When Should an Email Marketer Start Planning Their 4th of July Email Campaigns?

The Ideal Timing for Starting An Independence Day Email Marketing Campaign

The 4th of July is perhaps the biggest holiday event of the summer. As the day draws nearer, people around the country will be soaking up festivals, outside grilling, fireworks and all the trimmings that typically accompany the occasion. While this day sees many people having a blast, it is also a wonderful opportunity for the savvy email marketer. Ideally, you want to start planning for it right after closing out your Flag Day program, which should be around the middle of June. This will give you enough time to plot strategy and prosper from the holiday rush. Execution is crucial, so here are some solid tips that may come in handy when planning your 4th of July email campaigns.

Display Your Patriotism

In the United State, the 4th of July is celebrated to highlight the independence and freedoms American citizens currently enjoy. On this day, Old Glory is sure to be waving proudly throughout the nation. The patriotic nature of this holiday is the perfect excuse for using your 4th of July email campaigns to flash your patriotism. For you, it could be as simple as giving your email template an Independence Day inspired design. You could also craft your offers or promotions around the occasion. At the very least, this approach can help you chalk up valuable goodwill points that you may be able to redeem with our audience at a later date. 

Go Social

For an email marketer, the only thing better than building a campaign around the 4th of July is combing those efforts with other channels. Right now, the ideal channel would have to be social media. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, integrating social media into the mix can provide a way for your holiday offers and promotions to travel beyond the inbox. Luckily, more email marketing software offer social sharing buttons and other features that enable the easy integration of these two powerful channels. The key for you will be creating 4th of July email content  your readers want to share in their social hangouts

Engage Before the Fourth

Of course you want to plan your 4th of July email campaigns before Independence Day, but you can start rolling them out before the holiday actually comes as well. For example, if you have a regular newsletter, you could use it to tell subscribers about festivals, fireworks displays, and other activities related to the 4th of July in their location starting in April. Readers will appreciate this, and may even show that appreciation by giving you their business when you finally do throw your sales pitch.

The 4th of July is a festive holiday that presents a gamut of possibilities to the opportunistic email marketer. Your competitors realize this as well, but that is no reason to not seize the moment. With the right strategy in regards to planning and timing, it could be you who has the edge in the inbox.

What is the Bare Minimum You Should Accept From Your Email Marketing Services?

What is are the basic and most important features of an email marketing service?

Deciding to pick up email marketing was probably a tough decision. Brace yourself because it gets even harder when you enter the process of deciding on a service provider. Not only is this decision difficult, it is also important, meaning you need to set some standards and stick by them. Without further ado, this is the absolute bare minimum you should accept from your email marketing services:

Respectable Deliverability Rates

It would be nice if every message you sent to your subscribers arrived at its intended destination on time, every time. Unfortunately, this is not the case in today’s internet world. There are a number of factors that could disrupt the arrival of your message, and most of them have to do with the nasty, never ending epidemic known as spam. While whether or not your message gets delivered is ultimately up to you, your email marketing service provider also plays a role. It would be a shame if you were playing everything by the book only to find yourself blacklisted because of your provider’s shady reputation. Deliverability is the very reason you need a partner in this game, so the company you have trusted with your marketing should be doing everything in their power to keep your message in the inbox.

Great Support

There are some email marketing services that you just can’t do without. Solid customer support falls in that category. Maybe you need to know why your login ID and password is not giving you access to your account, maybe you have a question about how to import your existing contacts into the system. Whatever it is, you need to know that you can get in touch with someone behind the scenes when that time calls. Some email marketing service providers excel in the customer support department and pride themselves on being responsive and helpful. Others are slacking at best, and this is something you just shouldn’t tolerate, especially when you are paying customer.

To Have All Your Expectations Met

Above all, your email marketing services should be living up to all of your expectations. By this we mean that you should receive everything you were promised before signing up and more. So how could a company fail to live up to your expectations? They could let you down in many ways, including by leaving you stuck with software that doesn’t perform as advertised and worst of all, surprising you with hidden charges you weren’t made aware of from the outset. When your expectations are not being met, it is a sign that the relationship has hit a major snag.

Conclusion

By now, you should know where this article stands on the matter of what you should accept from your email marketing services. If not, the moral is this - never settle for less. Email marketing is a great tool and a company that can’t properly service your needs should never stand in the way of you and success.

Should you buy a house before it's too late

You better buy a house in this market before it's too late.

How many times have you heard those words? The panic thinking is driven partially by prices continuing to rise to record levels but also by the sense that near-record-low interest rates could rise at any moment.

The sense of desperation to buy now out of fear you won't be able to get it tomorrow is probably one of the first things taught to any sales person. Create a sense of urgency.

"There's six left on the shelf, nope, it's down to five," jokes certified financial planner Ted Rechtshaffen, president of TriDelta Financial. "It's an interesting phrase."

Mr. Rechtshaffen says his clients are not uttering panic words but you have to wonder whether Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, might have been hearing them before making a speech to the Vancouver Chamber of Commerce this month.

"One cannot totally discount the possibility that some pockets of the Canadian housing market are taking on characteristics of financial asset markets, where expectations can dominate underlying forces of supply and demand," Mr. Carney said. "The risk is that expectations become extrapolative, prompting the classic market emotions of greed and fear -greed among speculators and investors -and fear among households that getting a foot on the property ladder is a now-or-never proposition."

It's hard to measure desperation, but a recent survey from Toronto-Dominion Bank on first-time homebuyers might imply there is some urgency in the marketplace.

The survey found 45% of Canadians are willing to buy their home independently without a co-signer. Traditionally people wait until they are married to buy that first home but now they want to establish equity early so they can get their foot in the market.

More worrisome out of the TD report was the statistic that buyers are doing less research before jumping in. The bank said mortgage pre-approvals are down to 72% from 84% a year ago and home inspections have dropped from 85% to 67% during the same period. The report also shows declining percentages for buyers researching issues like electricity and closing costs.

It all sounds like somebody in a hurry to buy or at least in a bit more of a rush.

"I think people see affordability is still there. The employment numbers are strong and rates are relatively still low," says Farhaneh Haque, regional manager of mobile mortgage specialists with TD Canada Trust. "In part there is a sense or urgency because they are worried about rates and unsure of what the markets will do."

Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets, says the Bank of Canada is partly to blame for some of the urgency in the market because of the uncertainty over rates.

"People feel the window is closing," Mr. Tal says. "People have been talking about the Bank of Canada raising rates. They look and say rates will be one or 1.5% [percentages points higher] next year. There is some logic to it."

He adds that if you look at trends over the past 20 years on what happens before rate announcements, you see an acceleration of activity before the announcement.

"Look at the last year and half and we've had this sense of urgency," says Mr. Tal, adding it has driven housing in Canada since the recession. "The real estate market has like nine lives."

It's easy to say wait until the market crashes in cities like Vancouver, where prices are up 25% from a year ago. But if rates go up, it could be just as expensive to carry a home.

Queen's University professor John Andrew says it's in the real estate industry's interests to promote the idea prices will rise forever. But while he thinks it's obvious in places like Vancouver there will be a price correction, it doesn't help you if interest rates go up.

"You see a 10% price correction but if interest rates go up two [percentage points], you are not better off," Prof. Andrew says. "Buyers are caught in this quandary that when interest rates go up, prices will come down."

If you are sitting on the housing sidelines, it might seem like you can't win either way.

gmarr@nationalpost.com

7 Highly Effective Viral Marketing Techniques You Should be Using

I was watching the tv show Biography recently, and the celebrity being profiled was none other than Ted Williams. No, not Ted Williams the famous hall of fame baseball player and arguably the greatest hitter of all time. Biography, (which has profiled famous celebrities from Barack Obama to Michael Jackson to the Beatles)was profiling the story of Ted Williams, the homeless "man with the golden voice" who was discovered on a street corner in Columbus, Ohio in January, 2011 - thanks to a YouTube video that went spectacularly viral, receiving over 13 million views before it was removed at the request of the Columbus Dispatch newspaper due to copyright infringement.

What is Viral Marketing?

Think about that for a second. From homeless to being featured on Biography in only six short months. Such is the amazing power of viral marketing. So, what exactly is viral marketing?

In essence, viral marketing is word-of-mouth advertising. Or, to be more specific, Internet word-of-mouth advertising. And as you know, word of mouth advertising is the most powerful method of advertising there is, bar none - online or offline.

Viral marketing exists in many forms including articles, videos, e-books, software, reports, interactive flash games, white papers, text messages - even tweets.

The term "viral marketing"  was first used in 1997 to explain the extraordinary growth of Hotmail, which accumulated over 8 million users in an astonishing 18 months. Hotmail was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million.

And what exactly was Hotmail's viral marketing success secret? Actually, it wasn't a secret at all. It was a clickable, single line of text  in the footer of each and every e-mail that was sent from a Hotmail account that read:

"Sent from my free Hotmail account. Get your own free web-based email account Here!"

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

We've all recommended products and services we liked or were satisfied with to family, friends and acquaintances. And we know how powerful and persuasive favorable movie reviews and restaurant reviews can be - because millions of us decide what movie to see or what restaurant to eat at based on the reviews.

Well, social media has made word-of-mouth advertising even more potent. According to a study by Performics, people on social media networks enthusiastically recommend companies and buy products they follow. Among active Twitter users who follow at least one company, 59 percent are more likely to recommend a company they follow, and 58 percent are more likely to buy a product they follow.

In addition, 60 percent are at least somewhat likely to take action when a friend posts something about a product/service, company or brand.

And opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising with 70 percent trusting consumer opinions posted online, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries. Those numbers simply cannot and should not be ignored.

How to Implement a Viral Marketing Strategy

I've been fortunate enough to have several of my articles go viral. In fact, a couple of my articles were so popular, at one time they were among the top 5k tweets on Twitter - out of 50 million daily tweets, according to Twitter's analytics team. So, I've experienced first-hand the amazing power of viral marketing.

In order for a something to become viral - meaning, spread rapidly like a virus. It has to be something that can easily be sent to others with little effort. The aforementioned Hotmail text link is a perfect example of something requiring little effort to pass along. Recipients merely had to click on a link. It doesn't get any easier than that.

It should also be something that "stands out" from the rest of the content on the Internet. Ted Williams' amazing story is a perfect example of something that stood out and captured the hearts and imagination of millions of YouTube viewers.

Finally,  it should have some sort of perceived value - not necessarily a monetary value per se. But it should have some sort of educational or entertainment value.

Following are 7 highly effective viral marketing techniques that should be part of your overall marketing strategy:

1. Videos. Upload an interesting, educational and/or entertaining video to YouTube, Metacafe and other video-share sites that captures the imagination of viewers, and anything is possible. Case in Point: Ted Williams. Need I sday more? Speaking of videos, I'm currently in the process of converting some of my "How to" titles into videos...more on that later.

To learn how you can use videos to market your business even if you don't have a camera, I highly recommend you Google and read Tracy Matthewman's excellent tutorial, How To Make Videos Even If You Don’t Have A Camera And Are Terribly Shy.

2. Social Media. Although Hotmail achieved viral marketing success before the advent of social media, it's hard to imagine a business having that same level of success today without participating in social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. Simply put, social media marketing, if executed properly, can put your viral marketing efforts on steroids!

3. Article Marketing. If you write articles and allow them to be syndicated, it's not out of the realm of possibility that one or more of your articles could go viral - provided, of course, they are well-written, interesting, educational and/or entertaining, and offer good value.

I receive articles in my e-mail box all the time from friends and colleagues who think the content is something I might be interested in reading. More often than not, they're right. After you write your articles, you can significantly increase the reach of your content by converting them into videos, using conversion software such as ArticleVideoRobot.com and Article2Video.com. As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently in the process of converting some of my "How to" titles into videos.

If you don't write well, or don't enjoy writing, reputable and professional article writing services like Nicole Beckett's PremierContentSource.com, can write articles for you at a reasonable cost.

4. Tweet Button. The Tweet Button is pretty much everywhere these days. This useful widget allows users to post a tweet to their Twitter profile from any website. Here's how it works: Tweets posted using the Tweet Button are pre-populated with a shortened link to the webpage from which the message was sent (for example, your website). Users have the option of customizing the tweet's content before posting it. This is an excellent way to give visitors to your site the ability to spread your content via Twitter. You can get a tweet button at the following link: twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton

5. Share Widget.  Share widgets give your visitors the ability to easily share and bookmark your website through popular social network websites. You can get a share widget from ShareThis.com.

6. E-Books. E-Books have long been one of the most effective methods of viral marketing, because they're easy to produce and have the ability to reach a large audience. If your e-book contains content that is interesting, entertaining and/or educational, and offers good value, readers will enthusiastically pass it along to others.

If writing isn't your forte, rebrandable e-books (e-books written by others) gives you the ability to accomplish the same thing. WhiteDove Books.co.uk has an excellent affiliate program already set up through ClickBank. Simply rebrand the e-books, and give them away or sell them. You will then make commission on back-end sales from your affiliate links within the books.

7. Newsletters. Newsletters are not only an excellent way to keep the name of your business in front your subscribers, they also have excellent viral potential. To take full advantage of this potential, at the end of your newsletter, ALWAYS encourage readers to pass your newsletter along to others. You'd be surprised how many actually will - if you simply prompt them to do so. You can create a newsletter quickly, easily and inexpensively through services like ConstantContact.com and VerticalResponse.com.