Rogers Online Business Management for the Agriculture Community

Posts Tagged ‘promoting your business’

So your Harvest Fest has been in full swing for a couple of weeks now….What do you mean you didn’t even put a Harvest Fest together for this year? Seriously?????

It really don’t take much to dot the fields with pumpkins of every shape and size. Offer special treats as you invite the public to view your corn maze or other demonstrations such as making Kettle Corn…let them pick their own ear right off the stalk and take it home to pop in the microwave.

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.

Idyllic days in the sunshine. Ruby liquid in sparkling glasses. Merry picnickers and live music.

It’s these moments – drinking your wines and visiting your vineyards – that your customers remember. But even the best memories can fade.

Email marketing can remind your customers what they’re missing. It can invite your visitors back. It can inspire your fans to go buy that favorite bottle again.

Once you build up a sold list of subscribers, you’ll need some creative ideas to spark your customers’ memories and bring them back for more.

Here are some ideas:

Pairings and Recipes

• If your chardonnay sparkles with scallops, let your customers know. Pair your wines with complementary dishes and share the recipes.
• If your Burgundy is excellent in beef stew, share that, too. Original recipes for dishes cooked with your wines are even more valuable. If you have an online store, make sure to link up the wines.

Seasonal Gifts

• People are always searching for unique gifts. Show them what you have to offer, whether it’s festively wrapped wines for the holidays, wine and chocolate sets for Valentine’s Day or picnic baskets for Mothers’ Day.

Fun Facts

• Identify wine myths vs. facts. Quote some trivia your readers will want to quote themselves. Feature a rotating glossary fo wine-making terms.
• Your customers may not know why racking wine does not mean putting bottles into wine racks. Tell them why. Give them more than just discounts – give them an education. With insider information, they’ll feel good about themselves and grateful to you.

New Merchandise

• Giddy tasters and frequent visitors alike bring home the winery experience with glass charms, drunken olives and other goodies. If you add a new must-have item, email your list – they’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it next time they visit.

Video Footage

• Videos show off your winery even when your doors are closed. They also let you share more content than the typical email can hold.
• Use video for educational demonstrations, “meet our team” introductions and sweeping panoramas of your estate that call visitors back. Post them to YouTube and link to them with clickable screenshots in your emails.

New Releases

• Stir up some excitement! Introduce new vintages with fanfare. Tell your subscribers where they can find the new wine, and let them know that you can’t wait for their reaction!

Special Discounts

• As faithful readers of your content and proclaimed fans of your winery, your subscribers might deserve a little extra once in awhile. Reward subscribers (and keep them coming in) with email-exclusive discounts and offers.

Events

• Live music performances, tastings, tours of your production area, grape stomping festivals, wine education classes with guest speakers – if you host these, get the word out!
• Send an invitation to your subscribers early enough for them to plan ahead, but not so early that they forget!

Rate Your Wines

• Your wines may wind regional awards, but aside from recognizing this as a maker of quality, customers may not have much reaction. Instead of telling them someone else’s opinion, ask theirs.
• Have visitors to your tasking room rate your wines. Periodically invite your readers to send rating to your “from” address. Announce the winners in an email that subscribers will check to see – Did their favorite win?

Wine Classes

• If you offer wine education classes on-site, make sure to invite your local subscribers (try segmenting by location). Summarize the best points from the class afterward so the rest of your list can benefit as well.

Images

• Don’t forget pictures! Ambiance is an important part of the wine lifestyle, so extend yours to your newsletter.
• Show the grapes being crushed, the wine being bottled. Feature your winemakers, bartenders and grape pickers – give your readers faces to recognize when they visit.

***Don’t forget to watch out for minors! Make age a required field on your sign-up form. Marketing to those under-age could result in fines.

As a winery, what content do you send your subscribers? Do they respond? Do they mention your messages when they visit?

These ideas can easily translate to other businesses. Hotels and restaurants can use images for ambiance. Fitness bloggers can highlight fun facts. Galleries can announce new shows.

What kinds of content can you create from these ideas?

Be sure to take a look at our service packages as we can help you with all your marketing ideas, including shooting the video for your online ad and submitting it to the search engines to get you in the top ten ranking!

Source: AWeber Auto Responder Service

Creating videos to market your products and services became much simpler thanks to the introduction of a new set of cloud-based video editing tools from YouTube. Web marketers and content publishers can now build a library of online videos and increase opportunities for brand exposure at the same destination.

YouTube users have the capability to cut from videos, create montages of different clips and add or change accompanying music using YouTube’s commercial library of licensed songs.

If all the editing tools just seem so overwhelming to you, we can help. Contact us at information@easmyworkload.com to discuss your video needs.

The practice of one-page-long sales letters is being used widely today by businesses of various sizes to sell and push their products and/or services into the Internet marketplace.

Long sales letters are really just one long page with focus on selling the product to one prospect. It's like an electronic salesperson on your behalf, and it certainly beats having you to prospect and sell to someone else face-to-face or gamble on sending out hard copy mail (that can span 5-20 pages long when printed) and face the chance of not covering your investment in printing.

Believe it or not, online sales letters consist of mainly the use of words, some images, and now videos. And words are indeed powerful tools; you should consider them as a double-edged sword.

If used correctly, words can sell literally anything. If used improperly, not only would your sales letter suffer in conversion rate, it might just deliver the wrong message and the worse case scenario can be that of offending your prospects (besides not closing the sale).

If your sales letters are currently not producing the kind of conversion rates you want, or this is your first try at wrting a sales letter, perhaps you may want to contact me at information@easmyworkload.com to help you design a sales letter that will produce a decent conversion rate of 2 to 4 percent.

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.

Did you know that the week of October 11 through the 17 is Getting the World to Beat a path to Your Door Week?

Well here’s a great marketing idea to make that happen and promote your business…Personalized Stamps!

Personalized stamps are a great way to get noticed. Have stamps of your farm logo, your products, or even yourself made and use the stamps for promotional mailings. It’s a very creative way to catch someone’s eye and make a lasting impression. You could also have them made for your best clients and use as a thank you gift for referrals and their business.

Make your mail memorable with PhotoStamps: the exciting new way to turn photos into real US postage!

There is no better way to market yourself than excellent customer service. Be easy to work with. Go above and beyond. Appreciate what your customers do for your success.

I recently stopped at a local Farmer’s Market and I have to tell you how disappointed I was in how the vendors were marketing their products. Well actually let me re-phrase that–how they were not marketing their products.

What do I mean by that? Well, as I walked around the market I had no idea what farms were being represented. There was only one booth that had a banner on the front of it’s table and that was a local restaurant. No other table had a name attached to it and even more crazy, only one had prices on the produce.

I really don’t like the idea that I have to go from table to table and ask the same question over and over again. I don’t buy my produce on price alone so it really doesn’t matter to me if you’re going to have the best price or not. But in these tough times many families are pinching pennies and price does matter. You need to have your prices visible for your customers. And please don’t just write them out on a piece of paper and plop it in front of the produce. Take the time to print the price list out on your computer. If you don’t have a computer at home then find a friend who can do it for you. Appearance is everything and that hand-written piece of scrap paper just isn’t that appealing to any one.

Now lets get back to the sign for your business. You don’t need to have a big banner running across the front of your table. Just go to your local office supply store and purchase a table top sign display. Print off a colorful flyer with your farms name and proudly display it on top of your table. And don’t forget to print off some business cards with the information on how the customer can reach you if they have any questions for you…like maybe they want to know if your going to be back next week so they can buy some more snap peas from you.

So all I’m suggesting is just take a little bit of time and represent your farm in a positive way. People notice the little details and sometimes that’s what makes their decision for them of whom their going to buy from. You put a lot of time, money and effort in order to get your product this far so don’t stop now when this could be a very profitable moment for you.