Direct marketing has been an important part of the marketing mix for small, medium, and even large businesses.
Outsourcing your direct marketing campaign is a wise decision as you can get the help of professionals. A number of multi-national and even small companies have made use of these contact centers to get in touch with their customers and have increased their sales. You too can join the bandwagon and opt for the services of contact centers. Direct marketing involves a number of activities like
- sending direct mails (here you’ll need to hire an effective copywriter)
- making follow up calls to tell them about the offers
- responding to inquiries over the offer.
The personnel working in these contact centers have the experience of a number of years as they have been working in the industry and providing these services to other companies as well.
The result of hiring a contact center for carrying out direct marketing is that with the help of these experienced and confident professionals, you are able to get more customers as the conversion rate increases. Today’s market is highly competitive and you should not compromise with the quality of services that you offer to your customers. There is no better way to connect to your customers but to get contact centers to do that on your behalf.
You need to know that direct marketing is a very important aspect of promotion and thus you should not have any second thoughts about hiring a contact center along with a copywriter and going further with the services. Reaching your potential and existing customers is easy with the help of such a campaign that focuses on a particular section of people who you wish to target. You can strengthen your relationship with the customers as well as save costs, while increasing the revenue and enhancing the loyalty that the customers have to show. This just makes sure that you will achieve better results.
The smart work that is put into creating the direct marketing solutions for your company will bring in positive results. Choose a contact center that has served a number of companies varying in sizes and types so that your chances of success are maximized and you can get exceptional results from the direct marketing campaign that you have launched for your business. The use of high-end technology by these companies is also one of the reasons that make these companies worth opting for. a combination of experience, expertise and technology is what makes them offer you best of the direct marketing solutions and give you a competitive edge.
Online businesses go out of the way to promote themselves. Often the promotion is blatant.
But there is no single step to conversion and after the fist step often nothing happens. So how do you convert your leads into interested prospects?
Simple: Go beyond the usual.
In the offline world we see it happen often. The handyman may thoroughly clean out the garage though it wasn’t a part of the job. Your garage mechanic may use some petrol to clean out an old stain in your car upholstery. What will you do? Next time you ring up his company, you ask for him personally.
How do we emulate such examples in the online business?
Unfortunately in the online business we promise the moon and deliver the moonshine. This has lead to a lot of suspicion, In fact during routine website updates when we added some title tags to the pages have been personally asked by some clients, why are you doing it? They are awry. Am I going to sell them something or am I going to charge them later.
An online homemade chocolate company from whom I regularly order my supply of mint flavored black chocolate recently popped the message "Do you want to order your mint flavored chocolate too?" when I just ordered Almonds wrapped in chocolate for a gift. This online chocolate company kept data of its customers and personalized the experience of the shopping cart. It ensured that I won’t ever go anywhere.
Being in the website marketing field I was impressed. I knew that they had customized the shopping cart and it must have been expensive especially for a small business. And yet they cared enough.
Blog requirements and platforms
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Purpose
Making use of blogs for promoting the online business is considered to be one of the effective marketing tools. The latest trend that can be seen in the business sector is making optimum use of resources to increase communication and interaction with targeted customers. Blogging is one of the effective approaches to increase traffic to one’s website.
Blogging has steadily become the most preferred method over the traditional methods over the traditional methods to increase visibility of the web page on search engines.Blogs in businesses are greatly used to increase popularity and establish business’s reliability and name recognition. |
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Through blogs, you can build an invaluable platform where expertise, talents and experiences gained in the business can be demonstrated instantly to the people all over the world.
The primary function for a successful blog is to provide adequate information. All successful and popular blogs are those that provide information without overt promotion.
But that raises a big question for a business. If I cannot promote my products what value does my blog have?
The answers are very visible
- You make your brand known
- You come across an as expert in your niche.
The above two factors are enough to get visitors interested in your products. So your blog becomes a part of indirect marketing. In this age of direct marketing bombardment this subtle form of marketing appeals to a prospect. Your expertise has already been established but most probably
Hence, there are some factors that you must never ignore:
- Always put a ‘call to action’ on your blog.
- Display your latest products and your most popular products as images linking to details or specifications and cart page.
- The copywriting on the call to action page and the product pages must be well done to convert. Your blog has established your expertise; all you need now is the emotional pitch that tells the prospect how the product will change his/her life.
Popularity
The purpose and the ROI factor of the blog established, you now need to know how to make your blog known among all.
- In this age of social networking you can use your network to tell others about the blog.
- You can also make your business colleagues know about it and ask them to link to your blog. You may have to link to them in return.
- Technically it would be advisable to submit your blog to some of the most popular blog directories.
- Use keywords that your customers will use to find you in titles of blog posts. Search engines will pick it up and make you rank higher. The higher you appear the more chances are that your customers will visit your blog.
- Post excellent content. Good content gets linked and this raises the value of your blog and indirectly your business. Generic content has no value.
Platforms
There are several ways to blog and many more types of blogging softwares. If you are thinking of setting up your blog on a folder or sub domain on your website the blogging software has to be compatible with the website. For a stand alone blog domain you can choose any platform and then decide on a host that will support the platform. You can even opt to host your site on a platform like blogger or typepad.
Please see the link http://www.pcworld.com/article/128620/blogging_platforms.html for information on blog types. Select yours carefully taking into considerations your skill sets, who will manage your blog, are your willing to pay, your storage area and your future vision of your blog as to will you allow podcasts and videos on your blog?
Happy Blogging!
Best
Sangeeta |
Never thought social relationships are good for business? Use this Three Pronged Twitter Strategy for Your Business and see the results. We have started following it and things are going great. Just thought we’d share it with you.
Share with us some twitter strategies that you apply for your business. We’ll update the list.
Best Sangeeta
Podcasting is a brand new unsaturated marketing channel based on audio communication at the will of the listener.
What is podcasting?
Podcasting is basically audio over the Internet where people subscribe to listen to content that they deem useful. The best part is that you don’t have to be on a computer to listen to a podcast. It has gone mobile. Listen to it on your iPod. You can listen to what you want, when you want, where you want. And very important: Podcast listenership is doubling and tripling over the months.
Why is it effective?
- It’s an additional communication tool for your business.
- It increases your visibility in target markets.
- Audio communication medium is more powerful than text. This translates into potential results for your business.
- Increased internet visibility from the search engines from RSS, blog & podcasting directories.
- You add an improved level of perceived trust & expertise from your target market. Increased perception of your product, service, brand or value in customers minds
- Increased mind share from your target audience. People listen to podcasts while doing other tasks online. They can also take you messaging with them on their portable media player such as an iPod.
Requirements for a podcast
- A Microphone
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An audio recording software. These softwares can be can be downloaded free. Download the software and install it on your desktop for easy access e.g
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
How does it work? The steps
- Determine the nature of your podcast. What will the content for podcast be? If you cannot speak extempore write down the script. All successful podcasts have a script behind them.
- Record the audio for your podcast You can download the software at the link for windows. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. Garageband has software that comes with a Mac version.
- Tag it, give it ID information (Artist, Album) and give it an album cover.
- Save the audio file (in MP3 or iPod format) on your computer. Keep the filenames simple.
- Create your RSS podcast feed. The feed must meet all industry standards for a valid 2.0 feed with enclosures. Try using a complete solution and free service such as Podblaze or Podomatic (see the external links below). If you are zapped about it all create a blog on http://www.blogger.com. The blog should have the same title as that of your podcast. Don’t make any posts just yet.
- Now you need to put your RSS podcast feed on the Internet. The best way to do it is to go to http://www.feedburner.com and type in the URL of your blog and click "I am a podcaster!". In the next screen, configure the elements for your podcast. These are the elements that directly relate to the podcast. .
- Go to OurMedia.org and sign-up there (this may take a while). Then go to your files, and upload your MP3 file.
- Make a post on your blog/website – the title of the post will be the title of that episode of the podcast, and the content will end up as the "Shownotes" or "Description". At the end of the post, put a link directly to your media file.
- Wait a little. In a few minutes, feedburner should add this to your feed, and now you have an episode! You can submit it to iTunes or a number of other podcast directories to get it known. You may want to wait, however, until you have some experience, so that your podcast will be compared as a fifth episode to another’s first.
- Ping the appropriate podcast directories when a new show is updated.
- Put the appropriate subscription buttons on your website so people can subscribe to the RSS podcast feed.
(Source: wikiHow)
Podcast Strategy
- Witty, racy script
- Good Audio quality
- Proper format, check for iTunes validity
- Use social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us
- A podcast works well if it has a companion blog. If you are just podcasting
- The bandwidth consumption can be astronomical. Make sure your podcast is hosted with a reliable server that can handle huge bandwidth spikes. Most cheap hosting services will not work for this.
Tools for Podcasting
Recording Software:
Podcast Directory
Internet Strategy | sangeeta April 14, 2010 | 
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