Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category
The Weekly 10-Second Marketing Challenge: Update Your E-mail Signature
**Note: This is a guest post written by one of our readers. For more information on how to submit a guest post, please read our guest posting guidelines.
When was the last time you checked to make sure your e-mail signature was serving your needs? If you haven’t done so lately, now’s the time to take 10 seconds to freshen it up.
Consider these questions as you evaluate your e-mail signature:
- Is all your information current?
- Is any critical information missing (accent on critical)?
- Is your signature neat, un-crowded, and attractive?
- Does your phrasing sound intelligent and businesslike?
- Does your signature evoke enthusiasm about your product or service or create curiosity about your company?
These are a few important issues to address when you create – or update – your business e-mail signature.
[image by Sean MacEntee on flickr]
The following eight e-mail signature best-practices can help you whip your e-mail signature into shape:
- Keep it simple. Don’t write a book! Four to seven lines seem to be about average. Provide only enough contact information to facilitate a connection. Too many choices create indecision, which leads to inaction. Choose a single phone number, e-mail address, and/or instant messaging ID, and skip your mailing address. Most people won’t need it, and those who do can find it on your website.
- Keep it up to date. Outdated information will be counterproductive to your business.
- Format for easy reading. Stay away from unusually large, fancy, or colored fonts, and don’t crowd everything together. Use pipes (|) to separate unrelated information you place on a single line.
- Skip the images. The only exception? Your company logo – but make it small. Trying too hard to be “artsy” can distract readers and will make you appear less professional.
- Link to your business website and main business social media pages. Resist the temptation to list every online address you’ve ever had. Instead of linking to your home page, try using your most effective landing page, with a simple call to action as anchor text. This could increase conversions.
- Leave out your favorite quotation. Not everyone will appreciate it as much as you do. If you must add something, try using your company’s tagline instead.
- Use a shorter signature for replies and forwards. It’s kinder to your recipient.Always view your e-mail signature through the eyes of your prospect. This can alert you when something just isn’t working. If it doesn’t work for you, chances are good that it won’t work for your prospect either.
- Your e-mail signature says a lot about your business. The overall impression it creates is crucial to your brand. Never underestimate the effect these few simple lines of text can have on your sales.
Study the above tips. Then, take 10 seconds to make a few changes to your e-mail signature. When you’re finished, stop by and let us how it went. We’d love to hear what worked for you and what didn’t. Every company is different. And that’s why every e-mail signature strategy will vary slightly from the “norm.”
About the author:
This article was contributed for Injury-lawyers.net.au by Sarah Carling. Sarah is a freelance writer and lawyer. She enjoys writing business related articles about social media and marketing.
Hitting Your SEM Goals with Agendize
Agendize is a web-based platform that allows quick creation of a number of different engagement tools (i.e. online scheduling, chat, forms, click-to-call, comments/ratings, and more) for websites or campaigns. The goal of SEM is typically building traffic. The goal of Agendize is to turn that traffic into conversations and ultimately sales.
A few points about Agendize:
- Beyond search engine optimization, this is engagement optimization. An untapped market with massive potential.
- Unique in offering a self-serve one-stop shop for all of these tools, with robust and easily-customizable reporting.
- No setup fee, no monthly fees. Our customers only pay when their engagement tools are used by end users. (Pay per action)
- Perfect complement to SEM campaigns, tracking actions down to the search keyword that brought the user to the site.
Also, make sure you check out the video below for a little more information.
3 Questions Every Webmaster Should Ask Themselves
- Where do your eyes first travel when you land on your website? Pretend that each of your visitors has a short attention span (because this is often the reality). Using this information, you need to make sure that your website draws in your readers with some sort of hook….immediately. Statistics show that it only takes a mere matter of seconds (sometimes less) for someone to land on a website and jump immediately to a different one. Things that factor in heavily at the outset? WEB DESIGN (including color scheme, white space, text font choice and use of images).
- What is this website about? If it takes you longer than a couple of seconds to figure out what the website is about, then that is simply too long. Visitors should know right away what product/service you are trying to sell and the general point you are trying to make. If there is too much going on on the website or too many distractions, then the only thing you’re guaranteed at that point is NOT being able to garner an business prospects.
- Is the important information “above the fold?” In print media, major information is usually put above where the newspaper folds over. In the web world, most people who visit a website want to know the general details without having to do a lot of “digging” in order to find it. The idea here is that you, the webmaster, provide the consumer with a couple of catchy headlines or basic information that will draw them in and make them interested in reading the rest of what you have to say.
What other sorts of questions can you think of that would help to create better, more functional websites and blogs for readers? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section!
