Email Marketing Ideas For Local Restaurants

There are two steps to do Email marketing for any type of local business: the first one is list building and the second is to run email campaigns.

For local restaurant businesses, there are many ways of building your email list. Here are just some examples:

1. Include an email sign up on the comment card and bring them with the check to the clients in person when they finish the meal.

2. Insert a card promoting your email campaigns with your take-out and delivery orders. Simply put your site URL in it and tell people to go there to sign up for a special deal or something.

3. Sign people up for your email newsletter when they make the reservation. If you can have a reservation form on your site, it’ll be even better because people already become your email subscribers before they become your clients.

Now comes the email campaigns. What you should include in your email newsletters. Here are some ideas:

1. Menu. It could be your seasonal menu, menu change, or ingredients in your dishes;

2. Coupons. A small discount, exclusive to your email subscribers, will keep customers coming back;

3. Directions. Provide a link to driving routes, tips on parking, and public transportation information;

4. Gift cards. If you have them, speak it out. People are always looking for great gift ideas;

5. Pictures. Colorful pictures of food are the best enticement;

6. And don’t forget to mention your reservation phone number and best of all online reservation form.

For additional information on online marketing for local restaurant, please contact your local online marketing expert.

Dentist, Are You Ready For The Relationship Marketing?

The other day I received a mail newsletter from one of the local dental practices. It is the only newsletter I’ve ever received for the past couple of years. I was curious enough to go through every articles and news there. I would agree that they have done a great job, not only by delivering valuable information but by building its brands. Although it is costly to do that mail-out campaign, it is effective in building relationship between patience and its practice- just by that 2-page color printed newsletter.

As a matter of fact, dental patience tends to easily switch to new practice every time they see a coupon somewhere. While most of the dental practices have been aware of that, they fail to use various marketing ways to build the brand loyalty with their existing customers.

We are talking about relationship marketing more and more. Because to acquire new customers takes about 80% of the time, effort and money, but the revenue which generated is only 20% or less at the beginning. With the royalty relationship building up, we are going to generate more and more revenue.

There are some online relationship marketing tools other than those traditional ones. For example, email newsletters, coupon offers, rewards program, sweepstakes, etc. Stats show that over 90% of the people download or print coupon in the email; over 75% of people will purchase product offline because of the information he gathered from emails; over 70% of people will click the link to read company or brand content; and over 65% of people will share and forward the coupon in an email to their networking.

We also need to change the way of just thinking about coupon-based incentives to building brand loyalty based on more intangible, emotional values. Cone found that users developed positive feelings toward brands they felt they could interact with on new media channels. New media channels include videos, audios, photos, blogs, online social networks (i.e. twitter, facebook) and so on.

According to a survey conducted in September 2009, 74% of the respondents agreed that after interacting with companies or brands with new media, they generally have a more positive impression of the company or brand; and 70% of the respondents said that they are willing to engage with company or brand who has a presence in new media.

It is our goal as an online marketer to create on-going conversations with your new and existing customers to build brand royalty by various online relationship marketing tools.

Canada Internet Users

Canada’s Internet population continues to grow – by 2013, it will hit 25.9 million, or nearly 75% of the entire nation. That’s is really impressing. The total population as of January 2009 is around 33.5 million, while 69.2% of them (23 million) are internet users.

Many of these people are among the world’s most committed Internet users, spending 45 hours or more online each month. Since over 70% of the internet users are searching for local related content according to Google, local business marketers should be adapting to the online search surge.

While nearly 65% of consumers in the country own a mobile phone, they do not prize them as highly as Americans do. And the majority do not feel compelled to pay for a data package to surf the Web while away from home.

But traditional media isn’t dead — television still dominates, especially in the highly desirable over-35 audience.

(resource: emarketer)

Local Small Businesses Raise Search Spend

Small businesses using search advertising have sharply increased their search engine advertising in Q3 2009, according to data from WebVisible. Average spending by small-business search advertisers was up 91% year over year and 93% quarter over quarter in Q3. While Google still got most search spending, it lost 5% of the spending share over over last year. Bing gains 2.9% of the spending share.

More and more local small to medium businesses have concluded that over half of new customers are ‘referred’ by the internet. According to Google, more than 70% of the online searches are for local products or services. Remember, we are talking about billions of online searches everyday.

Stats show that 90% online commercial searches result in offline purchase; 82% of local searches follow up via online store visit, phone call or purchase. However 90% of local businesses have no clue of what to do to take advantage of those online local searches to benefit their local businesses.

Does Your Real Estate Website Do Leads Capture?

Although most of the real estate agents get a professionally looking website. However they still don’t get it and aren’t doing anything except taking listings and more listings and more listings.

But the problem is that listings weren’t selling.

I understand that the Internet is the best way to capture home buyers. Remember, sales is a numbers game and Real Estate is no different. If you want to work, then the Internet is the place to be.

Of course if you are just doing this part time or do not have a great work ethic, Internet leads are not for you. So let’s look at your website.

When someone comes to your site via the Internet, are they going to your home page? If so, that is your first mistake. The link from the Internet to your site needs to be directed at wherever you want the customer to end up.

For instance, if you want them to come to your site to do searches for property, then you need the link to go to the search page. However, if you do not have a mechanism to capture leads on your search page, you are making your second mistake. Most agents and brokers give away their MLS info on their site and don’t ask for a name, email address or phone number from the consumer. Why would you do that? If they are going to do a search on your site, you need to be able to capture this info…what’s the sense of having a site that is just informational with no capture?

Of course you can always just have them click on the “Contact Us” link on your site. You may get .00001% of the consumers to click.

With all that said, be sure to have your link on the Internet pointed to the portion of your site that is going to capture their data. Since 95% of the time they are just looking to do a search, it makes sense to have your search page as the landing page.

If you are going to do that, be sure to have them register before they can search your site. The ones that don’t register were never going to contact you in the first place. If you don’t know how to create an appropriate landing page for your site, contact your local online marketing expert for help.

What’s Your Real Estate Website Conversion Rate?

No matter what industry you’re in, success in the online marketing is determined by conversion.

Sites like Amazon and Wal-Mart measure not only how many visitors view an item, but how many place the item in their shopping carts and then actually purchase it.

Even though you aren’t selling goods on your real estate site, you should always be concerned with how well your site is converting visitors into leads.

Many of the real estate sites that we see convert visitors somewhere in the range of 3%-5%.

Some of the other real estate agents’ sites convert higher, but most fail to convince its visitors that it is worth their time to leave their contact information in exchange for a glimpse at local listings, and, therefore, fail to produce a good ROI.

You really only have a few seconds before a reader moves on!

Due to the low conversion we know some real estate agents are experiencing, we always keep our eyes open for websites that convert at much higher rates to provide as examples to agents wanting to know how they can get better their ROI.

Dental Patients Cancel Visits A Lot, It’s Time For Online Marketing

It was inspired by one of the report in Walt Street Journal. The headline goes: Dentists Step Up Marketing as Patients Skip Their Visits.

Because of high unemployment rate (9.1% in BC), as more patients lose jobs and employer-sponsored insurance, fewer come in for major treatments or even routine cleanings. A lot of dental practices here in BC already experienced big appointment lost as what happens to the whole dental industry in North America.

That means more dentists see the need to step up the marketing of their services. Most of them increase their spending in traditional marketing, for example ads on yellow pages, newspapers, direct mails. Since it gets lower and lower response rate by traditional marketing. Some of the dental practices have started to take advantage of online marketing to push their businesses and brands through internet.

Many small dental private practices are still preferring doing dental surgery as well as marketing by themselves. But the problem is, in dental school, most dentists learn that good location and personal service will earn referrals to new patients. But these days, the old ways alone aren’t enough to cut it and dentists with slumping business want to know what to do differently.

The lack of time and experience in marketing could make all the marketing money and work in vain. Dentists have to outsource the marketing jobs to the experts, who will make huge return to their dental businesses.

Next Page »