Any small business that isn’t doing some form of email marketing is missing an essential opportunity to deliver their message directly into the inbox of ready and willing customers. Email is still a great way to engage an audience and still provides the best return on investment (ROI) when compared to other online marketing channels. [Read more…]
Case Study: Blogging & Social Media for Apparel Network
One thing we never fail to tell our prospective clients: online marketing isn’t for those seeking instant gratification. It takes a substantial investment of time and effort to identify and reach your target audience; it takes focus and persistence to reap real bottom-line benefits. So when we launched the Apparel Network website back in August 2014, the principals knew they had only taken the first step on their journey into the world of Internet marketing.
In order to grow and sustain a robust and engaging online presence, B2B businesses must offer more than basic brochure-type content on their website — and Apparel Network is no exception. They signed Panoptic to build and manage their business blog and get them started with social media marketing. [Read more…]
Keeping Your Email Marketing Fresh: List Segmentation
Part One of this article addressed engagement as an important factor in email marketing. List segmentation — the process of breaking your list into separate sub-groups based on the recipients’ interests – is another tactic that can help you increase engagement.
Let’s begin by accepting one, basic premise all for modern email marketing: relevance is what really counts. It’s easier to engage your readers when you’re giving them something that they find entertaining, useful and above all, relevant. [Read more…]
Keeping Your Email Marketing Fresh: Reader Engagement
The success of your email marketing campaigns depends on several factors: the relevance of the content, the effectiveness of subject line and calls to action, and the quality of your list. In today’s post we’ll be talking about Reader Engagement.
What do we consider a successful email campaign? That depends on what you are trying to achieve. For now, let’s think about success as your recipients opening your email and clicking on whatever call to action was included: maybe a link to purchase a product or to read one of your recent blog posts. These activities (opening, clicking) are what we commonly refer to as “engagement” (download this White Paper from the DMA around email marketing engagement metrics). [Read more…]
Case Study: SEO for Ecommerce Website
Late last summer, a manufacturing client came to us for help with their e-commerce website, which they believed to be underperforming. With over 20 years in the hair care products business, our client was generating over a million dollars in revenue annually and was hoping to expand into online sales — a natural next step for any manufacturer. After all, selling products via the website is almost a no-brainer – it requires no additional sale force and has the potential to bring in as much, if not more, income than offline sales. [Read more…]
Benefits of Email Marketing
All too often people make the mistake of thinking that with the advent of social media marketing came the death of email marketing. This is far from true. Email is still a very important component of any small business marketing plan and there are very specific reasons why.
Email marketing is targeted and cost efficient.
An e-mail marketing campaign is relatively cheap and easy to create; there are no postage fees as with direct mail marketing and no ad-buys as with print, TV or radio (or even Google AdWords). When you invest in these classic forms of marketing you need resources: a creative team to put together the mailers or advertisements and money to buy space for the ads. Email campaigns liberate you from that burden. [Read more…]
Case Study: Small Law Firms and Solo Law Practices
Client: Andrew Abramowitz, PLLC
The Challenge:
Our client, Andrew Abramowitz, is the founder of a small law practice in New York City. Needless to say, he’s got a lot of competition! New York is jam packed with lawyers — how do you distinguish yourself among so many other small business attorneys?
Solo law practitioners and small law firms rarely have the internal resources to devote to marketing activities. For the most part, these attorneys have a standard brochure website comprised of attorney bios, practice area descriptions, and perhaps a list of books or articles published by the partners; static, uninteresting content that doesn’t give the reader much insight into an attorney’s personality and style, or demonstrate what he or she actually does for their clients.
Andrew is a corporate and securities transactional lawyer who had such a website: a simple four-page site with his basic bio, practice description and contact information. We met with him, talked about his experience and goals for his business, and we discovered two things: (1) Andrew has special expertise in working with private placement investors (on both the buying and selling side), and (2) Andrew has been carefully following the legal and regulatory developments surrounding the American JOBS Act and how it is giving rise to a new model of business financing known as “crowdfunding.” [Read more…]
Don’t Replace Email Campaigns with Social Media Marketing: You Need Both!
As advocates of social media marketing for small to medium business, we’re always pleased to see business owners who throw themselves whole-heartedly into feeding their Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest pages with interesting updates and content that excites their fans and followers. Unfortunately, many of these same folks neglect their email marketing campaigns, thinking that a strong social presence is enough to take the place of a monthly newsletter.
When it comes to building serious business relationships with partners and clients, you might want to consider making email campaigns your priority. Think about it this way: wouldn’t you rather use a single channel to talk to all your customers than divide your energy between multiple channels to talk to only some of them, some of the time — in ways that don’t always have the same professional impact? [Read more…]
Online Marketing for Small Business: Three Things to Focus on in 2014
Happy New Year, fellow small business owners! What resolutions have you made for yourself and what goals have you set for your company for this upcoming year? At Panoptic Online Marketing, we’re committing ourselves to doing a better job of blogging (heh). Especially since consistent, twice weekly, posting to a company blog is something we regularly recommend to (and in many cases, do on behalf of) our clients.
It’s hard to maintain an active online presence – as a small shop, we know EXACTLY what you’re facing with respect to your own small business marketing. If you’ve never ventured into the world of internet marketing and don’t know where to begin, then the prospect of getting your message out there can be that much more daunting. [Read more…]
Email Marketing is Alive and Well for 2012
2011 was a wild year when it came to email marketing. Article after article claimed that email marketing is dead, pointing out the many challenges that face email marketers in the coming years. Despite the predictions, many marketing strategists still believe that email is very much alive and continues to evolve. Business leaders tend to agree.
According to the 2012 Marketing Trends survey conducted by StrongMail, email marketing, along with social media, remain the top target programs for which business leaders are planning to increase spending for the third year in a row.
