Top 10 Reasons to Have an Ezine

I recently switched e-mail providers to Get Response. Here is an affiliate post that I think you may find interesting on why you should have an Ezine.

1. Establish yourself as a trusted expert. People search online for information and will look to you, as a subject matter expert, to provide it to them. Every week (or whatever schedule works) provides an opportunity to build on this, while reinforcing your brand.

2. Build a relationship with the people on your list. It's common knowledge that people like to buy from people they like. By using ezines to connect with readers in their homes, you can develop a relationship of familiarity and trust. Be sure to share a little about yourself or your company in every issue, whether it is an anecdote, event, or employee spotlight.

3. Keep in touch with prospects and clients. Consideration should be given to eventually developing two ezines: one for prospects and one for clients, as each require different information. This is a great way to notify your readers of weekly specials or upcoming product launches, offer new articles or customer stories, and provide links (or urls) to updated FAQs, blogs and splash pages.

4. Drive traffic to your website or blog. As noted in #3, remember to call attention to new blog posts or other changes to your website with links directly to those pages. Remind readers of your online newsletter archives. Promote special sales (maybe with discount coupon codes only for subscribers) with a link to the sales page. Use links to turn your ezines and newsletters into "silent salespersons"– driving traffic to your website and building your lists around the clock.

5. Build content on your website. Make a habit to adding your ezines and newsletters to your website in an archive area. This serves a several important purposes:

   • Visitors can read an issue or two to determine if your ezine will be of interest to them, which could help to increase sign-ups and potential sales.

   • If you optimize your article placements, you will not only make your website "meatier", but you'll also bring new traffic from the search engines.

6. Get feedback from your readers. Make it easy for you to stay in touch with prospects and customers and vice versa. Ask them to take action and comment on your articles and offers. Conduct polls and surveys. Start a "Letters to the Editor" column in your ezine. Feedback allows you to fine tune your messages, target your marketing, and expand your product line. It's also great for relationship building!

7. Develop an information product. If you deliver your newsletter once a week and include two articles, at the end of a year you'll have 104 well-researched articles in your portfolio! Pick the best-of-the-best and turn them into a bonus ebook for opting-in to your list, submit to download sites to build your list, or sell in PDF-format!

8. Grow your mailing list. Let your ezine subscribers work for you. Be sure to remind your readers that it's okay to forward your newsletter to anyone they'd like. In addition, it's important to include sign-up instructions for those who received your ezine from viral marketing methods. A simple line titled, "Get Your Own Copy of XXXXXX", with a link to your squeeze or opt-in page is all it takes!

9. Gather demographic data. By offering surveys, feedback forms, and niche reports, you'll be able to get valuable information about your prospects and customers. Learn what makes your readers tick, how to better serve them, and how to give them what they want. Make sure they become repeat customers!

10. Save money! All of the above benefits of publishing an ezine are free or almost free. The small cost of a top-rated ezine publishing system is nothing compared to the cost of brochures, business cards, advertising, direct mail, pay-per-click or other means of promotion. Not only that, but someone has to manage that production! Because your newsletter is delivered online, you can grow your list to be as large as you want without worrying about the expense. Bottom line − it's proven that email marketing is the most cost-effective marketing solution for companies just like yours!

Would like to learn more about Get Response?

Technorati Tags: get response,email marketing,squeeze page,ezine,blog

Leveling your organization thru Lean Sales And Marketing

I am not sure that Lean will ever work within a company unless sales and marketing are on board. In fact, why start with production if we want to look from the customer’s eyes. Would it not be tainted if we do not Lean sales and marketing first?

Have you ever won a large order and watch your production department roll their eyes? You could never understand why the frustration. In fact, you wonder why they just don't have the same enthusiasm you do. Instead, you wonder why they just can’t take the attitude of lets “gitter-done!” I would encourage you to take a little deeper look in the frustration and especially if you've been trying to become a Lean operation.

Let's face it, a manufacturing manager who does not meet the promised date or deliver quality parts does not keep his job long. There is an expectation to be on schedule. What about Sales? Is there the same level of accountability? That new order causes a wide variation in demand from what was planned to be booked. Who makes up for that deviation? The production department does. It is justified of course by the age old sayings; Customers don't know what they want or our type of business is hard to forecast. I read once where it was stated that greater than 90% of this delivery dates are missed at the time the order was accepted. This double standard is unacceptable and in fact quite detrimental to a Lean Transformation. But for this not to happen, you must learn how to market and sell products differently.

First, just think about how you typically measure sales people and for that matter your customers. Companies usually provide incentives to their salespeople based upon the volume of sales. You even have pricing policies that reward customers for buying large quantities of products. Does this sound like Lean principles in action? In fact, they are just downright harmful to a lean operation.

A lean operation works best when there is a level production load. So you must try some new approaches to pricing and most particularly to incentives and measurements. If your sales and marketing understand the Value Stream of your company, they will also recognize the capacity restraints or bottlenecks that are within it. All at once they will start recognizing value over the cost of the product. If a part is difficult to get they will assessing more value to it. They may not be as willing to discount that product or at a minimum hesitate to promise an unrealistic delivery.

Can you create a linear demand with your customers? Sales and Marketing could work with customers to develop processes more conductive to lean operation. Such as many of the initiatives that Xerox has done. Maybe setting up Kanban systems, vendor managed inventory, smaller daily orders, rather than large weekly or monthly orders, forward forecast requirements, and others. You would also expect sales and marketing to develop more appropriate incentives to increase demand for non-bottleneck products. This is especially important because these sales can be increase without increasing other costs.

The purpose of all this is to recognize the Value Stream of your operations and maximize all the components of it. BY the WAY - How much would a Leveling Sales and Marketing initiative cost to implement? What value would you receive from it?

Technorati Tags: Lean,Lean Transformation,Sales and Marketing,Lean Marketing

Why Do You Market the Way You Do?

Have you ever questioned the assumptions that inspire your marketing? Have you asked yourself whether there is a better way to make your marketing more effective? I believe there is a tremendous amount that marketers can learn from Lean Development process.

Dr. Robert Charente of ITABHI Corporation developed the principles of lean development (LD) in the early 1990’s as not only a strategic as well as tactical business approach for the creation of change-tolerant business software intensive systems, systems that can rapidly adapt to or help in the creation of business change. He sets these lofty targets in his developments:

• 1/3 the human effort
• 1/3 the development hours
• 1/3 the time
• 1/3 the investment in tools and methods
• 1/3 the effort to adapt to a new market environment

Why the 1/3 targets? These goals are meant to challenge status quo thinking. Without audacious goals, ones that seem impossible to reach business managers won’t bother to think about the issues of software development in entirely different ways.

Could your marketing achieve 1/3 targets? Could you achieve them while providing more value to the customer? Can you think about your marketing in a totally different way?

Bob Charente expanded the thoughts of Lean Development to these 12 principles:

1. Satisfying the customer is the highest priority.
2. Always provide the best value for the money.
3. Success depends on active customer participation.
4. Every LD project is a team effort.
5. Everything is changeable.
6. Domain, not point, solutions.
7. Complete, don't construct.
8. An 80 percent solution today instead of 100 percent solution tomorrow.
9. Minimalism is essential.
10. Needs determine technology.
11. Product growth is feature growth, not size growth.
12. Never push LD beyond its limits.

You can read an expanded version of these 12 principles on the ITABHI Corporation website.

Lean Development focuses on the creation of change-tolerant software. Setting up this model for marketing could be quite interesting. How flexible, how change- tolerant is your marketing? Why are you marketing the way you do? Is it the way that your customer wants you too?

Photo Credit by hanneorla

Technorati Tags: Lean,Lean Development,Value Stream,Agile,Marketing,Agile Marketing,Lean Marketing