Email marketing is a fairly inexpensive form of advertising. You can potentially reach thousands or millions of customers at almost no cost. However, many companies have been using this technique indiscriminately. The result of this is a huge amount of unsolicited emails (i.e. spam) that end up annoying people.

When email marketing is done badly, the offending company is often called a spammer and can potentially violate the law. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

1) Permission
We should get permission from the recipient before sending them emails. You could have a registration form on your website, where the user can decide whether to receive emails from you.

2) Opt-out Link
Every email should include a link where the user can unregister so that they won’t receive any further emails from you.

3) No Purchased List
Some companies might buy an email list from a provider. This is very dangerous as the recipients who give permission to the provider might not welcome other emails from you.

When you’re doing any email marketing campaign, ask yourself a question, “how would I feel if I were the one receiving this email?” This common sense approach will help you to identify whether your emails are useful and relevant to the recipient or not.

If someone asked you to describe your business in a few words, how would you do it?

If it takes you a few minutes to describe all the things that you do; you probably need to think more about what’s really important to your business. And your audience will probably be stifling yawns.

On the other hand, if you can answer too quickly, “I’m an accountant” or “I sell watches”, you might be limiting yourself too much. To most people, calling yourself an accountant doesn’t just mean you work out numbers, it comes along with certain stereotypes, like being very formal and boring. The danger comes from thinking of yourself this way and being subtly pulled to act just like the stereotype.

Try adding a little twist to your summary. Maybe you’re “Toronto’s friendliest accountant”. Not only will this help customers remember you, but it helps you think of ways you can stand out even more. Maybe you should use plain language and graphs to help your clients understand their financial situation. Maybe you can send handwritten birthday cards or wear more casual and colourful clothes.

When summarizing your business, tell people what you do, but also what makes you different.

When you’re making decisions on different marketing or advertising channels, a big question is how much can you afford to pay for each visitor or sales lead.  This can help you make informed and profitable decisions.  All it takes is gathering the right information and some simple math.

If you’re selling things online, you can use an online tool to track how many visitors you’re getting.  Say on average you get 5000 different people visiting each per month.  From your sales statistics, you had 250 customers last month with an average profit of $15.  Then you can estimate that 5% of your visitors turn into customers, so each visitor will contribute on average 5% of $15, or $0.75 to your sales.  This is just a quick estimate - it doesn’t account for things like repeat purchases or the chance that they’ll tell their friends - but it’ll serve as a starting point.

So now you can use this as a quick test to figure out whether you should use certain forms of advertising.  If you pay 50 cents per click for a sponsored search result on Google Adwords, you’re still earning an average profit of 25 cents each time someone clicks, so you should do as much of this as you can.  On the other hand, if you’re paying $200 a month for a banner ad that brings in 100 visitors, you’re paying $2 per visitor, which probably means you’re losing money, unless visitors from that banner are particularly likely to buy.

You can use a similar analysis to find out how much a retail window shopper or sales lead is worth to you.  But after you make your marketing decisions, go back to treating your visitors as human beings, not dollar signs.  This’ll be both more enjoyable and profitable in the long run.

Last time, we talked about what is a brand and how it relates your customers to your business. In this post, we will discuss some general guidelines on building your brand.

1) Own One Word
What do you think when you hear Volvo? Safety. How about Toyota? Reliable. How about Mercedes-Benz? Prestige. Even though all three companies build safe cars, use reliable engines, and have more prestigious expensive models, one word stands out for each of them. For your brand, you will want to own one word that sticks in the mind of your customers. If you try to get too many words to stick, then chances are none of them will stick and the identity of your brand will get diluted. Focus is the key.

2) Be Authentic
How many of you came across an internet company claiming their internet service is fast, but the actual speed is slow as snail? How about a car dealership claiming they have the lowest price, but you find another one that gives an even lower price? Whatever the branding image or ideas you are going for, you have to make sure it’s authentic, reflecting what you can deliver. Volvo never claims they make the fastest cars in the world, and Toyota will never try to sell you on the prestigious side of their cars.

3) Own One Color
What color do you think of when you hear about Coca-cola? Red. How about Pepsi? Blue. How about Mountain Dew? Green. Owning one color allows your customers to associate the color with your brand, and differentiate you from your competitors. Pick one that closely relates to what your brand offers, and that it separates you from your competitors.

4) Be Consistent
A brand is never built overnight. If you want your customers to remember your brand, you will need to consistently apply the same theme over and over again for a long time. You need to apply it on everything your customers see, which includes your website, your brochure, your product packaging, your retail store design, and so on. Repeated exposure to the same theme is the key to getting your brand to stick in the minds of your customers.

If you want to learn more on what makes a good branding strategy, read this book.

A lot of small business owners might not give much thought to branding. It seems like an abstract concept that’s only applicable to widely distributed products backed by big marketing budgets from large corporations. But if you want to grow your business over the long term, then you should start seeding your brand into your customers’ minds even when you are still small.

Where should you start? Before we explore ways to build your brand, let’s start by looking at the question, “what is a brand, anyway?”

From Wikipedia, “A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service.” This might be a really good textbook answer, but chances are you won’t remember it in a week.

In essence, a brand is the images and ideas that people remember you by. The images are visual, like your logo, color scheme, mascot, etc. For example, you might remember Nike’s “swoosh” logo. For Fedex, you might remember the purple/orange/white color scheme. The ideas can be as simple as a single word. What do you think when you hear Wal-mart? Cheap! How about a Volvo car? Safety!

If you are able to get those images and ideas into your customers’ heads, everytime they see the images or think about those ideas, they will automatically think about your company and your products. Next time, we’ll look at some general guidelines on building your brand.

Most small businesses these days have a website up to share information and attract new customers.  If you don’t, you might want to consider getting one designed.

If you already have one, have you ever wondered what kind of people are visiting it?  Where are they from?  What do they click?  How did they get there?  How many come back?  Answering these questions helps you understand how people interact with your website, so you can improve on weak points and promote your selling points better.  Luckily, there are free tools online that can help you track how people use your website.

Google Analytics gives you detailed information on how your users browse your site.  It can tell you what time of the day you get the most traffic, which countries the users from, which page is the most viewed, etc.  The nice thing about it is that the graphs are all interactive, allowing you to drill down to find the exact information you want.

Quantcast shows you the demographics of your users.  Information like the age group, average household income, the gender percentage, etc.  How could you target your marketing message better if you found out that most of your visitors were women over 50?

Using these tools is very easy if you already have a website.  Simply sign-up for a free account, and follow their instructions to attach a small piece of HTML code on your website.  You might be surprised by how your website is being used.  We know we were when we saw Malaysia in the top 10 countries visiting us.  Time to go international, anyone?