If you are a savvy online email marketer, you need to include Social Medial Optimization (SMO) as a key ingredient of your email marketing plans.  Websites that now have a larger integration with social media are gaining huge popularity as their rankings grow higher in the search engines.  SMO is a unique marketing tool, offering you live, interactive methods to engage your audience daily.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) produces a great deal of popularity for any website.  Using online communities create an endless flow of digital chatter called viral marketing.  Viral marketing is where a website becomes popular through the buzz created by using blogs, emails, social bookmarking, videos, and photo sharing.  SMO is a powerful free tool when considering all the strategies you might invest in when building and boosting your own website traffic.

While preserving your current listings, SMO helps you gain more search engine exposure.  By using videos, forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you can capture a larger number of organic SERP positions.  Every marketer’s goal is simple; increasing website traffic – by pointing them to a customized and predetermined landing page.  Using SEO marketing will help you reach that goal effectively.  It is imperative to understand what strategies will work for you.  Here are some basic tactics to get you started:

Link Building with:

1. Article Directories.  Submitting articles to article directories is a great source when creating valuable backlinks.  There are several article directories that are frequented by thousands of Internet surfers.  Many surfers will click on your email or website signature when your article is read.

2. Forums.  Adding your backlinks to a forum signature when posting your responses is another way of getting your company noticed.  Do not market yourself on the forum.  It is tempting, but forum moderators constantly scan the communications for spammers, and will quickly blacklist you if they believe you are only joining for marketing purposes.

3. Blogs.  Blogs are one of the most popular tools, when integrating social media into your marketing strategies.  Blogs open interactive dialogues with your clients and prospects, enabling an honest exchange of ideas and thoughts.  Viral discussions are not only good for your company, but are picked up by the search engines creating backlinks back to your blog.

4. YouTube.  Sign up with YouTube for your free account today.  Make a YouTube video of either your products or services.  Advertise the URL on your newsletters, blogs, Facebook and Twitter account.  You can leave your website and email as your video signature.

5. Business Directories.  Add your business listing to the Local Business section on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It’s free and the local business results appear first on the search results.

6. Pay Per Click (PPC) PPC is when you create advertisements on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Bing.  The advertisements will appear under the sponsored results each time a user types in a key word that relates to the subject of the ad.  Advertisers only have to pay for users that click on their websites, explaining the name “pay per click.”  

A Few More Simple Strategies to Add

Listen to what your customers and prospects are saying:  Communication is a vital key towards gaining business success.  Honest and useful communication helps establish, and grow your customer base.  Be an active listener.  When you are an active listener, you’ll know the best method and way to communicate to each individual prospect or client.   Good listening skills foster good customer relationships.

Keep up with the latest Internet digital chatter.  Do some keyword searches for your product or service.  Read the blogs, articles, and Facebook comments.  See what people are saying.  What makes them happy?  What are their grievances?  Always have the attitude to grow and adapt along the way.

Track your marketing campaigns.  Integrate tracking tools to monitor and measure the success of your social media optimization campaigns.  Create linking reports showing inbound links pointing to your domain and specified landing pages. Tracking your metrics is important when determining whether your SMO campaigns are effective.

www.fathomseo.com – Find out how to build a large – yet refined – email marketing database. Email marketing tips like using “double opt-in” and partnering with a lead generation vendor will help you stay out of spam results. Fathom SEO’s Joe Soltis hands out some email marketing tips on building a quality email marketing database. To learn more about Fathom SEO’s email marketing services, visit www.fathomseo.com
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Online and Internet marketers have fierce global competition.  The marketplace is open to all.  There are very few obstacles hindering email marketers today when wanting to reach millions.  In a bad economy, marketers are hurting.  But, at the same time, we cannot afford to make too many mistakes.  Mistakes and miscalculations are very costly.  Unfortunately, there is no guarantee or marketing guide created, that can promise instant success.  If it does, it is dishonest.

However, there are many tactics and strategies that have proven worthy of investigation, showing successful results in the present and past by other marketers’ experiences.  Let’s discuss just a few:

Don’t change your ads too often.  All the studies show that customers and prospects need to see your ad at least seven times before it makes an impression, before a purchase is conceived.  Give them time to get a general sense of your brand and what you are offering.  Be consistent.

Lead by example.  Stressing to create a unique selling position or market niche can be the road to showing why you are different, but in doing so, can cause your company to lose credibility.  Newsflash:  In your quest to stand out and get noticed in this spam and ad cluttered world, many marketers forget that attention getting is not a new idea.  Guerilla Marketing thrives on surprise and wacky ideas.  Maybe, standing out in today’s marketplace might be best served by concentrating on quietness and quality rather than headlines and surprise.

Recognize your existing and past customers.  Let them know how much you appreciate their business and past patronage.  Consider a way to market them again. “Your existing customer base is the best resource you have,” says the National Federation of Independent Business. “They’ve bought from you before, and they’re likely to buy again. Reach them through special promotions and sales.”

Develop new marketing materials.  Develop some new marketing ideas on pricing and special offers.  Maybe it’s time to rethink and refresh your email and newsletter campaigns?  With professional HTML templates, you start off on the right foundation.  Is your brand logo and message still relevant within your business objectives today?  Have you reached out to your clients lately with surveys, stories, and updates?  This is the time to be different.  This is the time to try new methods of approach.  As the world is changing and so are your clients and prospects.

Be teachable and reachable.  With social media, we can share and learn from our prospects and clients at the same time.  It is a win-win situation.  Everyone appreciates honesty, trust, and a good listener with engaging communication skills. Communication is a two-way road.  As wonderful as we want our products and services to be, we are human and fallible.

Listening to honest criticisms not only helps to improve our products, but builds trust and loyalty in our relationships as well. Online chatter goes a long way.  Make it work for you.

You need the right demographics when reaching the right audience.  Segment your database.  Before you can send the right message to the right target, you need to understand the different characteristics of your list.  Lives change.  People marry, divorce, have children and move.  Their needs change and so must your demographics and messages to them. The more you know about the unique segments within your database, the better chance you’ll have of sending the right messages that will be relevant and appealing to their present needs.

Having a valuable product or service is a great.  But all that our recipients are interested in is contained in this simple question: how does this product or service improve or best serve my lifestyle?  We are all consumers.  We have no excuse not to look at or understand the other side.  Bottom line dictates relevance and quality.  In a bad economy, people pull back and question relevance on a larger scale.  Purchases are no longer being made on impulse and desire.  That, in itself, is a good thing, but creates a real challenging environment in which the email marketer must succeed.

It is a fact that businesses are not only trying to raise their ROI, but are in survival mode as well.  Consumers are saving more and spending less.  More and more, people are looking for cost-effective solutions with quality and dependability.  The challenge is real, but so are the solutions.

In this video I finally go in depth with one of our services used by our clients called the E-mail Marketing Solution. How we do it and how we get it done is explained. If you all have any questions whatsoever please do send me an e-mail shivana@quoviz.com. Have a great one peeps. Look out for our next video…
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In today’s digital marketing environment, people easily become stressed out by the steady onslaught of advertisements and sales.  We live day to day in a market environment, a world filled with an uninterrupted barrage of hype.  Because of this, people now seem to tune out and become quite negative towards any email marketing messages.  Traditional marketing and advertising in its purest form begins to become a source of irritation, counter productive for the marketer, causing loss of sales, and opt-out requests.  Perhaps it’s time for a out of the box strategy.

Story Marketing Works

Personal testimonials help you get a message to a larger portion of your audience, while motivating them to buy. A story-based email marketing campaign can icrease open and click-through rates, boost opt-ins, while converting more leads into sales.  Using stories that are attention-grabbing and useful to your prospects, subscribers, and clients help transform those narratives into an email marketing campaign, generating a greater ROI.

Create buzz-worthy chatter on social media platforms.  Develop compelling stories that parallel your brand including voice, image, and reputation.  Let’s face it, we all enjoy stories. They automatically evoke interest. Here are just a few questions to answer before creating your email marketing campaign:

What are your recipients looking for?
What concerns and problems have they expressed?
Is your product or service beneficial to their lives?
What will create an interest in your message?

Successful campaigns are campaigns that are well-planned and researched.  Here are several more tips to consider before hitting that “send” button.

1. Add an emotional element to your stories. Create an emotional connection with  your product.   Many purchases are based on emotion .

2. Make your stories relevant and meaningful. Story telling is very appealing because it applies to so many lives , in a very direct and personal way.

3. Honest Testimonials. Let others validate your claims. Testimonials are a powerful marketing tool when creating brand perception.

4. Stories go viral very quickly. Integrating social media into your email campaigns automatically enables your stories to go viral from one forum to another.

Recreating your brand’s image using compelling and persuasive genuine stories, along with personal testimonials, is quite effective when grabbing your recipient’s full attention to what you have to say.  As soon as you get your audience’s attention with your message, enables the m to “form a bond” with you and your brand  beyond a superficial level.

Connecting emotionally with you, allows people to overcome the number one reason and major obstacle to their being  unmarketable – skepticism and lack of trust.  Anytime we become aware someone is trying to market us, our instincts take hold and our guard comes up as we automatically respond with resistance.

To survive in today’s market, one must be adaptable, creative, accommodating, and a bit daring.  The “same old” is not working anymore.  What was once considered successful marketing just several years ago, has worn itself thin.  With the influence and effect of social media marketing, people are demanding a more personal contact in their personal and business interactions.  Like a chameleon, we need to blend in with the new strategies, but at the same time we need to stand out and make a clear distinction with our brand and voice .  Not an easy task – a definite challenge.

Do you know how many subscribers are reading your emails on mobile devices? Do you even know what your emails look like on a mobile device? If you’re not designing for mobile, you’re likely seeing decreasing open, click through, and conversion rates. You only have a few seconds to hook recipients and prompt them to open and act on your email, so it’s important to design for those reading your emails on the go. In “Mobile Email Marketing 101,” Blue Sky Factory and Wood Street talk about all you need to know to ensure your emails are designed and optimized for mobile devices, including: Key design elements for mobile devices Strategy tips and tricks to get recipients to act on your mobile emails The nuances of email on different mobile devices

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Every business employing email marketing should know the classification of their subscribers.  Why email segmentation?  First of all, it helps you clearly define your objectives for each classification of those you are marketing to.  Without clearly defined goals, you cannot hope to develop finely targeted campaigns, with a personalized message that will engage a specific group with a specific need.

The second and most important point to make is that the main objective of segmenting is to convert the greatest number of prospects and subscribers from browsers to buyers.  Below are a few straightforward guidelines to promote this transition as quickly as possible.

New Subscribers

 Acquiring a brand new reader is simply the starting point when making the most of the return responses you receive from your email marketing promotions. The next phase is to ensure they take action. Your goal is to cause them to click on your call to action – leading to your landing page, and hopefully, upon their landing, they will make a purchase.

Be creative.  Have a special discount in place intended for welcoming brand-new online subscribers, including a promotional code monitored by your website analytics.  This will enable you to follow what they click on and what they buy.  Follow up with a welcome email message to your new subscriber.  Include a link back to your promotional landing page.  As soon as they click this link, you will be able to trace exactly where they browse and what they click on.  In this way, you not only boost the possibility of more sales, you also gain a behavioral profile of this new subscriber’s personal interests, enabling you to create a more finely tuned targeted future campaign.

Activate your Inactive Prospects

We all have lists filled with prospects that receive, but never open our email campaigns.  At some point, you will need to delete them from your database in order to save precious time, effort, and money. However, it couldn’t hurt to give it one more try before deleting this email from your database forever.  Why not send out a verification reminder, asking them whether they still wish to continue receiving your email or newsletters. Make sure that your subject line clearly states the reason for the communication so it is not perceived as spam.  If they are interested in maintaining their subscription, they will open the email and click the link. If not, then you can remove them without any hesitation.

The Unclickables

These are recipients that have opened your email messages but have never clicked the call to action. Send them an Internet survey to find out what they would be interested in seeing, or which services and products are looking for.  Obtaining any kind of live data from potential subscribers is extremely valuable.  This data can guide and assist as you move forward to developing future campaigns designed to get this particular targeted group to eventually click on your call to action, and make their first initial purchase.

The Coveted Client

Once a browser becomes a buyer, they fall into another category.  Clients need to be nurtured, acknowledged, noticed, and appreciated.  Set up campaigns with special offers and deals just for them.  Follow their future clicks and purchases.  Let them know you value their patronage.  NEVER take them for granted or think they represent an automatic repurchase behavioral pattern.

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