Interactive Marketing Tips, News and Other Useful Information

Raise your hand if your company has an email newsletter that is more boring than the St. Louis Rams’ offense?  Raise your hand if your company’s email newsletter seems like an aimless collection of information snippets and meaningless factoids.

Raise your hand if you’d rather eat liver and onions (no condiments allowed), with a side of Brussels sprouts, than read another boring, aimless newsletter.

OK…Put your hands down (Wow! That was a lot of hands in the air).  Grab a pencil.  It’s time for a little homework assignment.  Make a list of at least five specific goals or milestones you have [...] Continue Reading…

Yogi Berra once said, “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you gonna stop them?”

I love that quote, and I think about it often as I work with clients on their marketing campaigns. In his charming, convoluted way, Yogi presented a very basic but essential marketing principle: It’s far easier to tap someone’s desire than to create desire in someone who doesn’t have it. If you want to fill the ballpark, identify and market to the baseball fans rather than trying to “stop” nonfans from choosing another option.

Email marketers often forget this [...] Continue Reading…

A friend of mine recently was on the verge of selling his small business, but the deal collapsed. The business was profitable and growing, and the prospective buyer liked the numbers. But the deal tanked when the prospect asked to see the customer list. When my friend replied that he had not been collecting emails and other contact information from most of his customers and prospects, the prospective buyer bolted.

The prospect knew that a business is only as good as its list. Sure, your business may be making money and even growing. But you limit your potential to grow your business if you do not have a good, clean, homegrown list of prospects, customers, and former customers. [...] Continue Reading…

The following article appeared in the May 2009 issue of St. Louis Small Business Monthly

By Tom Ruwitch

Last month, I wrote about Domino’s and how it cornered the pizza delivery business with its outstanding unique selling proposition (if you missed it, you can find the column by searching for “pizza” on www.sbmon.com. Here are more lessons from the pizza parlor, but in this case we’re learning from the Domino’s mistakes.

Domino’s was in the news a few weeks ago. If you believe the PR mantra “all news is good news,” you didn’t see the YouTube video in which a Domino’s employee [...] Continue Reading…

Do you have an email signature? If you’re like most people, you may have one that lists your name and basic contact information, but you most likely don’t see it as a marketing opportunity.

You should think of your email signature as an opportunity to promote your business and capture leads.

Here’s the signature I use for people who are not already MarketVolt clients:

p.s. Get Free E-Mail Marketing Tips:
“10 Secrets to Write Email Subject Lines that Sell”

http://www.marketvolt.com/SubjectlineTips

p.p.s. Please check out my twitter feed — http://twitter.com/marketvolt.
Daily interactive marketing tips and other ideas and observations to help you grow your business.

(My contact info follows the p.s. and p.p.s) [...] Continue Reading…

When I was a teen, I loved to order Domino’s pizza. I would call the neighborhood shop, order my favorite (a small pepperoni), note the time of my order on a slip of paper, and then wait with breathless anticipation.

My excitement had little to do with the quality of the pizza. In fact, there were plenty of other pizza joints in town that, in my opinion, delivered better pies.

Why did I choose Domino’s over all of the other pizza places?

I chose Domino’s because it offered me something no other restaurant would: “Fresh hot pizza delivered to (my) door in 30 minutes or less…or it’s free.” [...] Continue Reading…

I recently got a call from a former prospect who is president of a company here in St. Louis. To save money, he chose not to work with MarketVolt, and instead installed a free email marketing application on his company’s servers. After a few months of sending email newsletters to a list of people who all had opted in, he began to notice a problem:

A certain internet service provider — a big one that serves many of the people on his list — was blocking delivery of the email newsletter. But worse yet, that internet service provider was blocking all emails sent from the company’s network.

Not only were the newsletters being blocked, but emails from the company president to individuals who host their email boxes with that internet service provider.

“What can I do?” he asked me. [...] Continue Reading…

As I drove to my office this morning, I heard a radio advertisement for a local technology firm (let’s call it Acme Technologies) that sells a service I might need. At the end of the ad, the spokesman recited the firm’s toll-free telephone number and said, “Call today to get started.”

“I’m not ready to get started,” I thought. “I may be interested soon, but not today.”

I didn’t call. In a few weeks, if I’m more ready to buy, I may remember the ad and may call the firm. Meanwhile, Acme has no idea I exist and no way to court me further.

Thousands of people heard that ad. Most are like me. We are the maybes. Marketers frequently ignore us.

If you want to sell more, you must court the maybes. [...] Continue Reading…