Susan Wilson Solovic: Hello, welcome to sbtv.com I’m Susan Wilson Solovic thanks for joining us today. This is the fourth program in our series The Power of Relationships with our guest expert Eric Ross, he is the senior vice president at Constant Contact, I'm sure you know by now Constant Contact is the leading email marketing and survey company providing lots of assistance and great resources to small businesses and organization. So thanks again for being here Eric.
Eric Ross: It’s great to be here Susan.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now we have certainly covered a lot of ground in this series, starting off with an introduction on The Power of Relationships looking at building a data based and maintaining it, than last time we were talking about actually creating and email strategy campaign that people open and read. And that if we don’t get messed up with spam filters. So and at the end of that program we started talking about the importance of the content. So why is the content in creating compelling contents so important for the success of an email marketing strategy?
Eric Ross: It’s a great question, if you think about it in terms stages of your campaign. If you write a campaign that’s all about you, it’s all promotional content and it’s all come see me, come by from me. But what's going to happened is the recipient is going to have an action on that, they’re going to receive it, its either going to be interest or its not going to be of interest.
And it will kind of end there, but if you can expand your content into sharing a little bit more about what you know and a little less about come to me, all promotional then what happens is you put a little negative knowledge in there that goes out to your readership. The reader reads it and they say “Wow, this is kind of interesting, I was just talking to Susan about this last Friday night, let me forward it off to her”. So if you can add really interesting content, what happens is it goes out to your recipients and then your recipients forward it on to other people.
And its kind of something that unique to email, because if you think about it from a stay of footage direct mail, how many times have you got a direct mail piece and said “Oh, I've got to send this off to Susie and put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it and send it on its way”. But with email it’s so easy to just forward that message off and what happens is now your spirit of influence get much, much larger. Because you leverage the network of that individual has. So if you can take your content a do a little bit of less about you and a little bit more about what you know and sharing that with others. Then you’ll find that you're audience will expand dramatically.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Well then, I guess it really establishes you as the expert and the authority on whatever industry you're subject matter you’re dealing with.
Eric Ross: Exactly, whether it’s a restaurant that just sending out interesting tips for how to make a certain dish or tips for how to cook with your kids. Different things like that can attract the audience and say “Wow, this share fully knows what he’s talking about, next time I want to go back to his restaurant”. So a lot of different things that you can do in the content to demonstrate that that knowledge that you will, that you have. That’s really the power of a small business is because you are an expert that’s why you went into business.
And now if you share that with others, they looked at you as being the expert and when they need what you have they're going to come to you rather than somebody else.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now that’s very interesting because I wouldn’t have thought about a restaurant having compelling content but you made a good case here. So really this is applicable to any industry or any profession.
Eric Ross: You name it whether its landscaper or an accountant. Anybody that has a group of customers that they want to communicate with sharing that knowledge will help you sort of stay top of mind and have them turned to you when they're looking for what you sell or you're offering?
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now what if you're not a great writer yourself.
Eric Ross: It happens.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Where, yeah, or you don’t have time. Where do you go and how do you find this kind of content.
Eric Ross: Well it turns out there is a number of different places that you can go. First of all if you're an expert in an industry it means you're going to be reading articles about different topics or whether you're an accountant or financial planner and you read an article about 529 plans. That’s content that you could repurpose and offer up to your clients. Now the catch here is you have to get permission from the person that authored that content. But if you see a great article and you send a note off to that person saying “Hey, I love what you wrote about that would it be okay if I included that in my communication?” a lot of times our attainder going to say “Great, just give me attribution” and so you can take that information and put it together and deliver it out to your readers without having to come up with great content.
The other place that I suggest people do look to is their existing costumers. Asked your costumers to stump you, send you a question that they think you're not going to be able to answer. You're going to get all kinds of interesting questions, questions that they want answers too. And then you can pick the ones that are the best of the week give attribution to that person and maybe give them an award for having the best question and then you answer that question and you also have all those other questions that you can leverage in future communications. So you can kind of build up a reserve of great content for your audience.
Susan Wilson Solovic: What about just spot lighting some of your costumer businesses asking them to write a little something about their business and spot lighting them.
Eric Ross: It’s a great idea, as well as finding other businesses close by to you and if you have a list and we've got a number, sort of film society often spot lights restaurants that are down by where their cinema is. And what they do is they to the restaurant, “Hey, if you will tell your costumer about what we do, we’ll tell our costumers about what you do” and it’s a great way to cross pollinate and keep your content fresh and relevant to your audience.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Well and I guess too depending on your industry if you have vendors or suppliers that authorities in a particular area they could be resources as well.
Eric Ross: Certainly, yeah, all of those great sources of content. And you know if you really asked yourself “What's going on in your industry that people are going to be interested in, in the next six months. What questions do people asked you when they come in the store? And that you turn to your suppliers for”. write all those things down and put them in a manila folder on your desk and then when your having a hard time coming up with a content turn to that folders reach out to a supplier, get them to give you the content that you need and your off and running.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Right, right that’s a great suggesting key I mean it goes, that way if you have writer block or you cant think of anything if you got really a resource right there.
Eric Ross: Yeah, exactly because we all do the same. We want to send out a campaign demure and tonight at 11:00pm we started thinking about the content. Well first of all we suggest that people critic calendar and start thinking about their content a little bit earlier than that but you know if you’ve got that folder you can fall back on, its sort of a nice security blankets to know “Hey, I've got instant content” when I'm ready to go.
Susan Wilson Solovic: All right, or even just keep a little note about it, right notes to yourself when things pop into your head.
Eric Ross: Exactly, because it usually comes when you're like falling asleep, right put it by the bed those.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And what about the volume of content in your email campaign sum, can you have too much, too little, too many graphics, too much text.
Eric Ross: Yeah, were working—there is a lot of different question there. But you know we like to say just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Okay.
Eric Ross: And within our templates you can add as many articles as you would like but what your really trying to do with a news letter is just to stay up of mind typically with the reader and say “Hey, remember I'm out here” and you don’t need to do that with 14 articles worth of content. In fact you can do it with one really well written article of content and remember there is nothing worst than sending a monthly newsletter that only comes out ones because you put all of your great content into that first campaign and now you run out things to say.
So you know, keep it short and sweet. And remember that you know you’ve got all content you can use that in the future months. But we really suggest that you don’t try and you know overwhelm the reader because when they get that campaign they're going to look at it and say “You know, how much time am I going to give with this” and they're going to want to see things in you know a bolt ties format and very easy to read and quick and simple. And if you go on and on they're never going to get below the fold.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Right, and looks like quite what we do with newspapers you read the first paragraphs basically and you’ve got it right. Now I know basically what our audiences are with our costumers that not everybody is going to be interested in the same thing. Is there anyway that I can target or is that even a good idea but target is certain content to certain members of my data base.
Eric Ross: Sure and we really think that this year focusing on relevancies is really important and that’s because when the email comes in you’ve got to rise above all of the other emails that have come into that end box that same day. So couple other things, first of all you should really be watching when you're sending your campaigns. You know sending it out on Sunday night it means it going to end up in their email box on Monday morning with all of the stuff that—
Susan Wilson Solovic: It’s not a good idea.
Eric Ross: Yeah, it’s just going to get the big global delete. So that’s one of the things you can look to. Another way to kind of hone in your audience is to put a link in your communications. So I write an articles set of wine store and I've been sending out the wine to the month communication and now I'm going to do a wine tasting. I can put a link, I can tell at the little blurred without my wine tasting with the link to my website where I can see all about the wine tasting and then I know anybody that clicks on that link is interested.
So if I've got three spots left for my wine tasting I could send a special message just to those people that clicked on that link. And then the last thing that could do is actually, do an email survey or an online survey out to those costumers and say “Tell us what you're interested in?” So if I'm a sport store and I've been building my list for the last five years and I put them all into one bucket, now I could survey and say “Tell me if you're interested in skiing, biking, archery” and whatever they click on and say this is what I’m interested in and then you can deliver a message. Spot on to that audience by just targeting that group that self selected into snow boarding.
Susan Wilson Solovic: That’s just fascinating, I will tell you marketing has really come a long way hasn’t?
Eric Ross: It is and it has become something to do. I mean it’s something that any small business owner can get into relatively easily and we provide all of the tools to help them get trained along the way. So it’s very powerful and it’s simple to do at the same time.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Well and I hope someday we haven’t touched on this yet but I hope you’ll come back and talked about online surveys and how to utilized those in our marketing strategies.
Eric Ross: I would love to.
Susan Wilson Solovic: That’s great, wonderful. Well thanks again for joining us I've learned a lot and don’t forget you can check out Eric’s website at Constant Contact which is www.ConstantContact.com lots of great information resources strategies there that you can learn. And of course remember to always stay tuned to sbtv.com where small business is our only business.
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