Rogers Online Business Management for the Agriculture Community

Posts Tagged ‘blog’

An effective email marketing campaign requires framework. Successful marketers will always be the first to tell you that their campaigns are the work of careful planning and diligent consideration.

It’s actually much like building a house. There’s no way you can construct a building haphazardly, without direction, and turn out a flawless finished product. The result would be chaotic!

The same goes for email. You can’t randomly send messages to your clients and prospects without establishing expectations and formulating a plan, or they will tune out and unsubscribe due to your lack of organization.

Follow these guidelines for constructing a well built house and you’ll be on your way to creating a profitable and manageable email campaign in no time.

1. You Need a Solid Foundation

The strongest buildings are built from the ground up on a rock-solid foundation. For your email campaign, the foundation is your message content.

The whole point in sending email is to solicit an action. You want readers to click through your messages, buy products and respond to surveys. In order to engage subscribers and inspire those actions, you must consistently send subscribers interesting, relevant and incentivizing content.

• If you are using email as a sales tool, you want to wow readers with your products and your knowledge, and establish yourself as an authority in your field.
• If you’re using email as a retention tool and are primarily sending informational updates and newsletters, you want to create content that builds relationships.

2. Sources for Content

If your business has a blog, you already have one valuable  content resource well within your reach. Try restructuring older posts for your new messages and pick posts with lots of comments – they obviously piqued the interest of your readers and will be relevant and helpful to new subscribers on your email list.

Don’t have a blog? Look through old emails from your customers. If you see the same questions about your product or service over and over again, take that as a hint. You could probably create a whole follow up series addressing the FAQs.

3. Plenty of Windows

Windows let light into your home. They give you different view of your yard and help you keep watch when the kids play outside. They also let your neighbors see in.

Instead of drawing the curtains tight on your email campaign, take the opportunity to give your readers a look inside. Be transparent. Build their trust by making yourself available.

Don’t make subscribers dig for your social networking sites. Instead, purposely link to your Facebook and Twitter pages so that they can’t miss them.

If you put all of the information about your company out there for subscribers to see from the get-go, you will never need to Windex the windows on your campaign or backtrack to make yourself more transparent.

4. Curb Appeal

Anyone who takes pride in their home understands the desire to make your property as clean and beautiful as possible.

You landscape, paint and generally spruce things up from time to time to keep your house in tip-top shape. After all, your home is a reflection of you.

Your email campaign should be an extension of your business in the same way. You should take pride in its appearance, and realize that a neat and approachable design will only contribute positively to the perception of your brand.

Using beautifully designed message and web form templates is the perfect way to put a professional face on your campaign. With hundreds to choose from, there’s bound to be a least one or two that fits your style.

5. An Impenetrable Roof

The roof on your building protects your structure and everything inside. Email deliverability requires the same amount of protection.

There are a few things you can do to safeguard your list:

• Confirmed Subscribers:

Confirmed opt-in ensures that you only send messages to people who specifically request them from you. It also protects you from false spam complaints, and ISPs and spam filters give priority to senders who use confirmed opt-in.

• Get Whitelisted:

Ask subscribers to add your email address to their address books. While emails sent from AWeber customers are already whitelisted on an ISP level, it’s important to reduce the likelihood of your mail being filtered to a junk folder on an individual level.

• Don’t Take Permission For Granted:

Remember that subscribers are interested in a certain type of information, which is exactly what they signed up for when they gave you their email addresses. Send only valuable, relevant information that relates to the topics the reader expressed interest in.

6. A Maintenance Plan

Even impeccably built homes require maintenance. While autoresponders allow you to “set it and forget it,” the best email campaigns have owners that are extremely involved with their clients and their product.

Keep a close eye on the performance of your emails. Split test your subject lines and use analytics to track open and click through rates.

When necessary, do a little spring cleaning. Your campaign can never be to tidy!

My team at REAS can help you get started with your email campaign. You can contact us at information@easmyworkload.com to discuss your needs.

A blog is a must for every Farm; whether you have a website for your Farm, your Farm is just another place in the Country, or if your Farm-related business is only on the Internet. If you are in any type of Agriculture business at all, you need a blog.

Blogging has become the way to drive new traffic to your Farm, whether the Farm-related business is on the Internet or in the Country. This is because people connect personally to you through your blog, even if it is a blog about your Farm.

Through writing blog posts your readers, subscribers and customers get to know a little bit about the person behind the Farm. And as long as you’re posting quality, trustworthy content your readers will come to trust you. Therefore, they will then begin to purchase your products or retain services that you offer.

Your blog should reveal a little about the person behind the Farm, but it should never be too personal. Having an “About” page on your blog is a good place to display a little about your personal life, but not too much. Keep it professional, but let your audience know who you are as a business person, as well as a Farmer. The “About” page is also a great place to display your qualifications, merits and credentials.

Once your blog is up and running, you will then use it to connect with people on the Internet through stories, talking about promotions or sales, and letting the public know your Farm exists. Having a blog is the most important marketing tool your Farm should have. If you don’t have a blog yet, and don’t even know where to begin, hire a virtual assistant to start one for you. A VA could even then maintain and manage it for you if you feel you don’t have the time. But, by doing whatever it takes to get a blog started now, soon you will see an increase in your Farm traffic and more traffic means more sales.

We offer a number of different packages for your blog setup to enhance your marketing campaign here at Rogers Executive Administrative Services. Contact us at information@easmyworkload.com with your questions about getting started.

Social network marketing is becoming the way to market in this day and age of the Internet. With the Internet, businesses are able to reach people throughout the world with their products and services and social networking is the key to reaching more and more people.

If you are not familiar with social networking on the Internet, here is a little explanation. Social networking is basically interacting with other people on the Internet through various sites and platforms.

How to make social networking work for you consists of a few key elements. When you incorporate them into your farm marketing plan your farm traffic will increase and more traffic means more sales.

First of all, you need to know which social networks are popular and join them. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious and Stumble Upon are all huge right now with millions of members each from all over the world. Obviously you don’t want to, and won’t be able to, reach all of them, so you will want to target specific groups or persons; basically you want to reach all of the people who are going to be interested in what you have to sell or offer. Which brings me to my next point.

Next you will need to know your target market. Is your target market farmers, industries, mother’s, dad’s, cattle ranchers, etc? Once you know your target market, begin connecting with them by adding them as a friend or follower. It helps to know one person in your target market who is already a member of the social network to introduce you to new people in your niche.

One thing you will find about social networks is there are millions of people. You will get people adding you that will never buy from you or become regular readers of yours, but they may be a friend or follower of someone else who will. But don’t add people simply to have a huge number of friends or followers. If that is your goal, then that is all you will have. The idea is to build relationships with these friends and followers so they get to know you and trust you and then perhaps they will become regular subscribers to your blog.

Through the years I have assembled tons of tips from my research, reading, and by helping my clients with their marketing plans. And today I’m going to share three of them with you.

These tips are cost-effective ways to market your business so you can get more clients, increase sales, and increase your wealth!

1. My first tip is very very important and should not be taken lightly. You need to spend 1-hour everyday doing marketing activities. This can be in the form of planning activities and promotions, or actually implementing your plan. If you’re saying to yourself right now how can you fit one more hour into your already busy day…then you need to outsource this activity to your online business manager or virtual assistant–it’s that important!
2. This second tip is as important as the first one and many farmers don’t think it’s necessary in this industry. But let me tell you right now—-You must have a Website! When it comes to today’s consumers we first look to the Internet for information.

   In my everyday travels I may see a small sign or fruit stand alongside the road and quickly record the farm name into the memo feature on my cell phone. Later in the day when I’m reviewing my memos, I start searching the Internet for anything I can find on that Farm. And what do you think happens? Well, the majority of the time I find nothing. Nothing!!!

   Do you know how disappointing that is for me? I saw your sign but couldn’t stop right at that moment. So now I can’t even get a hold of you to find out what type of products you’re selling or if I can even place an order to pick up later. I may never pass your sign again for weeks or maybe months. So guess what…you just lost the sale. How many other sales might you be losing this way?

   It does not have to cost you a thing to get a website up. You don’t need to have all the fancy bells and whistles at first. You just need to get your name and some basic information up on the Internet so people can get a hold of you. I would suggest that you actually start out with a blog design for your website. There are three blog platforms that are easy to set up and use, and affordable. My first recommendation is WordPress.com. This very site is a WordPress site and I love how easy it is to use, and it’s free. My second recommendation is Blogger.com. This platform is also free. Now if you want just a little bit more without having to work hard at setting it up, you can always use TypePad Blogs – Get a 14 Day Free Trial! After your trial the plans start as low as $4.95 per month. You get one-click integration with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, plus built-in search engine optimization.

3. Now my third and last tip for today is one that I love. Post your farm on your vehicle. All you need to do is get a pair of magnetic signs either at your local sign shop or take advantage right now from VistaPrint and get a Free Car Door Custom Magnet. Include your farm name, phone number, website, or maybe even a special seasonal offer by ordering many different signs that you can change throughout the year.

If you need help with accomplishing any of these three tips, my staff at Rogers Executive Administrative Services can put together a package that is right for your budget. Just contact us at agriculture@easmyworkload.com or make a consultation appointment right now that is convenient for you by going to our online Appointment Scheduler.