VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Take a Tip from Restaurants on Email Marketing & Social Media

If you've got a business that requires getting the word out to customers on a daily or weekly basis, using email marketing with social media can lead to a winning combination. One industry that can thrive on this type of combination is the hospitality industry and specifically restaurants. Because of the "up-to-the-minute" nature of these three marketing vehicles, it's perfect for this perpetually changing business. Let's take a look at some great examples.

Email Marketing

You are probably using email marketing to announce chef specials, menu changes, special events and parties and send emails weekly or monthly. Too many restaurants don't keep up with their customers during the year, then start jamming emails out to them in the holiday season for large parties and events. Remember, events happen all year long so you'll need to stay in front of them at all times. Email is also a great way to build your social media lists. To build your Twitter list make sure you tell your email marketing recipients in your emails to follow you on Twitter. Include a link to let them know they'll be able to get your daily specials, then watch your Twitter list grow! You also might want to include a message in your bill holder to sign up for your email list AND follow you on Twitter.

Twitter

I bet if you run or work in a restaurant and run daily specials, one of your top telephone requests is "What type of soup do you have today?", or "What are your specials?". This can be maddening especially if you're busy. Twitter to the rescue! This is a perfect application for 140 characters.  One important note: keep your Tweets to 10-20 characters less than the 140 characters allowed on Twitter. This will allow for others to ReTweet your post. Then your message will get in front of new people who might also end up following you.

Facebook

If you have daily specials that won't fit into Twitter's character limitations, you can include a link to your specials or post them on your wall on Facebook. You can also use the "events" feature to post special pairings and tasting events. And have the chef post that she just went to the farmer's market and is preparing something special for the evening with a picture of the dish.

You don't need to have a restaurant to put these great ideas to work for your business, especially if you've got things that change a lot on a day-to-day basis. This is a great way to combine all of these great things to get more business coming in your door.

Promoting Your Business By Showing Appreciation for Another Business

Last week, while doing a search for "VerticalResponse" on Twitter, I stumbled upon a very smartly crafted Tweet. It had 2 key elements, it mentioned what the customer's end goal was and it contained supportive language about email marketing with VerticalResponse.  

It took me all of 2 seconds to decide that I wanted to ReTweet this comment so that everyone who is following our VerticalResponse Twitter account could see it. My goal was to help spread the love for VerticalResponse by showing Carolyn's love for VerticalResponse, but as a side effect I wanted to promote Carolyn's 7 Step Seminar. After I ReTweeted it, a domino effect happened, everyone else in my company ReTweeted my Tweet about her as well.  

I met Carolyn at a conference awhile back and I do not know if she was trying to get VerticalResponse to ReTweet her, but I do know that her company is pretty new and, like any new or growing small business, help with promotions can really make a difference.

So take a few minutes and show some support or say thank you to some of the companies that you are working with. If you craft your messages appropriately you just might get ReTweeted, get a mention in a blog post or newsletter, or even wind up being a case study for the company you are supporting. You will also be passing on a resource that your business finds useful to your audience, which is a practice that is very well received on social media.

Jenna Jantsch
Social Media Lead 

Cause Marketing: Giving Profits to Charity

I recently walked into a holiday decoration store in a mall. Neat ornaments, nice decorations, and since it was a new store I told the gentleman behind the counter that it was a great place. "Thanks", he said, "All of the stores proceeds goes to AIDS awareness and all of the employees here are volunteers." Shocked and inspired I wanted to buy something on the spot. I did one more whirl around the store because I thought I missed a sign that told me that. I found none.

I walked out astonished. If I'd never said anything to the nice volunteer, I'd probably never know what a great cause. Sad, because so many people who were just looking, may have purchased something had they known.

Since the 80's more and more larger corporations have snuggled up to Cause Marketing. We've all seen the Product RED campaign where companies like the Gap or Nike, give back to  the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for every piece of RED clothing that is purchased. And we're not strangers to Susan G. Komen and the many retailers that offer something relating to the pink ribbon for breast cancer. 

But smaller businesses are jumping on the bandwagon to help. In a down economy non-profits find it increasingly difficult to get their usual donors to act, so there's never been a better time to help out if you can.

At VerticalResponse we give email marketing for free to any non-profit, especially the small ones that really need the help that we can give. So instead of choosing just one, we choose thousands. We do it because we believe in it, there's  nothing in it for us except the great feeling we get helping those whose mission is to help others. Our company also matches our employee's Kiva donations, we encourage employees to make micro loans to entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries. We also donate hundreds of hours of employees' time to making our community better, to causes like Project Homeless Connect and the San Francisco Education Fund. All of this wrapped up in one, makes us all feel great about working for a company that cares, and hopefully shows the type of company we aim to be.

So it's never too late to get yourself active with a non-profit partner you believe in. Consumers these days more and more are looking at who they buy from. They want to patron companies that are doing good things for people, animals, and the environment. So why not give your prospects a reason to make a choice and give your customers a reason to keep coming back?

Remember my blog where I said you're not in control of your brand anymore, your customer is? One of the things they might be looking for these days is what you stand for. If you offer a similar product or service as a competitor, your cause just might be the thing that pushes them to your business over the competition.

Get Started!

1. What's your cause? - You might want to ask your employees what they care about getting behind or pick something that has had an effect on you in your life.

2. How much can you afford? Make sure you include in your budget that you'll be giving a percentage away to your cause. You certainly want this to benefit your business, not hurt it.

3. Market your cause - If you've got a retail store, like the one in the beginning of this post, make sure you have proper signage about your cause in your store window and around your property. Print it on all materials and display it prominently on your website. Make sure the cause your supporting knows about it too, they may even include you on their site like RED does for it's partners.

Include it in all of your email marketing campaigns along with a link to the cause. Driving them new donors is also beneficial to them. Make sure if you're using social media like Facebook you become a member of your cause, and make sure you talk about your involvement on Twitter and Facebook.

4. Talk about your success - Make sure once you get to a place that seems significant, get loud and proud. Talk about the amount of money your cause received because of the profits you were able to give. Tell stories about lives that may have been saved, or successes of the cause because of businesses like yours. People love to do business with a winner and you and your staff will feel great about the work you do.

Ingrain cause marketing in your company and it could be a boost to business, a boost for your cause and a boost for employee morale for years to come.

How to Make Money From Your List - Co-Registration Done The Proper Way

If you've got people signing up with your opt-in form on your site, you might be able to make a bit of cash during your sign up process. How? If you know another business that would pay you each time someone signed up for your list and indicated an interest in receiving emails from them as well, you might have a match made in heaven.

Here's how I would do it in 5 easy steps:

Agree on how many dollars they'd be willing to pay you for an email address. It could be as little as 50¢ and as much as a few bucks, it's up to the deal you cut.

1. Set up an opt-in form where you'll collect email addresses and other information and link to it from your site (at VerticalResponse you have one already waiting for you in your account and it's free.)
2. Set up a page you host on your site with a thank you message, then direct anyone who completes your opt-in form to this page. On this page you'll also have your partner's message detailing why they'd want to sign up for your partner's emails.
3. Set up another opt-in form (or a few depending on how many partners will be willing to pay you) and host them next to their respective messages on the thank you page.
4. Customize your confirmation email with your partner's messaging: "When you signed up for [Your Company Name] email list, you indicated you were interested in receiving emails from one or more of the following [Your Company Name] Partners. Please confirm your email address below:
5. Then once per week, download your list, and send the email addresses of the recipients who confirmed their email addresses and indicated they were interested in your partner's offers to them along with an invoice for the agreed upon amount. Careful here, you'll want to avoid sending them emails of those that haven't yet confirmed.

Your partner should send them an email right away welcoming them to their list, reminding them that they are receiving emails from them because they indicated interest when they signed up for your list.

Let us know how it goes!

My CEO Gave Me the Keys to Her Blog – What Was She Thinking!

I used to write our newsletter here at VerticalResponse, now I do most of our social media marketing, in a nutshell, anything that has to do with Facebook, Twitter, and tracking what happens on these platforms. Two of the most popular questions I get when speaking to small businesses about social media are ‘What do I write about?' and ‘Who should be our social media representative?'.  Two very good questions I'll attempt to answer here.

What to Write About

This can often be daunting but easy things to post would be things like articles in your last email newsletter, things you may have cut out of your newsletter and what's coming up in your next email newsletter. This is a great list to start from. It is okay to talk about content, event or offers that you have already announced because let's face it, you know not everyone opens your email, the message's life on social media is shorter, and the more times a customer sees your message the better.

When I was publishing our newsletter everyone in our company had to make sure I knew what we wanted to publish. Because of this it made it very easy to keep a list of what we should be talking about when it came to Twitter and Facebook.

Other things I would encourage you to talk about on your social networks are company fun facts, whitepapers, industry information, and online articles relating to what you do. This gets you noticed as an expert in your industry and people will then start to follow you.

Social Media Representative

When you hand over the keys to the person who will be representing you on your social media networks, you'll want to make sure that you trust what they say, they may already write your email newsletters, and they are great at speaking on behalf of your company.

Think about what type of person you want as the voice of your company on these networks. The start of social media can be scary, whatever experience your social media rep can bring to the table of writing for your company online will be beneficial. If you are bringing on someone new it could be a good exercise to have them draft a few of your next email campaigns for you.

I wrote our customer email campaigns for over a year and the feedback I got about what makes sense to our audience has been absolutely invaluable in my social media efforts. 

Jenna Jantsch
Social Media Lead

Announcing the VerticalResponse Checkie Award Winners for Q3 2009

At VerticalResponse we give away our quarterly "Checkie" awards to our customers for  excellence in email marketing, online surveys and direct mail postcards. We pour through campaigns, stats, and creative approaches, and identify the top 3 email marketing performers in 21 industries (That’s 63 email marketing awards a quarter!). We also will award one survey winner and one postcard winner.

Without further adieu, here are the Checkie winners for the 3rd quarter of 2009. Congratulations and your awards are in the mail!

VerticalResponse Social Media Posts

We have a lot of buzz around the office currently about all the new features that we plan to release in 2010. As many of you know we announced that first up in 2010 is the addition of social sharing to our product. Here at VerticalResponse we are true believers that social media and email make a great team for promoting your business. And because of this we are excited to bring on an additional contributor to this blog.

Jenna Jantsch is our Social Media Lead here at VerticalResponse. She takes care of both our Twitter accounts (@VR4SmallBiz & @SupportVR), our Facebook Fan Page, our LinkedIn Group (Small Business Marketing with VerticalResponse), and our YouTube Channel (VRTube) with a few social media webinars thrown into the mix (VerticalResponse Social Media Series).

Her posts that will appear on Wednesdays will cover what she is learning from being VerticalResponse’s social media lead, industry specific social media tips, and as much information she can find on integrating social media into your existing email marketing campaigns.

If you have topics you would like to see us write about give us a comment and we’ll do our best to fit them into the schedule.

How Small Businesses Are Planning to Spend on Marketing in 2010 - Part 2 of Our Survey is Here!

Drum roll please… the second part of our survey to 831 small businesses is here! We released the results on 2010 marketing spend for areas such as email marketing, social media, online banner ads and search engine marketing. You may be interested to check out the results and see how your business compares to what others are doing.

Key findings from this survey include:

• Well over two-thirds of respondents plan to increase their use of email marketing and social media in 2010.
• Email marketing continues to prove its worth to small businesses, as 96.2% plan to use email marketing in 2010.
• Small businesses are getting more comfortable with social media. When reporting marketing plans for 2010, 35.1% of all respondents say they plan to increase their use of social media by a little and 33.3 % plan to increase it by a lot.
• Over half—or 54.2 percent—of all respondents stated they won’t do online banner advertising in 2010, and 23.8% of respondents won’t do search engine marketing such as Google, Yahoo and Bing next year.
• Not surprisingly 79.6% are not planning to use TV, and 72.7% of small businesses will not use radio advertising.

Check out the full survey here and see how your business matches up!

Building Your Email List - Opt-In vs. Opt-Out, Which Way Should You Go?

Many businesses have had the opt-in vs. opt-out discussion at one time or another. The question asked: do you get visitors to take an action to sign up for your newsletter or offers? This is considered opt-in. Or should you email people that never signed up nor have done business with you and tell them they can unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from you? This is known as opt-out.

At VerticalResponse we have always recommended that you get people to opt-in to your list or only email those who have done business with you. You usually wind up with higher open and click rates, and lower bounce and unsubscribe rates, which gives you a better return on your email marketing campaigns. Generally if you use an opt-out method, it means that you've obtained a list or someone has sold you a list, and many times these lists have been built in an unethical way.

Here is a perfectly great example of an opt-out email campaign I recently received from a company called OptInteractive, totally unsolicited.

Dear Janine,

Welcome to our email program!

You are now among a select group of professionals who receive emails packed with product news, information and offers.

Our hope is that you will enjoy this email program and take advantage of its offerings. If, however, you do not wish to receive emails from us, please click on the unsubscribe link below. Keep in mind that you can unsubscribe at any time in the future as well.

Thanks,

Your Friends at Dunhill Interactive

Please click Unsubscribe  from receiving future emails.

Lesson: The "from label" reads "Opinteractive", but they signed the email "Dunhill Interactive" so I'm not sure which company (neither of whom I have an affiliation with), is sending me the email.  And "OptIn-teractive" sounds more like "OptOut-teractive". They probably scraped my email address from the blog or a website somewhere and added me to this list.

Again, we don't recommend you start to build an e-relationship by force-feeding recipients your messaging and telling them they can opt out or unsubscribe. By doing it the right way, you're brand will be protected.

Seeing Merge Fields in Our Thank You Notes?

This morning we sent out a Thank You email to our customers. We made a mistake with our merge field when we inserted our image. Even though we use our product every single day we still make mistakes. Sorry for our error. And thank you for your understanding and letting us know what you saw. The essence of the message is still true, a heartfelt thanks for your business this season.