If done correctly email marketing can be extremely effective in attracting new business, getting leads, and building brand awareness. It is important that your content is original, and shows your personality. Marketers love emails because the recipient has to opt-in which means they are interested and want to hear more about your products or services.

Your email marketing campaign should:

• Use an attention grabbing headline
• Ask your audience questions
• Include relevant content
• Promote a free product or service
• Answer frequently asked questions

Make sure you engage your prospects by creating an email that is visually stimulating because 80.8% of users access their email on a mobile device. The last thing you want to do is bore your audeince to death with a page full of small hard to read text.  A short video is a great option for emails because we are so used to seeing text in our inbox, this small change will stick out in a consumers mind. When you decide that email marketing is right for your business please remember, you should always have a way to analyze and measure the effectiveness of your campaign efforts.

Here at IMTC we have the resources and knowledge available to get your email marketing campaign rolling. For more information, Please visit us at IMTCVA.org.

Text messaging is all the rage. Businesses both larger and small, from Walmart to your local Mexican restaurant are using text messages to alert their customers to coupons and specials.

Companies love texting because unlike email, almost everyone opens their text messages when delivered to their mobile device. In addition, they can be sent out just before lunch (to offer discounts and coupons) and before major shopping events such as holidays. That increases the conversion for the text message higher than emails or even television ads, for a fraction of the cost.

Why would a business need to hire someone to help them with texting? Managing the text subscriptions, designing the QR codes and writing the best copy in a limited amount of characters takes some expertise.  Some text messages just send out notifications, while other may contain a clickable link to a website or special offer. This takes knowledge of websites and landing pages, plus ecommerce systems and databases.

IMTC helps students get ready for the future of advertising with up-to-date training in every aspect of electronic marketing for small businesses. Don't let expensive companies or inefficient outsourcing take your business from you. This is a specialty career that is growing by leaps and bounds. This is your time…

No, we're not giving away free books. Not at the moment anyway. But it shouldn't stop you from doing so.

Here's a strategy for building a loyal and receptive physical mailing list that can help create brand awareness and make money too. Create a small, physical soft cover book to give away to your email list. It doesn't have to be huge — maybe just 60 pages or so. Use it to have a contest such as “Name The Title” or something creative so people will read it and engage with it.

The book can be printed for very little money up front. Small books like this from CreateSpace or Vervante can be printed for as low as $2.00 or less. Have a promotion where you ‘give the book away' for free, but charge for shipping, maybe $5.00. Have your list read it and come up with a working title for a grand prize at a later date.

Here is why this works:

• A physical mailing address is a powerful way to market to your list. With ever decreasing open rates, marketers are turning to direct mail marketing to help advertise their products and services.
• When people read the book, they engage with it in a more direct fashion than an ebook that they download, but may not even get around to reading.
• A physical, printed book doesn't get thrown into a folder somewhere on the prospect's hard drive, it stays visible on their shelf or office space keeping your brand top-of-mind. Books are often loaned out to friends, spreading the brand awareness to others.
• Even after printing and shipping the book out to your list for the $5.00 S&H, you may end up keeping $1.00 for yourself. That's $1000 for every 1000 books you ‘give away.'
• Prospects that opt-in to get the book with their physical mailing address are ‘hotter' leads than the rest of your list. They will be more receptive to higher priced services such as live events, seminars and personal coaching. Now you know who they are.
• The book is a branding device: it's sole purpose is to make you look like the expert and the ‘good guy.'

Not all Internet marketing strategies take place on the Internet. Reaching out to prospects in a non-digital way is a powerful technique that can make you stand out from your competition. Learn more about offline / direct marketing.

Sending email is still an effective way marketers sell their products and services on the web.  But with ever decreasing open rates and inbox clutter and competition, making that email message convert is more important than ever. There are ways to stand apart from the crowd, and online video in email can make for an interesting and dynamic presentation.

In most email programs such as Gmail and Yahoo, a link to a Youtube video in the body of the message will make the video playable right in the recipient's inbox. I tested this not too long ago: I sent an email to myself from 1shoppingcart and mailchimp, with a URL to a Youtube video in the body,  to my personal Gmail account and I could play the video in the email. I didn't have to click out to Youtube to watch it. Even if your recipient has to click out to Youtube, it's a safe way to watch a video that doesn't get caught in spam filters like an attachment.

Videos are far more entertaining and informative than just text alone. You can product how-to's, show off software applications with a screen-capture video or just pass on great information with a ‘talking-head' style video presentation. It easier for people to grasp information presented via video than having them read plain text. For those marketers who are trying to increase their Youtube channel views, sending out an email can do the trick. Think about how many views you can get very quickly if 500 people open an email and watch a video.

More video and email techniques are only a click away…

Lately I've been getting emails from people with
enormous attachments. This is poor form for a couple reasons.

1. If the attachment makes it through, you may have caused the
person receiving the email to exceed their allotted email space
which would make their other emails undeliverable. They won't be
very happy with you if you cause that to happen.

2. Many servers are set to delete or “send to junk” large
attachments because it looks like a hacker attack on their
system. In this case your email never gets through.

3. Definitely don't send a broadcast email or set up an
autoresponder with an attachment. You'll get tons of complaints
and a bad delivery rate. Just send an email with a link in it to
where people can download the file if they want to.

Large files are much more common because of video and graphics.
So what should you do?

A. Check the size of your file before you attach it to an email.
If it's anything bigger than a megabyte or two, don't send it via
email unless the person receiving it gives you the go ahead.

Generally you can “right click” on a file and click on
“properties” to see the file size.

B. Learn to reduce the file size of your graphics for screen,
ebook or website use. There are several sites available. Just Google “reduce image size”.

C. Use a file transfer service. Find it at
https://wetransfer.com Upload your file to that
service and tell it the email address you want the file delivered
to. The recipient will get an email telling them they have a file
to download. This is a much more accepted procedure and will make
you look like you know what you're doing.

Use the above tips to make sure you don't look foolish or cause
trouble for people when you send emails.