Welcome to Part 2 of our series “Email Marketing for Computer Business”. In Part 1, I explained small changes that you can make to start writing more effective emails today. Using these techniques, you can significantly improve your conversion rate – how many recipients open your email, then buy your service. Read it here if you haven’t read it already.

Eventually, your sales will plateau, then start to decline. The reason is simple – email lists shrink over time. Research shows that an average of 25% of email recipients unsubscribe each year. They might not be interested in your services, bought your service already, or simply do not find them relevant.

To get more business via email consistently, you’ll need to address two problems:

• Add more subscribers to your mailing list
• Make your emails more relevant

First, a note on what NOT to do. Some companies sell or rent email lists. For a small sum, you can get access to thousands of local email addresses that fit your demographic. They might even claim that these are “opt-in” lists. Growing email lists can be hard, so this can be tempting.

However, emailing people who did not explicitly ask to hear from you will not only tarnish your reputation, but also land you on the bad side of your email marketing company. These companies are legally bound to fight spam, and the most reputed ones, like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, are especially serious about this.

Being reported as spam can be very bad news for your marketing campaign. Even an innocent mistake like sending emails to deactivated accounts can get you banned from using their service (it’s happened to me!). You must tend to your mailing list like a garden, not use and abandon it like a coal mine.
[Read more…]

When used right, email marketing could be your most potent weapon for growing your computer business. Companies that have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but no email campaign, have their business strategy all wrong. Think about it… Facebook limits the reach of your posts to around 2% of your total fans, and on Twitter you need to be tweeting constantly to stay at top of the feed…

But people who have subscribed to your emails want to hear from you! Most emails you send out are delivered to the inboxes of your readers, where they can stay until your customer has the time to read them. Unlike ads and phone calls, emails are non-intrusive.

Smartphones have made emails even more effective. Research shows that smartphone users are more likely to open emails, rather than save them for later. Email marketing is going to remain relevant to your business for the foreseeable future.

There’s a lot more to email marketing than composing a blurb and sending it to your contact list. Its purpose is to engage your readers, and also sell your services, without being pushy.

It’s a vast topic, which is why we’re breaking it down into two parts. First, we’ll look at selling… what motivates readers at a rational and subconscious level to take an action. In Part 2, we’ll explain reader engagement – managing email lists and scientifically improving the quality of your emails. [Read more…]

While your business may be a one-person operation now, you might want to hire employees as it grows. Here are some tips for hiring and retaining self-motivated, talented employees who take your business to new heights.

Finding skilled, driven employees is a challenge for any business, no matter how big or small. Employees are not merely people who perform a specific job – they are critical to how your business is perceived – your brand. Your customers will only keep returning if they are delighted with the quality of service they receive. How they are treated by your employees is an important part of their experience.

If you are a one-person operation hiring its first employee or a small business, having the right employees is even more crucial. Here are some tips to help you find the right addition to your work family:

[Read more…]

When was the last time you clicked on an ad? There are around 4.84 billion pages on the World Wide Web, and most of them run ads. Yet the click-through rate for online ads is a dismal 0.06%. Some marketers have responded by making ads more intrusive, so it’s no surprise that nearly 200 million Internet users now use ad blockers.

Perhaps a decade ago, ads were valuable for building brand value. No more – today’s sophisticated consumers do not care for, or even notice ads anymore. So if you’re trying to grow your computer services business and want people to know about you, what are you to do?

As I’ve mentioned before, the Web is a wonderful thing, because it’s compelling businesses to be more authentic. Today, selling is about long-term relationships. The Web is where people go to get entertained, to learn something new, share their thoughts and find solutions to their problems free of charge.

To get the attention of customers, you must entertain them, share your knowledge, have conversations with them and offer something for free – in other words, create excellent content that checks all these boxes. Share-worthy content gets you free publicity on social media, and what’s more, Google values good content over ‘keyword stuffing’, click-baiting and such. In the long term, uploading valuable information on your blog, video channel, podcasts and social media profile is the only reliable strategy for staying at top of page-rankings and thus getting more customers.

Without much ado, here are 5 rules of thumb for getting started with content marketing: [Read more…]

Psychologists have found that we often invent justifications for choices that seem rational, but are in fact motivated by emotions, not reasoning. This actually serves an important purpose. Your “gut”, which is really your subconscious mind, lets you filter noise and make quick decisions, rather than be overwhelmed by our world’s complexity. It protects you from “paralysis by analysis”.

But the human mind is far from foolproof. After all, even something as vague and simplistic as horoscopes can affect our emotions and actions. The human brain is incredible, but also has its limitations and quirks. The good news is that by better understanding how our minds work, you can develop a compelling sales pitch to grow your business quickly. Here are some ways that you can leverage human psychology and emotions to be more persuasive and get more customers. [Read more…]

Abe Lincoln once shared an interesting metaphor about reputation. He said that if a person’s character is like a tree, his reputation is like its shade. People value a tree for its shade and a person for his reputation, but just as shade cannot exist without a tree, a good reputation cannot last without character.

For a business, the importance of reputation cannot be overemphasized. Your brand is made of two parts – your message (what you say about yourself) and your reputation (what others say about you). Your message – communicated on business cards, ads and a nice shop sign – tells people that you exist and might get them to try you once. But your reputation is what keeps them coming back.

A strong reputation not only gets you more and better clients without spending thousands, but also shields you from all kinds of problems, from a spiteful ex-customer to trouble with the economy. But reputation has to be earned painstakingly over months and years. It cannot be purchased or embellished. This is especially true today, when anyone can write you a bad review on Yelp for the whole world to read. We are living in times when all it takes to tear down a business built over a lifetime is for one mistake to go viral on the Web. The only reliable strategy to build a reputation is to consistently do excellent work.

Building a rock-solid reputation can be like seeking the Holy Grail, but this list of Do’s and Don’ts could make your Quest a little easier:
[Read more…]

Discounting is a minefield. Just ask JC Penney.

In 2011, JC Penney learned a hard lesson about the dangers of discounting. JC Penney had always been a discount store – and a successful one at that. You wouldn’t shop there for gold watches encrusted with blood diamonds or limited-edition hats made of penguin feathers. People shopped at JC Penney for one and one reason only – discounts. If JC Penney wanted to sell a suit, they’d price it at $150 for six weeks, and then offer it for sale at $75. Of course, their customers loved it. And all was well, until one day, JC Penney wondered, “Why have a suit hanging on a mannequin for six weeks, if it can be sold at $80, or even $90, flat price, from Day One?”

If JC Penney was expecting a stampede to their stores, they were wrong. Loyal customers ditched JC Penney like rats off a sinking ship. JC Penney learned an important lesson that year: people do not simply want to save money – they want the thrill of a steal. By taking away this thrill, JC Penney had entered into a price war with brands like “every day low” Walmart. And lost.

The JC Penney tragedy is not an endorsement of steep discounting. In fact, it teaches us that your customers are motivated by positive experiences, even if they claim that low prices are what makes them choose you.

How NOT to use discounting

Ask any of your customers if they want discount coupons, and invariably, they’ll say, “GIMMIE GIMMIE GIMMIE”. But using coupons to increase sales can be the business equivalent of swatting a fly sitting on your face with a sledgehammer. Here’s why: [Read more…]