another one in’ policy
3. Make a list of all current & proposed projects, and prioritise them by ROI, in other words those that will bring in the money the quickest!

Do you have any ideas or suggestions? What has worked well for you? We’d love to know!

In our never-ending search for efficient working online and increasing productivity

It may seem as if we’re always recommending Google, but they really do offer some really impressive and useful cloud-based tools. Today, we’d like to bring your attention to Google Calendars, a few of the functions to explore, and some possible ways to apply them in your business.

As with many Google Tools, Calendars have recently undergone a bit of a makeover and do look much smarter in appearance on the screen. Here are some of the features we’ve been using, although they are far from being the only ones available!

Multiple Calendars

If you’ve ever tried keeping track of appointments, ‘to-do’ actions and different projects you’re working on in one diary, you’ll know how messy-looking and confusing that can look. With Google Calendars you can have different calendars for each type of activity, and easily identify which is which by changing the colour of each one (as in the screenshot above). I’ve added in a US time bar beside the GMT so I can easily make the conversion when booking appointments.

Sharing Calendars

As with Google Docs, sharing Calendars with a colleague means both parties can edit and add appointments. Handy when you’re trying to allocate time to work on a joint project or two, and fit them in with your individual busy diaries.

Using Tasks

Not everything you want to do warrants setting up a timed appointment on a calendar, although by adding but not specifying a time to an appointment, it will show the activity above the timed slots on the calendar. Using Tasks is more flexible and mean you can set up activities like ‘Follow up Jim’ in a specific calendar, and allocate a day or deadline to complete it, depending on your preference.

Tasks will show up on your calendar screen in a small area of the screen at the top of the relevant day and as a list to the side of the calendar. As well as being able to edit task details, rescheduling is easy to do by simply ‘dragging & dropping’ to where you want them. When you complete a task, there’s a little tick-box which crosses through and fades the task to differentiate it from the unfinished variety. You can clear/delete all the completed tasks to tidy things up on the screen, but I like to save doing that until the end of the day so I can watch the completed tasks adding up

Installing the Calendar Checker (a neat little Google Chrome extension) in the toolbar, shows at a glance when the next appointment is due, changing to red as the time gets closer. Hovering over the icon reveals details of that appointment, and clicking on it opens up the full calendar.

Synchronise with other calendars and devices

Google calendars will synchronise with Microsoft and Apple calendars, although we haven’t tried that function. I (Louise) successfully use it in conjunction with my BlackBerry and online appointment scheduler, Tungle.me. Because of this, I can have access to the calendar wherever I happen to be, and avoid double-booking myself.

If you already use Google Calendar – what’s the most useful function to you? We’d love to know!

I’ve just received another automated Twitter Direct Message inviting me to join yet another new social network.

Sometimes the sheer volume of invitations and notifications from networks you belong to can become overwhelming, especially when added to all the usual emails and other messages demanding your attention.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on how off-putting it is to receive invitations to connect that make no attempt to personalise the initial message and you can see in the comments that Sam feels the same!

We’re much more likely to accept invitations from people who have taken a few seconds to introduce themselves. It makes a huge difference when an invitation says: ‘Hi, we met at such & such networking meeting recently’ or ‘I subscribe to your newsletter & would love to connect here’ or ‘We have a mutual contact/interest in x’.

The trouble is, we don’t want to refuse an invitation from someone who could potentially be an interesting connection just because they don’t use the right words!

Setting up a connection policy or process can help

1. Is there a photograph of the person?

I like to see who I’m connecting with, so a logo, grey avatar or pet photo isn’t helpful (or professional). It’s a bit like going to a local networking meeting wearing a mask isn’t it?

2. What does their profile say about them?

It’s often difficult to know what to put in these boxes. I look for clues about what the person does and also what they’re like as an individual, so blank boxes or sales copy are a turn-off.

3. Do they have a website and/or blog?

This is their online home and I often decide whether to connect based on what I read in their ‘About’ page. If there isn’t a link to click on, this gives me the message that they aren’t very serious about their business online. The same applies if the only link takes me to a Facebook Page.

4. What connections or interests do we have in common?

If we have nothing and no-one in common then why should we connect? Another reason why 2 & 3 above are so important.

5. What do they tweet about?

For Twitter connections, I always have a look at their timeline or stream of recent tweets to see if they chat with their other connections and share other people’s stuff. If all that’s there is a list of self-promotional tweets, then they obviously don’t ‘get’ Twitter and I don’t connect with them

I hope this doesn’t come across as too ruthless, but realistically I can only engage with a limited number of people in a day, week or month. While I freely admit to making regular use of automation tools, I try hard to personally connect with as many people as I can every day too. It is called social networking after all!

Related posts:

Connecting with Social Media

Friends and Acquaintances

Getting to Know You

What have we missed? Do you agree with this post? Please let us know in the comments below.

Too many small businesses, by which I mean solo entrepreneurs and one-person businesses, either don’t have a list of prospects to market to, or they rely too heavily on word of mouth referrals

At a recent local networking group we attended, only a handful of business owners said they sent out newsletters, and most of those didn’t do so on a regular basis. What a lot of lost opportunities!

Even though networking locally with fellow business owners is still very effective, it doesn’t hurt to make more of those connections and take them to the next level. And the same goes for networking online. Both these activities are definitely to be encouraged and continued – but with the addition of building a list.

You see, there are only so many 60-second pitches, tweets and updates you can send out about your business before you begin to sound sales-y and spammy. And with so many people wanting to get their message across as well, it’s difficult to get your own message across!

Relying only on networking, online or traditional, means you have to be there in person. Building a list means you have so many more opportunities to market to prospective clients and remind influencers of what you do.

It’s of little use to collect drawers full of business cards if you don’t also build a list to mail to. Adding new contacts to your list without asking permission first is bad practice – but you already knew that

Use a service like Mailchimp to manage your list and easily give a more professional finish to the messages you send out.

Invite people to subscribe to your list and make it worth their while to do so. Give away something of value in exchange for their contact details and permission to mail to.

When you have a list, it opens up another channel of communication to invite people to events. Whether these are events you’re hosting, speaking at, or just attending, you can reach out and tell your list about it.

Building a list of people to send email marketing messages to isn’t an excuse to bombard them with promotions just because it’s cheap to do and you feel like it. But using email is an excellent way to keep people up to date with your latest products and services.

Your list is a natural extension of the relationship building which begins at networking meetings. It’s an opportunity to start building the know, like and trust factor everyone talks about – and which is essential if people are going to want to do business with you.

What tips do you have for list building? Please share in the comments below.

All my business and personal connections are mixed up as friends on my personal profile. How can I separate them or get business contacts over to my business page?

This is where FB Lists come in handy. You can set up separate lists for family, for close friends, best friends, another list for a dance club you belong to, and a list called ‘Business Contacts’ if you have connected with them on your personal profile.

You can have up to 100 lists, and up to 1000 members in a list. Each of your friends (remember the max no is 5000) can belong to multiple lists.

Creating lists is easy to do and so is adding friends to different lists, which can be done when initially connecting with them, as well as afterwards.

1. By using the privacy settings you can set status updates to only be viewed by those lists you want or to exclude a subset of friends. To do this, first click on the little padlock sign beside the Share button, and select ‘Customise’.  On the next pop-up screen, start typing in the name of the list and it will appear amongst the individual friend names for you to click on.           
2. View news updates from one list at a time, if the stream is too busy. On your Home page, first click on words ‘Most Recent’ and then click on the little down arrow which appears beside those words. You’ll see a drop down menu with some of the lists at the bottom (if you have lots of lists, you’ll need to click to ‘Choose another’).
3. Another cool part of this drop down menu is that you can also select to see updates from the Pages you like.
4. If you use the live chat facility, you can switch off the chatter from whole lists if you want to, and choose who you do want to chat with.
5. When you have business contacts on your personal profile, you don’t need to unfriend them all. By adding them to a ‘Business Contact’ list, you can easily keep a eye on what those contacts are sharing.

You can send messages/updates from your profile just to your Business Contacts list and invite them to come and ‘Like’ your page, although be aware that the message will only be sent to 20 people at a time. This is another reason why using your personal profile for business doesn’t work very well, so the sooner you can migrate business contacts to your Page, the better.

For more tips on using Facebook, you might want to check out our latest guide “Using Facebook in Your Small Business”.

What’s your favourite way to use Facebook lists? If you found this post useful, please share it!