[Source: Footwear News
]Nike Inc. is in the position to snap up some struggling competitors, thanks to its strong balance sheet and ability to weather the weak economy, say analysts who follow the company.
[Source: Small Business Branding
]
Small business owners who are looking for a budget-friendly way to market their business may find email marketing their perfect solution. Many of the most successful internet marketers rely on this form of marketing for the majority of their sales. But can this really work for your business?
As the name implies, email marketing is a form of marketing done via email. Recipients sign up to receive emails from the business owner, usually in the form of a newsletter. In turn, the business owner sends out these emails along with some type of promotion for their business.
In a perfect world, the reader reads these emails, learns about the promotion and becomes a customer. Sounds simple – and it is, but there are also variables along the path to making this a successful way to market a business.
As with any marketing tool, there are some cons to email marketing. Don’t let that stop you from trying this technique, as these can be worked through.
The first obstacle to overcome is managing the mailing list. It would be nearly impossible for a business owner to try and do this on their own. If your new subscribers had to send you their information in order to be added, and you had to hand type out each new recipient, you wouldn’t have time for anything else.
There will be people who will want to be unsubscribed from your newsletter. Again, if they had to send you an email and you had to personally remove them, you would be spending way too much time managing your list.
This can be avoided by using an autoresponder service that allows people to sign up and remove themselves. Autoresponders also help your emails get delivered and avoid getting caught in spam filters.
Some business owners may struggle with getting their readers to open their emails. This can be avoided by creating interesting subject lines that get your readers’ attention.
Other people are afraid that they will run out of ideas of what to write in their emails. To generate some ideas, try writing out all the questions your readers may have about the benefits your products or services may offer them.
Some additional options would be to hire a ghostwriter to come up with customized content or to buy pre-written private label rights content.
Email marketing offers many benefits, as it is easy to use, very affordable and allows you to build relationships with your customers.
When people set about marketing their business, it can be a big gamble. If the person is putting up money, it can be scary to think you might not get a good result. And if a business owner is using free marketing methods, they are putting up a lot of their time.
Either way, once the time or money has been spent, they cannot retrieve it. To make the best use of time and money, it is important for the business owner to make sure they are delivering their message to the right target market.
A target market is the business owner’s ideal audience. These are the people who would be their best type of customer.
There really is no sense in putting time and money into marketing if the message is being delivered to the wrong audience. In fact, it is a big waste!
For instance, a business which sells high-end baby clothes is not likely to see a good result from advertising on a frugal mom website. Yes, moms are in need of baby clothes, but a site catering to moms who are trying to save money isn’t the place for the ad of a business which sells $40 onesies.
But if you turn that around, and the business owner writes an article which contains a link back to their own site, for an ezine targeted to new moms with lots of disposable income, the business owner could do quite well and see an increase in traffic and sales.
There are several ways to determine your target market. One of these is to take a few minutes of quiet time and visualize exactly who is in need, or want, of your product or service.
Try to picture them as clearly as possible. Are they male or female? How old are they? How will your product or service help them? What benefits does it offer them, and how is that going to make their life easier?
You can also do a search for competing and complementary products and take a look at their websites. When you look at it, who do you feel they are marketing to? Do you find a similar image to their target market and your own?
Once a business owner begins to target their marketing efforts and make sure their message is being sent to the right market, they will see a much better return on investment.
If you spend much time around internet marketers, you’ll hear them talk about “the listâ€. That term refers to their mailing list, which is made up of people who have requested to receive information from them, usually in the form of email newsletters.
For many internet marketers, the bulk of their income comes from marketing to the people on their mailing list. A person’s list can truly be their key to success.
Unfortunately, some people mistakenly believe that the bigger list they have, the more successful they will be. There are a lot of ways to “get†subscribers, such as contests, list swaps, and even through list purchasing. It is possible to achieve a high number of subscribers through these methods… but that doesn’t always guarantee success.
Instead of focusing on the number of people on the list, focus on the quality of the list and how interested the people are to receive the information. A list of 1,000 very interested people will bring in much more money than a list of 10,000 uninterested people.
If signing up for your newsletter is a complicated process, many people will simply click away. It’s also important to make sure the sign-up box is easy to see. Some people place it at the bottom of their sites and if the visitor doesn’t scroll all the way down, they’ll miss it. Many studies suggest that placing your newsletter sign-up box on the top right portion of your website will yield the best results.
Knowing your target market is another big key in creating a great list. The more targeted the people on your list are, the more likely they are to purchase your products or services.
Your target market consists of the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. For example, if you sell natural baby care products, you probably wouldn’t want to promote your list by purchasing an ad on harleydavidson.com.
Many people offer their subscribers a freebie in exchange for joining their mailing list. This could be in the form of an ebook, a special report, an audio recording of a teleclass or some other information product. When doing this, it’s always best to stay close to a topic your target market would be interested in. Going back to the example of someone selling natural baby products, a great freebie would be a small guide filled with natural baby food recipes.
Building a great list, full of targeted readers, will take some time to develop. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t happen overnight. Over time, the list will grow and it can develop into one of your best business assets.
Business owners who are looking to market their business often seek out outside advertising. They will gladly pay money for an ad that lasts a week or a month. This can get costly – especially if the ad doesn’t reach the intended target market.
One thing that business owners often fail to think of is marketing to their current customers and website visitors. This is a simple way to market your business, and it can be very easy to implement.
Marketing a business with email newsletters can be very beneficial, for many different reasons. The people who sign up for your newsletter want to hear from you. They are already familiar with you and your products and services. It will be a lot easier to sell a new product to them than to a stranger.
There are a few things that you may want to avoid with newsletter marketing, though. For as much business that they can bring in, they can also turn people away just as easily.
* Unprofessional design: If a newsletter looks sloppy or unprofessional, it may lend a bad image to your business. For best results, a business’ newsletter design should look similar to their website. This will create brand recognition and help your subscribers remember that they signed up for your newsletter.
* Misspelled words or bad grammar: When a potential customer reads a newsletter full of misspellings or bad grammar, they may assume that the business owner is equally sloppy with everything about their business. They may not want to buy the business’ products or services for fear that they will be poor quality.
* Outside advertising: Some business owners earn quite a bit of money through accepting outside advertising in their newsletters. And this business model may work well for your own business. However, before you decide to go down this path, it is best to think twice.
When a newsletter includes information about your business and links to your site, you are giving your readers a reason to visit your site. When you accept outside ads, you are giving your readers a reason to visit someone else’s site.
Would it be more beneficial to your business, and your bank account, to have people visiting your site or someone else’s?
* Content not focused on target market: The most important thing to leave out of a newsletter is content which is not focused on a business’ target market. A person subscribes to a newsletter because they want to receive information on a certain topic. If the newsletter doesn’t contain info on that topic, the subscribers will likely become frustrated and stop reading.
If done right, a newsletter can be a great business tool. It can serve as a wonderful way to communicate with your customers and bring in new sales. By using the above tips to know what to stay away from, your newsletter will be on the road to success.
Recommended Resource: Aweber is Email marketing software, Email Newsletters, and Autoresponders.
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[Source: Yahoo! Finance: Textile - Apparel Footwear & Accessories Industry News
]Accessory footwear marketer R.G. Barry Corporation today reported a 48.2 percent increase in net earnings on a 26.7 percent increase in net sales for its second quarter, ended December 27, 2008.
[Source: Footwear News
]St. Louis has a long history of being a center for shoe manufacturing in the United States, sort of like New York being known for its garment district.
[Source: Yahoo! Finance: Textile - Apparel Footwear & Accessories Industry News
]NEW YORK—-Skins Inc. , a developer of revolutionary, patented, two-part interchangeable footwear, announced today that it will be unveiling the Fall Winter 2009 collection at the Fanny Show in New York City, Feb. 4-6, 2009 at the Millennium Broadway Hotel.
[Source: In-Store & Retail Media News
]
As we’re poised to watch a whole slew of expensive Super Bowl ads, undoubtedly focused on entertaining and emotionally enticing viewers, it’s worth stepping back a moment and considering that as fun as these ads might be, lately most people are making purchasing decisions using their brains and not their feelings.
Whether you consider this a new insight or a basic tenet of human consumption in the market era, consumers are becoming more focused on gathering information about products and brands. To me, it’s no surprise, but the accessibility of knowledge via the internet and social networks makes this a whole new ballgame for marketers and retail sales. Certainly there’s a glut of information out there — and people struggle to decide what counts as an authoritative voice to guide them through purchases. (You can even see the Madoff debacle as an extreme example of how easy it is for the unbelievable to appear ordinary). One result of the current economic situation is that discernment is rising to the top of desirable skills for consumers. No one wants to make mistakes when they’re on a tight budget.
In a recent survey of consumer micro-trends, Penn, Schoen, and Berland Associates find that consumers no longer trust television ads or news as a means of gauging a product – and they’re more likely to trust online sources than store clerks for information. Again, no surprise when most retail outlets don’t work to create the sense that their sales force is there for the consumer rather than the company line. As I’ve pointed out in prior posts, those that do (Apple, for instance) are more apt to generate consumer loyalty. Blogs that provide retail insights (like this one, we hope!) are also a growing influence. Not that we have a buyer’s revolution on our hands, but it’s about time advertisers jettisoned their outdated notion of what consumers are really like.
Just to keep things in perspective, keep in mind that the micro-trends survey finds that most people are spending less than half an hour in product research online. That’s not a huge amount, but it also probably depends on the item in question. It also appears that it actually works when companies don’t presume that consumers are ignorant of technical information. Penn et al explain:
“Information-seeking is not just an activity, it’s a way of looking at the world. New info shoppers are proud of the progress they have made in putting facts over pablum. More companies should treat their customers as Dyson did and let them in on the secrets of their unique success. And they should invest more than ever in helping form their consumers into citizen corps, arming them with PCs, cameras and even asking them to use the phone’s new video cameras to document their product usage and put them online.â€
The biggest obstacle in advancing a new approach seems to be the antiquated notion that an informed consumer is an unwilling consumer. Trust, it seems, is a two-way street.
Image source: Smart Shoppers in the 1940s, The National Archives.
[Source: Smallbiztechnology.com
]
Web 2.0 is a powerful form of communication that goes beyond simply posting something on a blog. According to the Wall Street Journal it’s really about being a part of the CONVERSATION with your customers. This is an important difference.
You go out on a date and your date talks from 6pm – 10pm. What a turn off. On the other hand, how refreshing it is to have a conversation. You speak, your date speaks. You tell a joke and your data laughs. Web 2.0 (social media) is all about engaging with an audience, not just a one way conversation.
The WSJ writes Web 2.0 tools can be used to do what traditional advertising does: persuade consumers to buy a company’s products or services. An executive can write a blog, for instance, that regularly talks up the company’s goods. But that kind of approach misses the point of 2.0. Instead, companies should use these tools to get the consumers involved, inviting them to participate in marketing-related activities from product development to feedback to customer service.
How can you do that? A leading greeting-card and gift company that we spoke with is one of many that have set up an online community — a site where it can talk to consumers and the consumers can talk to each other. The company solicits opinions on various aspects of greeting-card design and on ideas for gifts and their pricing. It also asks the consumers to talk about their lifestyles and even upload photos of themselves, so that it can better understand its market.
[Source: Yahoo! Finance: Textile - Apparel Footwear & Accessories Industry News
]MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif.—-SKECHERS USA, Inc. , a global leader in lifestyle footwear, today announced that it has been named 2008 Company of the Year by Footwear Plus magazine. This award marks the third time in four years that SKECHERS has claimed the top prize in the Plus Awards for Design Excellence.
[Source: About.com Retail Industry: What's Hot Now
]While 2009 is a record-breaking year for retail store closings, many top U.S. retailers are opening stores and gaining market share on their weakened competitors. This complete list of 2009 U.S. retail store openings reveals which top retail chains are focused on expansion in the midst of recession.
[Source: About.com Retail Industry: What's Hot Now
]Find a complete and ongoing list of retailers that are closing their stores and going out of business in 2009.
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