Business Promotion

Whether you are planning a promotional event marketing or an experiential marketing, there are things you will be looking forward to. A period of preparation for an event can be both challenging and exciting. You would want to create a buzz in the people and generate interest in your campaign. There are things you would like to know if you want your event to be a success. A lot of things will have to be considered before you start up with your marketing strategy. Whether you want to hire event marketing companies or you want to work on your own, the following ideas can be very useful when working out your strategy.

Always start by creating a budget. This will consist of how much you would need for the material you would use for the campaign. If you would be hiring a company for certain professional details, you should be able to work that out and have an idea of how much you would be spending. For every item you would use for the campaign, it is important to make an estimate of how much you would need to spend. If the budget is clear, then you may think about the venue of the event. This can be as important as any other aspect of the marketing. Where you hoist an event is really very important.

You can get sponsors to help you. Getting sponsors is a choice that can be very fruitful for you. Sponsors will normally have a great email marketing list and they can use it to pull crowds to your event. You can also work with experiential marketing companies to get the best tools for your campaign. Such experiential marketing companies will have the most suitable event marketing technology that you can use.

You can create posters to shout your event out. Posters can be very catchy and the creativity with which they are made can contribute a lot to the success of an event. Writing catchy and interesting posts will help you get the attention of a large crowd of people. If you have a targeted group, say students, then you would be asking the assistance of institutions to which they are affiliated. Putting posters on university campus for an educational campaign can be the best thing to do. You can get stores and other public places to help you with your posters. You can never know where people get hooked with an idea.

Use popular media channels and social media networks like Facebook to advertise your event. Creating a campaign in Facebook can help you reach out to many people. Your friends will be able to read it and friends of your friends can also help advertise your event. Creating a successful event marketing strategy will depend on your resources and how well the event is thought out. Seeking professional assistance can be the best thing to do if you are not quite confident about what you think.

by Peter Blapps

How Email Marketing Solutions Help You Know Your Customers

For starters, and just to make sure we’re all on the same page, what is email marketing solutions? In a nutshell, it’s exactly what it sounds like: communicating with your customers via email. But there’s a key difference between legitimate email marketing solutions and the pesky spam messages that end up in your junk folder. The difference is that email marketing solutions is opt-in, or permission-based. This means that the people who are receiving your email messages have, at some point, signed up to hear from you. This is one of the key reasons why email marketing solutions is so effective.

But that’s not what I want to focus on today. In fact, now that we’ve gotten the basic stuff out of the way, I want to introduce you to a completely new way to look at email marketing solutions. Yes, email marketing solutions will help you communicate with your customers and leads, and yes, it’s an inexpensive and efficient method of marketing. But you probably already know that. You also likely know that you can use email marketing solutions for many methods of communication, including e-newsletters, e-flyers, e-coupons and promotions, press releases, postcards, event invitations (or e-vites), thank you notes, and so much more. But did you know email marketing solutions has another major functionality?

Email marketing solutions can help you get to know your customers. Just when you thought that market research and intricate customer profiling tools were reserved for big companies with huge budgets, here comes this nifty, easy-to-use and inexpensive online tool. Email marketing solutions is like a window into the actions, preferences and behaviors of your customers and leads.

So, the big question is: How? And, as cliché as it sounds, I’m happy to say it’s easy as pie (actually, since I don’t really bake, if you’re anything like me this is going to be much, much easier than pie!) Here are the simple steps you can follow to get to know your customers via email marketing solutions.

Step 1: Take Good Care of Your Contact List

When you ask customers or prospects to sign up for your email marketing solutions subscriber list, the one key piece of information you must collect is their email address. If you want to make the most of email marketing solutions, make sure you also ask for their first and last name, and other information that may be pertinent to your business. For example, if you run a sporting memorabilia store, you may want to ask for the customer’s favorite sports team(s). This way, later you’ll be able to send out targeted messages promoting merchandise from the selected sports team(s). The simple step of asking for pertinent information when the customer signs up will later help you send messages targeted to the exact interest of each customer. If you keep the information you collect in a simple Excel file, you’ll later be able to automatically upload it to your email marketing solutions software.

Now, you may be thinking: does targeting my customers’ interests mean I’ll have to manually sift through each customer record and separate customers by interest group? The answers is no, not if you are using a first-class email marketing solutions software package.

Step 2: Make Good Use of Interest Groups

An interest group is a group of email subscribers who share something in common. This may be a group of people who live in the same area, wear the same shoe size, purchase from your store with the same frequency, etc. In email marketing solutions, you can segment customers any way you want, or any way that makes sense for your business. By separating customers into interest groups, you can automatically send out email marketing solutions messages to one or more specific group(s) of people. For example, if you have segmented your customers by birthday month, you can send out a Happy Birthday email message specifically to the customers whose birthdays fall on the current month. You can even include a coupon for a freebie or a special discount on the customer’s birthday.

One really cool thing about that is that the top email marketing solutions programs can auto-fill information on an email message. So, for example, if Annie’s birthday is on April 2 and you want to send a coupon that can only be used on her birthday, the best email marketing solutions software packages include a feature that can auto-fill information, such as, “This coupon is only valid on April 2.”

Now there are 2 key ways you would know Annie’s birthday is on April 2, or Tommy likes the Toronto Maple Leafs. The first way is the one described in Step 1: you had the foresight to ask for this pertinent information when the customer signed up for your email marketing solutions list. So, what if you already have a list, but you never asked for customer information at sign-up? Can you still use email marketing solutions to get to know your customers? The answer is yes, of course.

Step 3: Make Good Use of Links In Your Email Messages

Another great way to get to know your customers through email marketing solutions is include pertinent links in your email messages. The best email marketing solutions programs provide you with detailed link click reports. This means that you will be able to see which customers clicked on each link contained in your email marketing solutions campaign. How does that help you get to know their interests and preferences? Easy! Once you have chosen how to segment your customers (by shoe size, birthday month, life stage, etc, etc..), create some email content targeted to that interest group. The simplest and most straightforward method is to say something like: “Want to receive emails about stuff that’s important to you? Tell us what’s important to you”. You can then include links to options like “traveling, my kids, work, etc..” Make sure these links take the reader somewhere, even if it’s a simple ‘Thank You’ page. And, you don’t even have to be so direct. Say you run a music store. You can include links to your product pages with link text like “See what’s new in classical music” or “Click here to browse through our hard rock music selection.”

Once the email has been sent, your email marketing solutions software will show you a detailed link click report. You will see which customers are fans of classical music, and which are fans of hard rock. Then (here comes my favorite part), if you are using a top-notch email marketing solutions program, you will be able to automatically turn these report results into interest groups. This means that with the simple click of a button, you will instantly have a classical music interest group, and a hard rock interest group. Next time, you can send each group emails with more of the albums that you know will interest them. And, you were able to get to know your customers that well simply by including a few pertinent links in your email marketing solutions campaign.

With these 3 simple steps, you too can get to know your customers using the simple, inexpensive and highly effective tool known as email marketing solutions.