Adam Teece

E-mail Marketing For Small Business

October 31, 2011 By Adam Teece Leave a Comment

When small businesses want to use e-mail marketing, they need to research the best ways to do it effectively. Using e-mail allows businesses to reach existing customers and potential customers by using targeted mailing. The internet is continually growing every day, and potential customers are logging into their e-mails, and surfing the web for the next new product they want to buy.

There has been a study on e-mail marketing that showed businesses using a targeted mailing system; they had a higher ROI of $40 for each dollar they spent in advertising. This is an excellent increase in revenues. The internet allows small businesses to reach customers all around the world.

E-mail marketing can reach as far as the small business owner wants to reach. People need to figure out who and where you want to reach, and then start a targeted mailing list. Once the content and structure of the campaign is complete, then he or she will send out a mass e-mail marketing advertisement to potential and existing customers.

Using a targeted mailing list allows small business owners to search for potential customers who are in the market for their product or service that they are selling. They will be able to reach a certain demographic area when they use e-mail marketing systems. There are software programs that small business owners can buy that will help set up their marketing campaigns.

When people use e-mail marketing, they will often have a lot of positive feedback from potential customers. They often see an increase in sales in products or services they provide to customers. This saves a lot of money from doing postal mailing campaigns, since the postage alone usually costs more than the advertisement.

When people use this system, they will receive immediate results. Customers will go on to the small business’s website to order new products, or to request services. This is an excellent way to drive traffic to the website, which bumps the website up on the search engines. The only time small business owners need to wait is for their potential customer to open the e-mail and read the advertisement or promotion.

Small business owners like to use this marketing system since it helps to engage their customers to act to the advertisement or promotion. There are software programs that help make the advertisement interactive. People can add surveys, flash, quizzes, and videos for their potential and existing customers to watch. Everyone has an opinion, and often time’s people will call or e-mail the company telling them what they liked or disliked about the video, product, or promotional item. The new marketing system to advertise products and services is the fastest way to get through to new and existing customers.

Filed Under: Marketing

Social Media Video To Get More Customers

June 23, 2011 By Adam Teece 3 Comments

The Power of Utilizing Social Media Video to Get More Customers

What is a social media video? On the surface, it’s a video that is shared on a social sharing website. It’s a way for potential and existing customers to interact with you and your website. And it can be an entertaining way to share your message. At it’s best it is a great way to improve your search engine optimization. It’s not a commercial, it’s a combination of text, music and images and sometimes voice to get your customers to do two things: follow the call to action you have in the video, and share the video with people they feel could benefit from what you have to offer.

What Social Media Video Is Not

Remember, a social media video is not a commercial in the traditional sense. You don’t have to have a film crew come out to your business and have everyone follow a script with every movement choreographed. It’s not a fancy press release either. Usually a video for small business is put together with the help of a good online marketing specialist who either has the skills or people to put together a quick and entertaining video. If footage is needed it can be gathered using cell phones or digital cameras which makes getting everything on the computer for editing very simple.

Social media video is also not spam. Just because you have a video doesn’t mean you need to put it on every site out there that you possible can. Some businesses can also make the mistake of being too forceful, which you definitely want to avoid. The most effective videos are the ones that people actually want to watch.

What A Social Media Video Is

Completely defining a social media video, is nearly impossible. It can be different things to different people. The best videos don’t even appear as marketing to most of the people watching it, which is why it can be so powerful. Here are a few things that can define it a bit better:

A social media video triggers an emotional or psychological response. It creates the need to interact and drives customers to want to share the video with others.
Social media videos typically use a platform that is already in place. Platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are great places to share these because of the number of potential viewers. There are already people there watching video, sharing them with others and interacting.
Social media videos need to be about you and your business, but the real you. It should be fresh, original, and usually funny for the greatest effect.

This is just scratching the surface so please leave a comment if you have any questions. Also share with us if you have ever used social media to spread a video. Was it successful? What worked and what didn’t?

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: social media, video

Control Your Business Phone With Virtual Numbers

March 21, 2011 By Adam Teece Leave a Comment

Are you a freelancer that struggles with giving out your personal phone number to clients?

Do you have a team that works for you and you wish you could track business calls?

Then you really should consider setting up a virtual number. Starting out in business it was just me. I really didn’t want to go out and set up a whole new business phone line, or buy another cell phone or plan just for the business. I was boot strapping this business so I had to keep costs down.

Thankfully there were options for me. These options came in the form of Virtual Phone Numbers. Starting out with the free service of Google Voice.

If you don’t want to give your personal cell phone number out to all of your business contacts, then just get a Google Voice number. Not only does it give you another number to use for your business, but it allows you to screen calls, answer while they are leaving a voice mail, and get your voice mails transcribed for free. The transcription isn’t perfect, but it works well enough to get the gist of the message.

Google voice is a great place to start, but it doesn’t have all the features a business owner might need. Once you are either ready to take your phone management to the next level or if you just need to, especially because you have employees, then you need what is called a Virtual PBX. A lot of businesses have PBX’s in their offices for their phone systems. It’s what allows the company to have extensions and mailboxes and more. Physical versions of these are very expensive and you need to know how to set them up. With a virtual PBX you can easily set up extensions, add and delete phone numbers, receive faxes, and more all to your cell phone.

Personally I use Ring Central mainly because the price is amazingly affordable, it gives me a free 800 number, dedicated fax number and unlimited extensions. I can even add more phone numbers to it for only $5 a month. The cool thing is, if I want I can have everything directed to my phone, or I can have one extension ring many phones. With the Android app(they also have an iPhone and Blackberry app) I can easily see incoming faxes, missed calls, check missed calls and make calls as if calling from my business line.

So I highly suggest getting started with a virtual number today to start upping your business game.

Leave a comment below with questions or ideas on how to use virtual phone numbers to make managing your business easier.

Filed Under: Tools