BrightIDEAS Newsletter

                        Your resource for marketing ideas, tips and trends.

FEBRUARY 2010

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Dear Clint,

This is the LOVE month and showing the love for your customers, partners and prospects is a sure way to attract business in 2010.

In this edition we explore ideas to keep your business foremost in the minds of your customersÉ.your referral partnersÉand your prospects through regular, planned communications. (Prospects are those who have expressed an interest in what you have to offer but havenÕt yet become a client).

You can start by making a Marketing Contact Plan.  This is your action plan, your commitment to keep your business visible by staying in touch.  Keep it simple – a bulleted list like this will do just fine:

 

  • 1 Newsletter a month to customers & prospects
  • 1 Chamber event a month
  • 1 Partner meeting a month (group or individual selling partner)
  • BNI networking every week
  • Send thank you note/notepad or treat with every paid invoice
  • Send holiday cards/gifts to clients

Keep your list where you can see it and manage to it – seek not to sell, but to add value by helpingÉthen watch the referrals start rolling in.  :>)

MEMBER OF:

Rochester Regional Chamber of Commerce

Troy Chamber of Commerce

Rochester BNI

FEATURED ARTICLE

Staying in touch WILL increase your bottom line

There are many good reasons for a business to stay in touch with people and if this is done right, it can and will result in more business. 

 

This article gives you the lowdown on the value of staying in touch and some creative ideas to do so while adding genuine value to your audience.  Enjoy!

 

 

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Overnight send time for email improves open rate, click through & registrationsÉ

An interesting case study from Marketing SherpaÉ

Hunter Boyle, Managing Editor, Marketing Experiments, was running tests to optimize his companyÕs email messaging when his team discovered an exciting result. The CTR jumped more than 21% for messages sent in the wee hours of the morning.

 

BoyleÕs team tested a range of different send times for email invitations to the companyÕs bi-weekly online clinics and their research newsletter. They wondered whether sending emails earlier in the morning would give their messages more visibility by arriving before most recipientsÕ inboxes began filling up.

 

His team compared open and clickthrough rates (CTRs) for messages sent at 9 a.m. (their standard send time), 6 a.m., and 2 a.m. Eastern Time. Both earlier send times beat the 9 a.m. standard, but messages sent at 2 a.m. got a 21.64% higher clickthrough rate – despite the 7.55% lower open rate.

 

The boost in CTR was exciting, but BoyleÕs team had some doubts.

 

ÒWe wanted to make sure we ran a test out over a couple months to try to distinguish the impact of the send time from some of the different content things going on,Ó says Boyle. ÒWe tried to isolate or whittle out any factors besides the time.Ó

 

RESULTS

 

The 21.64% boost in CTR recorded during the sequential newsletter test was not sustained during the A/B test. Double-checking the lift in CTR from a 2 a.m. send time was the right decision.

 

The 2 a.m. send time, however, still performed slightly better than the 6 a.m. send time during the A/B test:

-  Average open rate increased 3%

-  Average CTR increased 1%

 

ÒIf you feel like every little bit helps -- which we do -- we decided to shift all the sends over to 2 a.m.,Ó says Boyle.

 

The decision to shift to the overnight send time wasnÕt based solely on the improvement in metrics. The 2 a.m. delivery also allowed the team to reach subscribers overseas and on the West Coast during times when their inboxes were less cluttered:

 

- They saw an up-tick in Web clinic registrations from recipients in the United Kingdom with emails delivered at 2 a.m. (7 a.m. UK time).

 

- They saw an increase in registrations from the West Coast with the 2 a.m. delivery. Those emails arrived at 11 p.m. PT, when many of the Web developers, designers and entrepreneurs that read the companyÕs newsletter or attend its clinics are still online.

 

ÒMaybe we would have gotten them at 6 a.m., but if thereÕs nothing to lose and weÕre seeing those names coming in at that time, then thereÕs something there.Ó    TRE INTERESTINGÉ.

 

 

 

BrightWay Marketing LLC

 

 

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