When you have a sale, wouldn’t it be great if you could contact your prior customers and let them know about it? How much would that increase your sales?

Well, now you can. All you would need to do is put a sign-up form at the point of sale (POS) that allows customers to add themselves to your opt-in announcements and specials list. Your customers will add their name and email address so they can receive discounts, coupons, and notifications of sales at your store. You’ll benefit by being able to contact these customers, and with the click of a mouse alert them to any new deals or promotions you have. You will begin to build better relationships with your customers and turn many of those one-time visitors into lifetime customers.

When you are ready to send out your messages (you could send store news, surveys, notifications of sales, or even coupons subscribers could cut out and bring in), you would simply log in to our web-based software, write your message, select whom to send it to, and schedule your message for delivery.

And the best part is that iContact doesn’t cut into your budget one bit. Plans start from just $9.95 per month for 250 subscribers. And as your list grows you can easily upgrade. This is for full functionality including automated subscriber management, bounce back handling, message scheduling, surveying, and use of our library of HTML templates. The return on investment from the days and nights of packed sales counters will far outweigh the minimal cost.

Technorati : E-mail, Email, Ezine, Icontact, Marketing, Retail

Article by David Leach of Swiftpage

The most brilliant parts of email and email marketing are the testing and analytics. With email and the Internet, you can literally test the success of everything you send out, or put on the web. With this said, the ability to form a strict and effective testing process is crucial to whether or not you succeed.

You will need to start this process by laying out some guidelines and groundwork to continuously refer to. Creating a plan will help you stay on course and also allow you to pass off the procedures to the necessary players or new employees down the road. Diving into email testing you will want to decide exactly what you want to keep your eye on, so you can put the proper content in place for tracking. Some of the most common and true indicators of success are found in the testing of subject lines, testing of whether or not to use more images or a Plain Text format, and then also the placement and wordsmithing of links and surveys.

Once it has been decided that you will be testing your content religiously, you will want to set up a schedule. What you don’t want, is to send your emails out, move forward with your campaign and then come back to the results several weeks or months later when it is time for the next email blast. Instead, give the blast, two or three days for links to be clicked on and the email to be properly interacted with, and then jump into your testing when your mind is fresh on the topic. Report analytics are all too easy to look at and say “Oh, yes, hmmm…sure, that explains it” a few weeks after the fact. Try running a fine comb through those results when the focus and drive is fresh and bring your analytic skills to a much higher level.

Learning from your results over time and uncontrollable change are also key and curiously intriguing. From numerous tests you will be able to tell if your target group is more visually stimulated by flashy images, if they are no-nonsense, get-to-the-point and give me links/product types, if they are easily lured in for a good read with specific subject lines, are more responsive with a call to action, or if they are simply more into a good read stocked full of informative and intriguing content.

If they turn out to like reading more than actually purchasing your stuff, then figure out how to make that work for you. You could link to other intriguing and relative sites, and then those sites you link to, will send people back your way in return, etc. etc. and eventually you have created an information network that you can feed from. The whole point is being able to put a finger on who it is you are communicating with and how you can make their experience more enjoyable. The minute you start to force content on your recipients is the same day your numbers will start to tank. Consumers today are getting much better at only surrounding themselves with exactly what they want and nothing more.

The ability to continuously test email content has made email one of the best utility tools for companies today. With this new testing frontier it is very important that you do not stop testing, just because you hit the nail on the head and became an overnight expert realizing for example the words “Splendid” or “Scrumptious” in the subject line bring astronomical open rates. Opinions and tastes may change within the hour and always being tapped into those changes will bring you
the most success and stimulating feedback.

P.S.This is a continuation of my Sunday Affiliate posting.

Technorati : Swiftpage, drip-marketing, e-mail, email marketing, testing

From events or corporate announcements to a new customer welcome or product launch – Swiftpage provides the ability to automatically deliver marketing content and drive your ACT! sales processes. Create graphical email templates with Swiftpage using its simple online editor, or import your own HTML. Then send these emails directly to your ACT! Contacts, Look Ups, Groups and Companies – from yourself or on behalf of your sales team members. Easily track who opened, clicked, bounced and more.

Swiftpage also provides intelligence about your customers. A customer who has opened previous emails from you five times and has clicked on three links, is likely more interested than someone who opened an email once and didn’t click any link. Snapshot by Swiftpage places important information about your customer, both from data in ACT! by Sage and from internet sources like LinkedIn into a display that’s intuitive to read and use. It’s a long established marketing practice to continue to contact prospects at the appropriate time.

As I go thru the process we are going to explore the uses of Swiftpage and maybe even test my knowledge on best practices in this area. Swiftpage seems pretty interesting at this point but lets try it out! If you have, why odn’t you download a free copy of Swiftpage this week and work along with me!

Technorati : act, contact manager, drip-marketing, e-mail, relationship manager, swiftpage