For the first monday marketing tip of 2009 I thought it would be fitting to talk about the biggest way to gain exposure on a daily basis that costs you nothing and also can be done with zero effort, multiple times a day. Email signatures are a great way of promoting yourself, your business and other ventures you may normally not be able to talk about with the current person you are cooresponding with via email. You can utilize it in a variety of ways which I will outline below.
Company contact information
Do not just have your name in your signature line. Put your name, your credentials (are you the owner, president, marketing director?), your website url, your phone number and any physical address (if it is used a lot for your business – add it in)
Social Media Information
Do you want to connect with the people you converse with through email on other platforms? How about twitter or facebook? If you do, and you have a few profiles for them to connect with you on, why not set up a page on your company website listing them? This way, you can list the link in your email without having 10+ url’s pointing to different social media profiles.
To see an example of this, check out my “Be my friend” page on iamMikeSmith.com
Other ventures
Do you run other websites that are semi-related to the one that your emailing through? I know I do and that is why I have a link to my two blogs in the footer of my emails. Not only does it help show who I am in other realms, it also gives the people I’m talking to the ability to see that I have various amounts of knowledge on marketing, social media and design.
Contests & Exclusive Offers
Want to make the people you conversate with via email feel more important? Drop a line in your email signature that gives them 10-20% off their order, gives them exclusive bonuses that noone else gets or let them know about a contest you are running. It’s a great way to boost the effectiveness of your emails and will definitely show the people you’re writing to that generosity is defintiely on your side.
So lets make sure you’re utilizing those few lines of space to their fullest capabilities. You never know who might be looking.
Being remarkable sets you apart from everyone in your field of work. It not only sets you apart, but it puts you ahead. Ahead of the competition and ahead of the curve. That is somewhere we all strive to be as small business owners right? I am hoping to shed light on different markets and how different businesses can be remarkable in their own special and unique way. First up – The doctors office.
The idea is simple:
- You set up an appointment by calling into the doctors.
- Each half hour slot has its own extension on the doctors number (ie: call in and push 830 for 8:30am)
- The doctors office sets each inbox to only allow ONE message (the person who is able to get the appointment for that time).
- If the inbox is full, the person needs to select a different extension
- When the office opens in the morning, they check messages and have a schedule ready to go without the issue of overbooking.
Why is this remarkable?
Have you been to the doctors office in the past 40 years? Do you see how many people are in the lobby waiting? Much more than the time allotted allows, but somehow the doctors see everyone (even if it is for only a few minutes and you leave unsure if you’ve really been treated correctly because you can’t even remember what your doctor said, it was over so quick – yeah, I’ve been there too).
The idea is remarkable because no other doctors office ONLY books 1 appointment for each time slot and no other doctors offices make it THIS EASY for you to book your time. The person visiting the doctors office is happy for a few reasons:
- There is no real wait – you’re in at the time you called in for and there is nobody else waiting at the same time
- Calling in and knowing your appointment is scheduled that fast takes a lot of weight off your shoulders, especially if you’re already under the weather.
- It shows your doctor cares about you because he’s spending the entire half hour ONLY with you.
How many doctors offices could follow something so simple and turn it into what is remarkable about their office and gain more customer satisfaction and word of mouth exposure? I know my doctors office could. It’s generic just like every other doctors office. Simple posters showcasing some dumb catchphrases about health, a magazine rack and a fish tank. Sound like yours? Yeah, I thought so.
Your customers don’t buy shampoo; they buy clean and manageable hair. My clients don’t by a custom blog design, they buy higher profits and better branding. It’s simple; people hire you because of what you can do for them, not what you do. This might sound a bit confusing, but if you stand back for a minute and really think about it, it’s true. You don’t go to the store and buy toothpaste; you buy clean teeth and fresh breath. This holds true in any business online or offline.
If you’re freelancing full time, or you run your own small business, remembering this and building your marketing around it can really make or break your campaign. Focusing on the nuts and bolts of what your company does rather then what the end result is for the customer will not only hurt your sales, but your branding will suffer as well. For the average Search Engine Optimization company, their central focus is “your website will be #1 in Google for *this keyword*” yet if they were to stop proclaiming this and explain the 20-30 steps they take in order to make your website #1 for a specific keyword, they would surely lose clients and drive away any potential clients who are looking for the benefit, not the feature. Always remember that your clients hire you because of what you can give them and not necessarily what it takes you to get to that point, so exploit it for all its worth and make sure that is what you talk about in your marketing and copywriting.
Your software could have 300 cool features built in, and all kinds of extra additions that can be customized to the clients requests, but in the end, if your software doesn’t benefit your customer, or if the customer doesn’t know what it can do to benefit them, you’re losing out on that sale. Fluff is overrated.
* Editors note: Every monday we will be featuring a quick marketing tip like this, so make sure you subscribe to our feed to stay up to date with our newest articles.
I design websites that increase a companies profit and branding.
The above sentence is the statement I give all of the people that I meet face to face and ask me the question “What do you do for a living?”. After that introduction, I instantly have them hooked and am followed up with a “How” or “Wow” in which I then proceed to explain in a bit of further detail some of the specifics of my blog design company. If you run a business, a sentence like this is priceless to your profitability.
When I say “one hit wonder” most will think of a musician who releases one great song but is never seen again. That is the complete opposite of what this introduction can do for you. This one sentence can make or break many deals. Time is money, and attention spans are increasingly small today so anything you can do to instantly grab the attention of the person across from you, your computer screen or promotional materials puts you far ahead of the pack.
Get your company and your opening statement reviewed
What I’d like to do is have anyone reading this to leave a comment letting me know what you do for a living and a possible one hit wonder sentence you use or could use and I will go through them and list everyone’s replies in a future article along with my thoughts on each; what the positives of the sentence is or what could be done differently.