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? >>

Swiftpage Drip Marketing is Here!

You’ve asked for it, we’ve built it.  Put your Marketing on Auto-pilot – Join our Drip Marketing Beta.

Outlook 2007 Issues

I know I am a little behind here, but wanted to make sure you all are aware of the recent changes in the way email is displayed in Outlook2007 as opposed to Outlook 2003. A more in depth synopsis is available through the DM News, but here are the main concerns:

Outlook 2003 used word to create messages and internet explorer to display HTML, 2007 on the other hand use Word to create and display HTML.
This means -
No background image support
No flash or other plug ins
No up to date CSS support

That being said, your email messages may look nothing like what you originally sent, to an Outlook 2007 reader.

Steps you can take to avoid an indecipherable method: Take the time (I know, no one has any) to use very simple HTML when designing your templates. Not only will this have a shot at being displayed properly, spam filters LOVE clean HTML. The cleaner, the better chance of your email being delivered in the first place. Send a test to a friend that has 2007 and have her take a screenshot for you and make changes accordingly. Test, test, test until you achieve the results you are happy with. Also, always include a link to “view as a webpage” Swiftpage automatically adds this link to every email template that is sent through our system.

Small Business Marketing Quote for the Week

“The last thing we want is to build the Tic-Tac-Toe equivalent of software, when the user ultimately wants to play Chess.” by Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users on the ease of use factor in building software.

Built for the long run

Is your product/service built for the long run?  Are you willing to alienate potential clients in order to further your story?  I’m not saying you should, just saying you should think about your story and if you are doing anything that may be compromising it.

Brand Heirarchy

David Armano is putting together a presentation on the differences between influential power of A list, B list, and C list bloggers and I felt like it was a nice metaphor for your brand as well.

“The bigger point that I want to make is that bloggers at each level command a “sphere of influence”.  The higher the “level”, the more people are exposed to a blogger’s influence.”

Isn’t this true for your brand and your competition?  How large is your sphere of influence and who is feeding it?

Sales Tip

Now that you’ve purchased a contact management solution like ACT!, productivity is going to increase, you will know exactly where a lead is in the sales cycle, sales associates will have distinct plans laid out for each day, etc.  Right?  Right?

Not unless you have taken the time -

Taken the time to set up the proper process to manage these scenarios.  Define your process, your customers, you cycle and ask yourself questions along the way.  Take the time…it’s well worth it.

One Man Band

In small business it is likely that members of your team are playing more than one role.  It is also likely that you need to be incredibly smart and strategic when thinking about what department you need to beef up.

Where do you pool your resources?

Sales – do you hire an outbound team, make inbound stronger?
Marketing – do you hire an analyst and pour money into search?
Development – How would another engineer affect new product?

Where do you beef up?