VA Business Coaching Blog » Brand

Building Email Marketing Trust Through Appearance (Part Two)

Jeannine Clontz — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:07:53 +0000

Last week we looked at building trust in our email marketing campaigns by creating a recognizable ‘from’ line to our messages; optimizing the copy that is viewed through the preview pane; and encouraging subscriber communication. This week we complete the process with three more tips to polish your email marketing appearance.

4. Include full contact details in your footer.

Publishing your company’s full contact information allows your subscribers to trust in what you have to say. People are more open to content from credible sources and showing that you are a real company (with a registered name, mailing address, and contact numbers) will enhance your credibility. Including these details in your footer also creates accountability for everything you say in your emails.

5. Match email design to your brand.

The design of your emails should be consistent with all other materials you use to promote your business online. While you don’t need to copy your website’s design and layout down to the last detail, it is best for you to match your emails to its theme, colors, and graphics. This will help extend the trust you’ve built through other promotional activities beyond your email marketing campaign.

Once you’ve created a design that suits your image, use it consistently in all your emails. Doing so will continue to build trust through branding and recognition. You may consider showing a sample email to new subscribers so that they become familiar with the look and know what to expect. Once they receive your email, they will be more likely to read through it.

6. Email design doesn’t need to be fancy.

Some email marketers get so caught up designing their emails that they forget to focus on functionality. While the use of fancy code can make your emails look flawless, they will appear far from perfect if not in good working order and will do nothing to gain respect from subscribers. They need to look professional and work properly for subscribers.

To produce a successful email marketing campaign and gain trust from subscribers, you need to make sure that the design you use will work and does not appear broken, leaving subscribers feeling you don’t really know what you’re doing.

For this reason, make sure your emails render properly in at least the major email clients. You should also make use of proper alt attributes (an alternative text description for images that displays before the image is loaded) in case the images get blocked.

Appearance plays a huge part in gaining trust from your subscribers. As long as you keep these tips in mind when planning your email marketing campaign, you should be able to establish your reputation as a trustworthy and credible source of relevant information.

Please share your thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment.

Jeannine Clontz, owner of Accurate Business Services, a VA practice, is an author, writer, speaker and VA Business Coach specializing in providing professional business coaching to established and start-up virtual assistants (VA’s). For her FREE audio CD “What’s Holding Back my Business Success?”, a 2-month trial in her Insider group coachingprogram, or 1-month trial of her coaching club visit: http://www.VAbizcoach.com; or contact her at: coach@VAbizcoach.com.

Building Email Marketing Trust Through Appearance (Part Two) is a post from: VA Business Coaching Blog

Building Email Marketing Trust Through Appearance (Part One)

Jeannine Clontz — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:40:12 +0000

Appearance is everything, even in the success you can achieve through email marketing. Your branding, and the trust you gain through recognition, is gauged by the appearance of the messages you send to subscribers. The design you utilize, projects your quality and distinction.

Many email users consider commercial messages as spam partly because they look like spam. Marketing messages sent out with little attention to branding, layout, and design details will likely be considered spam and quickly ignored or deleted. To avoid portraying this image and to gain trust from your subscribers, you need to pay attention to the appearance of what you send out.

Here are my tips to help you build trust through the appearance of your emails and, allowing your email marketing campaigns to achieve success.

1. Make sure the ‘from’ line is recognizable.

Recognition is important in gaining trust from subscribers. This makes it crucial to use a recognizable name in your ‘from’ line. Use your real name, an online alias, or organization’s name, product or service. Obviously, you should choose whichever name your subscribers are most likely to recognize as well as respond to positively.

2. Optimize the preview pane.

Apart from your sender and subject line, what appears in recipients’ preview pane is what many people first encounter. The content seen through the preview pane, helps recipients decide whether or not they want to read the entire message. To keep your subscribers from ignoring or deleting your emails before receiving your message, make sure that what appears in their preview pane is recognizable and attractive. Try using your logo, a masthead, and an attention-grabbing headline.

3. Encourage subscriber communication.

Many Email Marketers use "Do Not Reply" accounts because they don’t monitor communications sent to the address they use to send out emails. This is often used when emails are sent by third party suppliers or email marketing companies.

However, this can be detrimental to the success of your email marketing campaign. You should actually encourage your subscribers to connect with you with comments, suggestions, or questions. By doing so, you gain insights from your subscribers and inspire trust through your interactions.

Check back next week for three more tips for building Email Marketing Trust through Appearance. Meanwhile, please share your comments or questions regarding the design aspects you follow to create success in your email marketing campaigns.

Find out more about our February Elite VA Insider session – What You Absolutely MUST Know About Design featuring expert VA, Jan Wlodarski of Inspired Design (www.inspireddesignexperts.com) on my teleseminars page: http://bit.ly/CrHSM

Building Email Marketing Trust Through Appearance (Part One) is a post from: VA Business Coaching Blog

Top 5 Ways to Google Optimization for Websites (Part One)

Jeannine Clontz — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:38:22 +0000

Staying at the top of search engine results pages requires a website owner to continually improve page content. Unlike Bing and Yahoo who use HTML tag structures, Google separates affiliate pages and ad sites from domains that provide unique, relevant content. Because of Google’s stricter requirements and guidelines, website owners need to optimize pages to improve Google index rank.

Keywords and Phrases

Keywords and phrases are main content components of a website’s text. Google evaluates site content and places relevance factors on keyword phrases that correspond to popular search terms. If a website’s focus is on “car repair,” the keyword phrase should display in several places within the content. Focus on full phrases rather than one keyword. They are more specific and reduce the amount of competition for search engine rank. It’s important to avoid keyword overuse; unnatural text flow that inflates the frequency of the keywords. Google detects it and lowers the website’s index rank.

Title Tag

Coded within the title of each individual page, the title tag is displayed in the web browser’s title bar at the top of the user’s window. Used by Googlebot to determine page content although not the sole element used for rank calculations, it plays a major role in search engine optimization. Web page titles should be different for all pages across the domain. To reduce title duplication, dynamically create web page titles using unique introduction text and appending the website business name.

Next week, we’ll complete the process by looking at Anchor Text, Header Tags and Unique Content…stay tuned.

Top 5 Ways to Google Optimization for Websites (Part One) is a post from: VA Business Coaching Blog

What’s a Brand Got to Do With It?

Jeannine Clontz — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:09:03 +0000

One of the things I enjoy most about having my own business is the freedom to choose who I’ll do business with. Not that I’ve always enjoyed that luxury, but my business is at a point where I can be a bit picky about who I decide to partner with.

I just spoke to one of my clients in Florida recently, and he reminded me how enjoyable it is to do business together. He always seems to have fun projects that fit perfectly with my expertise and his positive outlook seems to extend from his business to his life!

This made me stop to think about my other clients, and they too have the same positive attitude, are fun to work with, and we share a mutual respect and appreciation for each other.

WOW, how cool is that? This all makes me wonder, how did I get here? How did this happen? Could it be the law of attraction?

I think that has a lot to do with it, as does my attitude, and the fact that many of my new clients come to me as referrals.

But I think it’s also something else; I think it’s the brand I’ve created for myself. I believe that along with the logo, website, tagline, etc., that creates my brand, so does my appearance, professional and personal image and ethical standards. And I want to do business with people who appreciate my expertise and with whom I can share a mutual respect. Don’t we all?

So I think my brand is also firmly grounded with me personally, even with my name, so to speak. If I’ve learned nothing over these past few years of re-invention, I’ve learned that it’s better to have a personal and professional brand that I can carry into any particular niche I may expand into as the VA industry continues to evolve.

Today’s real estate VA could be tomorrow’s shopping cart VA. If I spent all my branding on a professional ‘real estate’ focus, it could be difficult to transition any of that experience into the newly developed niche.

After being in business more than 11-years, I’m grateful for all the clients and colleagues who have helped make me such a great success; and helped me to establish such a personal, professional, and enjoyable brand. I wish you all the same!

Jeannine Clontz, owner of Accurate Business Services, a VA practice, is an author, writer, speaker and VA Business Coach specializing in providing professional business coaching to established and start-up virtual assistants (VA’s). For her FREE audio CD “What’s Holding Back my Business Success?” or a 2-month trial in her group coaching program visit: http://www.VAbizcoach.com; or contact her at: coach@VAbizcoach.com.

What’s a Brand Got to Do With It? is a post from: VA Business Coaching Blog

Creating a Brand That is Uniquely You

Jeannine Clontz — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:30:21 +0000

A lot has been written about establishing a brand and how important it is. Over the years, I have learned that my brand goes way beyond my logo, website and marketing materials. It has a whole lot to do with who I am, personally, and professionally, and the role I play in everyday life – those things that I always seem to be asked to do; those things I am most passionate about doing.

For my coaching clients, I usually suggest that they get together with at least three people in the following groups:

1. Friends

2. Family

3. Neighbors

4. Acquaintances

5. Clients

Then I tell them to connect with them and ask them to be totally honest in answering the following questions about them:

1. Tell you about a fun or unique experience they’ve had with them.

2. What three things/traits do they like most about you?

3. What are your top five personality traits?

Armed with this information you will begin to see a pattern develop. Once you have established the pattern it’s important to do a self assessment. Some of the things you might consider in your assessment would be:

· List three things that make you different or memorable.

· What were you really good at when you were a kid – that you still enjoying doing today?

· When people compliment you – what is it usually for?

· What topics in your personal life do you never grow tired of discussing?

· What topics in your professional life do you never grow tired of discussing?

This information will help you to establish your personal and professional brand in a way that goes far beyond your logo, letterhead and business cards that will also be helpful in establishing a niche, and a focused marketing message to help you attract your ideal client.

These personalities, traits, and business practices will help to determine what makes you unique and why clients will want to not only do business with you, but be loyal to you for years to come.

Clients do business with us because they know like and trust us. Understanding our own personal and professional brand will assist us in developing deeper and longer lasting relationships with people who will partner with us in growing a profitable business.

Even if it doesn’t help you to establish and broaden your brand, it will certainly yield some great information about how you live, work and play.

Jeannine Clontz, owner of Accurate Business Services, a Virtual Assistance practice, is an author, writer, speaker and Virtual Assistant Business Coach specializing in providing professional business coaching to established and start-up VAs. To take advantage of a 2-month trial in her group coaching program for full-time established VAs, or for her FREE audio CD “What’s Holding Back my Business Success?” visit: http://www.VAbizcoach.com; or contact her at: coach@VAbizcoach.com.

Creating a Brand That is Uniquely You is a post from: VA Business Coaching Blog