So now is the perfect time to utilize SMS marketing opportunity for effectively reaching out to customers.
In doing so marketer has to keep in mind a few rights and few wrongs.
Do’s
[Do’s]Build your phone number list from scratch:
Imagine a situation when you received an unsolicited SMS from an unknown business, there is a great possibility you will ignore it. So to overcome this, ask your customers to provide their phone numbers if they would like to receive communication from you. Here’s a method used by a restaurant near my office which I frequent for lunch. The restaurant provides the feedback form and pen with bill statement. So till the time payment is completed at the counter, the customer is idle with the feedback form and pen and fills the form 90% of the time.
This may be a little bit tedious but it is sure-shot way to get contact numbers of customers who may be genuinely interested in your product or services and would want to interact more with your business. Giving a call can be too disruptive for the customers, whereas SMS is a subtle way to reach a potential customer. A great way to show that you are offering something of value without being too much pushy. You can update about new discounts, products, services or maybe announcing a new branch or location.
[Do’s]Keep it Short and Simple:
Lot has been written about the size and preciseness of SMS. Give your message in a clear and short way. Customers love it when their needs as addressed in a short, precise manner with to-the-point communication.
[Do’s]Include a captivating call to action:
The language you use should be actionable, addressed to the reader in person, include a clear value proposition in SMS, with focusing on completing action ASAP by using words like today, now. If possible try to personalize your SMS with available SMS tools in the market like Text Blaster , this could be anything like replying with some code for special offers, website links to redirect to website landing page etc.
Don’t
[Don’t] Buy Telephone numbers:
As mentioned in the starting of the post, buying a number database is waste of money, time , resources and efforts. As you would never know if the targeted audience is interested in you service or not. If the customer is uninterested in getting any type of communication from you, such a customer can block your number. Be careful as it will hurt your brand in the customer’s mind.
[Don’t ] Always Sell:
Every Customer can be potentially miffed by the pushy nature of service providing firm. You don’t want your business to be remembered as intimidating and pushing products at customer’s face every now and then. Use your feedback form to gather as much information you can about the customers. Birthday, anniversary, festival wishes are great occasions to be on top of mind of customers and not look pushy.
[Don’t] forget yourself:
Imagine a situation when you draft and send a amazing SMS campaign and forget to mention who you are and what you represent. Well that’s a awful waste of opportunity with money, efforts.
Here are some benefits you get by using SMS as a Marketing Medium.
Benefits
High Open Rate-
Unlike Email , the rate of opening an SMS is almost 100%, as soon as users see an SMS they do see its content.
High Conversion Rate-
As explained earlier due to targeted Marketing to customers, the conversion rate is high. It’s just like programmatic advertising or profile based advertising, where you know that customer is willing to hear from you.
Reliable Medium-
It’s a reliable way to reach out to customers, you don’t have to fight email filters or user filters to reach customers. As the clutter in the message inbox has reduced it has become more reliable.
It’s a direct, immediate channel-
You get direct access and 24/7 access to customers. With the immediate effect of customer reading and taking action.
Opt-in marketing Channel-
Customers are willing to opt-in to get communication from you. This helps in focused targeting of customers, with sure customer response as he/she is interested in interacting with your business.
01. Write an introduction about your blog and submit it to share sites like Digg, Reddit.
02. Create a Yahoo Group or Google+ group in the category your site sits.
03. Create a Facebook account and use it to publicize your site, create a Facebook page just
like ours Tech Fruit on Facebook.
04. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and also add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
05. Create a Technorati account and “claim” your blog. Must Must Must!!! Because Technorati helps you get great exposure and if have some sort of authority on the subject you write for Technorati and get immense exposure in the blogging world.
06. Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories.
It is must for free marketing of your blog.
07. Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline publicity. Use online apps like survey monkey etc.
08. Place a free ad for your company on www.gumtree.com
09.Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds.MUST DO!!!!
https://techpomelo.com/2010/11/configuring-feeds-rss-atom-using-feedburner-google-reader/
10.Submit your RSS feeds to sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, feeddirectory and feedfury.
11.Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
12.Sign up to StumbleUpon and ask your friends to Stumble your site.
13.Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere good.
14. Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address.
15.Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on. It helps improving your SEO rank too.
16.Tell your friends about your site. It’s free advertising people!!!! Use instant messaging apps to improve your visibility and reach to friends and yes it is free. I recommend using watsapp and now BBM is available on both android an iOS.
17.Spell check your site. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes. If you find some in my site please comment and let me know.
18.Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers. You can do this using Browsershots http://browsershots.org/
19.Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site, it is considered nightmare.
20.Don’t worry about PageRank , Your content gives you best visibility on Google. Google keeps on improving its algorithm to find quality content on internet
21.Offer something for free. Free is always good. People tell their friends about free stuff.
Creating a Ebook of your blog posts is a good idea. You can use Uberflip to deliver this ebook.http://www.uberflip.com/
22.Tell your friends and colleagues about your blog and your in depth knowledge about the subject, you never know what contacts they might have.
23. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. Skype, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace, Gmail, linkedIn, Twitter, Sina Weibo etc.
24. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It’s free, relevant and localised.
25.Do NOT use frames.
26. Submit your site to dmoz.org. It may take time, but it’s worth it.
27. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google.
28. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
29. Comment on flicker photos and links on sites.
30. Sign up with an affiliate program to sell your product, or if you’re a famous, make some cash!
Must read.
1)How to Publicize your Blog and make most of internet. Part two
2)How to avoid copying of Data from website or Blog using javascript with Comments
1)Sendible
2)SocialOomph
Following is the processes of configuring these services
1)Sendible
Sign in to your Sendible account. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for a free trial at http://sendible.com/signup.
Click on Add/Edit Services and under Add Services, select the Automation tab.
Next to the Twitter Auto Responder, click Add.
On the settings page, complete the details:
Description:
Twitter account: Select the Twitter account that will send the messages to new followers.
Message: Enter the message that will be sent out to new followers. You can also add multiple messages, with one message per line.
Message Type: Select the type of message that should be sent out. This can be a DM (private message) or Tweet.
Auto Follow: If you would like to automatically follow people back.
Frequency: How often Sendible should check for new followers and send out messages.
Maximum messages to send out: Select the maximum number of DM’s/Tweets to send out every time Sendible checks for new followers.
2) SocialOomph
Login to SocialOomph.com.
Add your Twitter account with “Networks, Connect Social Account, Twitter” in the menu.
Click “Following, Follow-Back & Auto-Welcome” in the menu and click the Configure button of your Twitter account.
You will then be taken to a form with a link where you can activate the Follow-Back & Auto DM subscription.
Select “Following, Follow-Back & Auto-Welcome” in the menu.
Locate your Twitter account and click the Configure button.
That takes you to the page where you can change your automation settings and welcome message.
Following are the links to this services
https://www.socialoomph.com/help/?s=help_autodmfollow
http://sendible.com/insights/how-to-automatically-welcome-new-followers-on-twitter/
Facebook might be saying that its user base is increasing but the truth is that the innovators and early adopters are fleeing or leaving it in big numbers. Reason human mind wants something new always.
As more services are entering the market and trying to get attention of users, people are finding out that their needs cannot be fulfilled by a single social network ; they need multiple social networks and communication channels. Taking my example I use Facebook, Google+, Twitter,LinkedIn, Blogger, Pinterest , Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Our tastes and hunger for new are making us choose different channels for our social networking needs. The result is fragmentation in the channels of service.
It is all natural, in the life cycle of product to slowly lose its charm or unless it somehow becomes a living organism with its own reproductive system and evolution, one will eventually wither and die. Facebook cannot evade this process – it regenerates with nuances, but is not reinventing itself.
Lets look at Diffusion of Innovation chart by Everett M. Rogers
Jonathan says this curve is missing something important – the two-way migration that happens over time. When the late majority joins in, the innovators and early adopters are already feeling uncomfortable.
Hence he says the conclusion is undeniable; a new social network is needed. These are the things that will make it awesome and sustainable:
- The multiple expressive me
- Mobile first
- Localized recommendations
- Ownership
- Income and commerce
- Tool-set for hackers
- The future
Inbound marketing is one such channel. In simple words inbound marketing is advertising your company using content marketing tools like blogging, ebooks, whitepapers, social media marketing, , online videos,SEO, podcasts.
This method is in complete contrast of traditional marketing methods like cold calling, email marketing , telemarketing etc. Inbound marketing tends to draw attention to company and helps find easy information about company.
Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.
Windows live writer is an amazing and easy blogging tool from our friends at Redmond Aka Microsoft.This tools comes handy specially when you have multiple blogs and different blogging platforms.I personally use this tool to update and write on my blogs.So if you are not having it, I would recommend installing it on your machine and check it out yourself. I would say you would fall in love with these blog writing tool. It is by far the best blogging tool for windows and on desktop platform.
Here is the process on how to add Windows Live writer to your windows machine.
Adding Windows Live Writer to Windows
- If you don’t already have Windows Writer installed on your computer, you need to install it to your machine.
- Hold on before going forward, click Start ➪ All Programs ➪ Windows Live and make sure you don’t see Windows Live Writer in the menu. If you do see it, Writer is already installed and you can skip to the next section to start
Learning how to use it
- To add Writer, open Internet Explorer and browse to home.live.com. Log in with your Windows Live account. (If you don’t already have one, you can easily sign up for one right from the login page.)
- Then, in the Windows Live Web site, click More ➪ Downloads. In the Blogging section, click Writer to open the download page.
- Click the Download button, and when the File Download dialog box appears, click Run. If User Account Control displays a security warning, click Yes to allow the Windows Live Setup program to run.
- In the Windows Live installer, click the button beside Writer. You can also choose to download other Windows Live add-ons at this time, or run the installer again later to add other add-ons. If the installer shows that Writer is already installed, as shown in image you don’t need to install it again. You can certainly add any other Windows Live programs that are not yet installed.
Setting Up Your Blog Account
After you have installed Writer or ascertained that you already have it, you need to configure at least one blog account. The following section explains how.
Adding a blog account
- Writer automatically should run a configuration wizard the first time you start the program. If you need to start the wizard yourself, choose Blogs ➪ Add Blog Account to start the Windows Live Writer Wizard.
- If you already have a blog, in the first page of the wizard choose the type of service where it is hosted:
- Windows Live Spaces: Choose this option if your blog is already set up on Windows Live.
- WordPress ::If your blog is on wordpress.
- SharePoint blog: Choose this option if your blog is set up on a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) site.
- Other blog service: Choose this option if your blog is hosted by a different site.
If you don’t have a blog already, you can use the wizard to set up one at Windows Live. If you already have a blog site, all you need to do is enter the blog site URL in the wizard and provide login credentials when prompted
Here are pictures of some functionality in windows live writer.
