Swiftpage Announces Bright Peak

Ever hit a creative road block or plain didn’t know where to start?  We hear you, we’re here for you.  Swiftpage is happy to announce our new creative services division – Bright Peak!  From email templates and postcards to landing pages, microsites and identity work, Bright Peak makes your small business not look like one.  See what Bright Peak can do for your business >>

Create an Email that Gets Results

There is more to creating an E-mail template than throwing text and images into a defined space and calling it quits. Does your recipient know exactly what to do with the email? You have 1/3 of a second to engage, 3 seconds for them to know what to do, 30 seconds to get your point across. Here are a few things you need to think about.

Copy

Your headlines should read like a newspaper front page – Demand attention, gain notoriety, engage.

Your main copy should be short and concise – drive recipients to landing pages to read further, they should not have to scroll through your email.

If you are addressing more than 2 topics in your Email, don’t, create another E-mail that addresses different points.

Creative

Many studies show human imagery draws your recipients eyes to it – as the eye is drawn to the image, what can you put on its natural path – how about your offering!

Use stock photography – clip art was cool in middle school – you’ve grown up and your recipients will appreciate your professional approach

Make sure they know it is undeniably your brand. While your messaging is no doubt different between emails, make sure you maintain brand consistency with your email templates – You didn’t build every page of your website with a different layout – do the same with email templates.

Action

Make sure your call to Action is above and below the fold. If scrolling is required, don’t let your offering go away.

Use a combination of banners/buttons and text based links for your call to action – the results of the E-mail blast will tell you what worked.

Your main call to action should be the first thing a recipient sees when they open your E-mail, make sure it is so.

A Typical Swiftpage Scenario

We’ve been working hard lately on a number of new features – an apology for lack of posting.  Rather than making our current feature set more robust, we’ve polished the process to drive marketing initiatives into sales activities.  Here is a typical Lead to Prospect to Customer experience, with a taste of the new, utilization of the existing and a sneak peak of what’s to come:

Your Lead goes to Google
They search for Italian Bicyle Tours
You happen to book Italian Bicycle Tours and your listing shows up in the search results
Your Lead clicks on your link and they are intrigued enough about your content that they request more information – Swiftpage Landing Pages coming soon
They fill out a Survey Form stating they are most intrested in the Umbria Region – Utilizing Swiftpage Surveys
3 things happen -

• They are automatically sent a text based email confirming their interest – Autoresponder
• They are automatically loaded into your database with the Umbria Region selected as their interest point – List Builder for ACT!, SalesLogix or Sage CRM (New) database integrations
• They are Automatically loaded into a Drip Marketing Campaign – Swiftpage Drip Marketing

They are sent an email the following day about the different types of bicycle tours in the Umbrian region
The clicked a link in your email to learn more about Perugia from your website
Based on this selection they are sent another email in 10 days focusing on the Perugian Tour.
In this email you’ve included a few “Get to Know Perugia” links
A Swiftpage Call List is generated from the activity of the first two emails and sent directly to your sales team – Automatic Swiftpage Call List generation with Drip Marketing
Your sales team looks in the database to see the Region and City the prospect is interested in and knows  they should call them first as they were active in the emails
A sales call is placed and the sales person only talks about Umbria and focuses on Perugia as they know this is what the Prospect is interested in
A third email is automatically sent 7 days after the sales call, mail merging specific travel agendas as discovered on the sales call – Mail Merging any Custom Field from Your Database
The prospect clicks these links and books the trip.

All you did was make a 3 email templates (Which you didn’t have to think about sending out – because Drip Marketing did it for you) and one phone call to gather more profiling information – Ready to Trial? >>

Drip Marketing Scenario – Upcoming Event

You have an event in 45 days.

You need to invite attendees,
Remind those that have signed up to attend without sending them more invitation messages,
invite the first 100 registrants to a VIP reception,
hold off on sending more invitation emails if you’ve already reached capacity,
distribute a post event survey to those that attended,
send a post-event recap to those that did not attend.

Seems like a lot of work, seems like a lot of people involved, seems like a headache, seems like you may not go to this effort.

Enter Drip Marketing.  Long story short, Drip Marketing will help you automatically drive full capacity attendance to your event, make sure you don’t break fire code and gather valuable information from the right people to make your next event even better.

Automatically.

Drip Marketing Scenario – Web Form

As this blog pregresses, I’ll be doing a series of Drip Marketing scenarios that hopefully will turn on the light bulb for what you can do with your business.

How to effectively capture data from the web and what to do with it next:
Put a webform on your general website or on any marketing landing/squeeze page.  Don’t just gather general contact information; ask one or two questions that will help you make profiling decisions. ie. are you interested in product X, Y or Z?

If you are already a Swiftpage customer you know about the survey tool and how easy it is to create a form and place it on your website.

Once a visitor fills out the form and hits submit, they can be automatically loaded into a Drip Marketing Campaign based on their survey response.  So, set up 3 Drip Marketing Campaigns ahead of time.  If they answer product X, they’ll be loaded into the product X Campaign and so on.

Not only does Swiftpage auto-load those that fill out the form into a Drip Marketing Campaign, but will also immediately send them a plain text email with a message you have for them.  This is the Swiftpage autoresponder.  In addition, they will be automatically loaded to your database (Currently this is only available for ACT! users).

So, long story short and bulleted – bullets make things easier:

• Someone comes to your website and they see a link that says “Click here for more information?”

• they click the link and fill out the form selecting they are interested in Product X

• Upon submit they are automatically sent an email thanking them for their response

• Upon submit they are automatically loaded into the Product X Drip Marketing Campaign

• Upon submit they are automatically sent to your ACT! database ready to be loaded with a single click

• They receive the Product X Drip Marketing Campaign messages you create and buy product X

This all happened automatically…

See the potential here?

Marketing Automation is your Friend

You have an event coming up in 30 days.  How do you drive the greatest attendance and coordinate a venue that will wow your crowd without burying yourself in the details – all without a small army of marketing folks?  You could have guessed from the title of this post…you Target, Plan and Build an automated marketing campaign.

We’ve got an answer and to illustrate, have written an article to help you pack your event to capacity – Read on Automation – Your Business Time Saver.

Drip Marketing is Here!

Always wanted to create a series of emails to be delivered to the right contacts at the right time?  Want this series to be intelligent enough to send marketing messages based on previous actions?

Now you can – announcing Swiftpage Drip Marketing

Drip Marketing blends simple functionality, like the ability to automatically send a sequence of marketing messages to a contact that fills out a form on your website, with intelligent technology that will send different messages to contacts based on their previous actions. For example, send a postcard to those that did not open the previous email – automatically!

Every Swiftpage account receives a free version of Drip Marketing while full functionality versions begin at $29.95 per month.  Automate your Sales and Marketing processes with Swiftpage Drip Marketing.

More than Open and Click Rate

Open and Click Rate are a nice metric for us marketers to look at – but as we become more sophisticated in digital marketing and the technologies we use keep up with this thought process, open and click rate become not good enough in themselves.

You received a 38% open rate on Email A and a 32% open rate on email B sent to the same group of contacts – Great, you know which subject line and content matter resonates best with that group – but what’s the next action?

You received a 5% click rate on Email A and a 7% Click rate on email B sent to the same contacts – Awesome, you know what Call to Action and language resonates best with this group – but what’s the next action?

you, as a marketer, think like a marketer and think about how to squeeze better response out of the next blast or campaign.  You need to break out of your marketing only mode and think about what these results mean to the sales team?  What technologies or processes can you put in place that turns this 38% open rate and 5% click rate into 123 hot leads, 250 warm leads and 75 dead leads?

As a Swiftpage user, you have the technology and we’ve built tools to help you with the processes – When building your next campaign or email blast, think about how to boost lead qualification, not just open and click rate.

Email Marketing Checklist

Here is a checklist you should run through before you send your next email marketing blast:

From Address –
Will your recipients recognize who the email is coming from?  Make it personal – send from your personal email address or from a sales team members address – general addresses garner lower results than a personal address.

Subject lines –
Less than 45 Characters including spaces
No special characters, numbers or all caps (#!?, 1234, HELLO)
Recognizable content – include corporate branding or product name
Consitent content – Does your subject line reflect what the main email represents?

Main Email –
Short outbound links
In 3 seconds of viewing your recipient should know the subject of the email
In 3 seconds of viewing your recipient should know what to do with the email – call to action!
Simple concise messaging – email should be short; pushing recipients to landing pages.

Spam Check –
Before you send to all recipients, send through a spam check to see if there are any quick fixes you can make that will improve deliverability.

Test Email –
Send a test to ensure all of the images render properly, text is properly aligned and your message comes in portrayed how you had planned.  Create dummy accounts with hotmail, gmail, yahoo, AOL and more and recruit some colleagues with corporate email addresses to be on your test list.  See how each message looks in each different email application.

You’ve taken the time to craft a beautiful message, make sure it gets to the right contacts and is received with an impact.

The Email 3 Second Rule

You have 3 seconds for your Recipient to see who the email is from and if the subject line makes them want to open.

At first glance, you have 3 seconds for your recipient to decide if they want to read the message

You have 3 seconds for your recipient to find your call to action and know what to do with your email.

This means, you have less than a 10 second window (with distinct hurdles every few seconds) before your email becomes noise. Think hard about this before you send your next email – You’ve worked hard to make it to the inbox – Make less than ten seconds count.