Email Marketing Tips for Small Business Owner

Email marketing is a great way to reach your customers where they are without spending a lot of money. But it’s a big responsibility, too—people don’t give their email addresses to just anyone. Thinking about starting a company newsletter? Here are some tips to keep in mind.

Make it easy to subscribe. 

Post a signup form on your homepage, blog, Facebook page, and wherever else your customers and fans are already active. You might want to collect names and birthdays (for a special offer or gift) or invite readers to join groups, but don’t go crazy with the required fields. A too-long subscribe form might scare people off.

Tell subscribers what to expect. 

Whether you plan to send company updates, letters from the president, e-commerce sales, daily deals, or weekly tips, it’s important to tell your readers what to expect and how often to expect it. Give them as much information as possible on your signup form, so they can decide whether they want to be on the list or not.

Send a welcome email.

 It’s always smart to remind people why they’re on your list and reassure them that good things are in store. You might even send new subscribers a special offer or exclusive content, as your way of thanking them for their loyalty.

Design your newsletter to fit your brand. 

Your email campaigns should match your brand’s look and feel. If you’re using a template, you might want to customize it to include your company’s colors and logo in the header. If your emails are consistent with the rest of your company’s content, then readers will feel more familiar from the start.

Make it scannable. 

Your subscribers are busy people who get a lot of email, so it’s safe to assume you don’t have their undivided attention. Instead of one long block, break up your content into short paragraphs. Include subheadings and images to guide readers through your email and make it easier to scan, and add a teaser to the top of your newsletter to tell subscribers what’s in store. If you’re sending a long article, consider inserting a “read more” link so people can get to the rest when it’s convenient for them. Your subject line should be to-the-point and easy to digest, too. You might even want to a/b test subject lines to see which ones perform best.

Cost Effective 
Buy Email credit at cheapest rate here

Landing Page Optimization

 Start Converting Visitors to Leads With Landing Pages

The goal of landing pages is to convince the visitor to provide you with his or her information in exchange for a high-value offer.  They are the best way to convert a person into a lead. Most small and medium-sized businesses have very few--if any--landing pages on their sites. Research has indicated that 62% of businesses using landing pages have less than 6. Even though they’re not optimally positioned to capture contacts, these companies still have to try really hard to increase their website traffic.

This is really pointless if you don’t have the means to capture contact data.  Way too many people are concerned with their organic rankings on Google while forgetting about the sales aspect of their business.  Isn’t the point of your website to get your visitors to buy your product or service?

Why Do I Need Landing Pages?

Obviously the ultimate goal is to have the visitor purchase immediately, but this is actually even rarer than you think--96% of first-time visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. It’s a prime reason why you need landing pages. The next best option is to generate a lead by capturing  visitors’ contact data and adding them to your sales funnel. You will now have the opportunity to email them and nurture them down your sales funnel by continuing to market to them via email, phone calls, or social media to influence them to buy from you.  The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities to generate leads and fill your funnel.

A landing page needs a form to capture contact data for a website visitor. In most cases, you do not want to include your main navigation bar at the top of the landing page so the visitor’s only option is to complete the form. Not including the navigation bar has been shown to increase conversion rates by as much as 100%.
Creating a Landing Page

All of your content on the landing page should be contained above the fold.  This means that the visitor should not be required to scroll down to see any of the page content. Effective landing pages will also contain an image that is relevant to the call-to-action button that drove the visitor to the landing page. The text should be very direct and easy to read.

Landing Page Tips:

•     Use a compelling title that is relevant to your CTA.
•     Place all of your content above the fold.
•     Keep your opening and closing paragraphs to 3-5 sentences.
•     Use bullet points to clearly display your value propositions.
•     Add a compelling image that is clearly relevant to your offer.

Here are 5 Simple Steps to Creating Landing Pages That Convert

How to Use Landing Pages

A landing page is typically linked to an offer. An offer can be advertised through a call-to-action button on your site, a link in your on-page text, a PPC ad, or even a QR Code on a billboard or a piece of print marketing material.  The point is, you can link to a landing page from just about anywhere and you will want to because landing pages are so effective.

The design of your landing page is extremely important and affects the conversion rate of your forms.  The look, headline, and text must all be relevant to the offer to obtain a high conversion rate.  Design does matter, but that doesn’t mean you need a graphic designer, especially if you use marketing software such as HubSpot, which allows anyone to easily create landing pages.

All too often, we see the cardinal sin of PPC when people link their campaigns to their homepage instead of a landing page.  Another benefit of using these pages, aside from  capturing the data, is that most software should capture visitor data and segment it for you, so you know the exact source of your visitors and new leads. If you are not able to track this data, you will never know how successful your campaign is and you probably need to look into a software such as HubSpot that tracks it for you.

Start building landing pages today and build lots of them--companies that increase their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 receive 55% more leads. Your Contact Us page is technically a landing page, but it does not qualify someone as a lead, so start creating some offers or link your ad campaigns to your newly designed landing pages. 

AdSense Application Common Mistakes – Read Before Applying For AdSense

AdSense is great option for publishers to monetize their website with. However, AdSense is known for very strong policies which are enforced strictly. The aim of this article is to share some common issues, which can be avoided and often result in disapproval of your AdSense Application.

Who can apply to AdSense?
Prospective AdSense publishers must own unique online content to monetize, which complies with the respective product-specific content policies. You can find more on our AdSense policies in a dedicated post on our blog. Additionally, AdSense publishers need to be at least 18 years of age. Lastly, in some locations, including China and India, Publishers need to have owned their sites for at least 6 months. Google has taken this step to ensure the quality of our advertising network and protect the interests of their advertisers and existing publishers.
How does the application process look like?

In most cases, prospective publishers sign up using the application form. However, if a publisher is primarily interested in monetizing his YouTube content or hosts his websites with one of our API partners, Blogger for instance, the AdSense application should be initiated using the respective web interface of the service they are using.

The application process consists of 2 stages, an initial check and a detailed content review.


How to avoid the most common mistakes in your AdSense Application?
There is a number of steps one can take to increase the likelihood of passing the initial application stage.

Payee/Contact Name: This is the name in which you’ll receive your AdSense Payments. Applications with an incomplete name will be dis-approved. For corporate/business accounts, you should enter the name of the company or organization in the “Payee Name” field.

Address: Enter the complete detailed mailing address in this field. Incomplete address would mean dis-approval. Make sure you enter the zip Code as well.

Email Address: Double check your email address as this is the email ID on which all communication regarding your AdSense account will be sent. Also, you will be using this email ID to login into your AdSense account.

Under Construction/Difficult Site Navigation: In order to be approved, your website must be launched and contain enough textual content for our specialists to evaluate. Websites that are under construction, don’t load, or have non-functioning links, will not be approved. Double check the URL on your application and make sure it is entered correctly.

Site Ownership: Make sure you own the website you are submitting and have FTP/Backend access to the website using which you can edit the HTML code on the website, which will be required to place the AdSense ad codes.

Unsupported Language: AdSense supports 38 languages at the moment. You can find a complete list by clicking here. For websites, which are not supported via AdSense, you cannot use AdSense on such websites.

What is the Second phase of the application process?
Once applicants pass the first stage, they need to implement the ad code on their websites. AdSense’s team of specialists then review the respective websites and makes the final decision on whether to allow the applicants into the AdSense program.

Please bear in mind that Google only reviews the website if the website on which the ad code has been placed and the website the applicant applied with, match.

Before completing this stage, applicants have full access to their AdSense accounts, but they see a red warning informing them that they are still under review.

Additionally, the ad slots on their sites only show blank spaces instead of ads. If approved, live ads will start showing in their existing ad units.

Please note that this process only applies to publishers intending to monetize their online property using AdSense for Content. Publishers only wishing to monetize their YouTube videos, for instance, are not effected. This means that they will continue to see the red warning, but it will have no effect on their ability to show ads.

What to do when your Application is disapproved?

If an application gets disapproved, the applicant is always being notified via email. This disapproval email specifically explains why a given application has been disapproved and provides precise instructions on what to do next.