Googles all new gBall is set to revolutionise the Australian Football world.

Its features include

• tracking you kicking data to determine ways to improve your technique
• full compatibility with your Google account
• inbuilt tracking to help find your Footy on Google Maps
• for those with talent, it can send details of your kicking data directly to scouts, who can immediately contact you through an inbuilt vibrating alert.

As one customer testified:

“Thanks Google and Sherrin – this gets my boyfriend out of my hair for a few hours each day. He won’t stop kicking the gBall. He goes to the park on his own and kicks it from one end to the other, fetches it, and kicks it back. He says he’s waiting for it to vibrate.”

Cara, Perth

Check out the gBall now, and view quite a clever little viral marketing campaign.

You can watch the video here:

I am personally looking forward to this case study, as it means that I will be spending more time on the Ballina Info newsletter, as well as showing you just what we do and what can be done to improve an email marketing campaign.

Setting the Scene – Determining our Goals

Because Ballina Info is mainly an informational site targeting the local area, the main goals of the whole operation is to generate good traffic numbers to sell online advertising. The newsletter has two main goals:

• to generate traffic to the site – especially repeat traffic to help build our online community
• to attract enough newsletter subscribers to become an attractive  form of advertising for local businesses.

We know already that the site generates good traffic numbers, so we are a little disappointed in the subscriber numbers. We see this goal as being the most important, so we will mostly try and focus on the goal of increasing the number of subscribers.

Subscriber details

Breakdown of subscriber list (from Email Marketer)

We currently have 644 subscribers, with 580 confirmed contacts. Email Marketer automatically keeps track of the subscribers who have confirmed or who have unsubscribed. The list is attracting on average about 10-20 new subscribers a month. Considering that the site has between 10,000 – 20,000 visitors per month, this is a very low conversion.

Our aim is to have at least 1,000 subscribers before we can consider it a viable entity, so as you can see, we have a fair bit of work to do. On the positive side, we do have the traffic already coming to our site, we just want to send them to the places we want them to go.

How we collect email addresses

Screenshot of Ballina Info displaying the subscribe button

Currently we collect email addresses solely through a form on the website. If you click on the screenshot you will see the button that is placed on the side navigation throughout the site. This links through to the subscribe page.

This could possibly be a key factor in the low subscriber count. On most screens and on most key pages, this is down low (below the fold) and not really eye catching. Even with the red arrow next to it (which is just for the screenshot in case you are wondering) it doesn’t jump out.

This will be one of the elements we will test. Getting potential subscribers get to the subscriber page will be a very important part of the process.

The next step – the subscription page

The form on the subscription page of the site.

The Ballina Info Newsletter subscription page uses one of the forms straight out of Email Marketer, placed into one of our pages. Email Marketer allows you to create a customised form to place in your site to extract as much detail as you need from your subscriber. The forms also handle all the stages of the double opt-in process to make sure you have a fully legitimate list.

One of the problems that you face is the more detail you extract, the more flexible and targeted your campaign is, but the downside is that people hate filling out long forms. Ballina Info currently asks for First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Preferred format and the security code.

We will also test the effects that this has on the subscriptions, as well as work out how to extract as much detail as possible.

I guess at this stage, that gives a pretty good idea of the actual sign up process that we use to get our subscribers. In the coming weeks we will document our efforts in refining the process of signing up, then we will move on to the actual content of the newsletter. If you have any questions, please feel free to post a comment below and I will be happy to answer them.

The very first thing you should do with any campaign is work out what it is that you have that will make users go to the trouble of signing up, confirming, opening, and eventually reading and clicking your email.

If you get your basic plan in place early, then spam compliance, catchy subject lines and compelling content can help get your message accross, but it is the product or service that you offer that makes your email undeletable.

One of my favourite newsletters that I have recieved for years I would class as undeletable. The email often gets caught up in the spam folder, or marked as spam by our server – mainly due to its content – but because the information inside is such good quality I have gone to the trouble of whitelisting the email address so that I will recieve it without a hitch every week.

Some times deliverability can be a bit of a battle, but building up a reputation and relationship with you audience through quality content is the key to great email marketing.

There are many reasons why I prefer Gmail and the two most important aspects for me, are;

1. I can access my mail from Gmail “web based email” rather than off the server.
2. I have a number of email accounts for personal and business and I can access all my business and personal mail in one spot from anywhere with internet access.
3. If my computer crashes I don’t lose any email
4. I can use my own domain name to identify my email

Since I’ve been using it I am continuing to find more and more features and benefits such as;

• Plenty of ‘free’ storage for large files!
• Super fast search function to find older emails (”I know I saw it here somewhere”) using a particular email address, subject or text.
• This has got to be the bonus… We all hate spam and Gmail blocks spam before it gets to the inbox!
• Displays, in order, all my back and forth emails – grouping replies and responses in the one place.
• Allows me to quickly store emails in an archive for future reference – or to read later.
• I can create labels – instead of folders – to group my mail for easy reference and search.
• Works seamlessly with other Google Applications, including Google Docs, Analytics, Calendar, Reader, etc., Not to mention Live Chat and Mobile Access – how cool is that? Using one web platform has the potential to make my life, and yours, a little bit easier… and that’s got to be good!
• Don’t forget to personalise your home page with iGoogle. Synchronised to show snippets of your Gmail, News, Google Calendar, Weather and more customised features.
• Gmail does show Google ads – ‘not really a benefit’ you say – but for a free service its ok and only ‘good ads’ relevant to the email topic will show.
• More info on Why Gmail?

It’s easy to setup your existing email accounts in GMail too -

• Mail Fetcher -Gmail’s Mail Fetcher can download messages from up to five other email accounts, centralising all your email in Gmail.
• Adding a custom ‘From’ address when managing several email accounts.
• Set up multiple Inboxes – really helps viewing  multiple accounts

Like I said there are many benefits and features but the first step is to sign up at Gmail.com and give it a try.

Times have changed in a very positive direction over the past decade with the uptake of the Internet within mainstream society.  Businesses, both small and large, now have the opportunity to get their message out to their customers in a more targeted and cost-effective manner via e-mail, Web sites and social networking.

More importantly (particularly with e-mail and your website) the Internet has allowed marketers and business owners to no longer rely on a scattergun approach, they are now able to make informed decisions about their campaign performance through a vast range of tools aimed at tracking visitors and performance.  Just about anything that you can think of can be tracked and measured!

Probably one of the cheapest and most powerful marketing tools at a business owner’s fingertips is email marketing.  Unfortunately though, most small business owners do not realise just how effective it can be — for a very minimal investment in time and money.  Did you know that even at the most basic level, your email marketing campaigns will tell you:

• how many customers opened the e-mail,
• what links they clicked on within the e-mail,
• who has unsubscribed,
• how many e-mails bounced, and
• if anybody has forwarded the message to a friend.

For those of you who are then wise enough to tag your links within the newsletter will be able to use Google analytics to continue to track these visitors on their Web site to see if the desired outcome was obtained (i.e. buying something, downloading a report etc).  This is why e-mail is still the most cost-effective and targeted form of advertising that any business owner can take part in.

The Ballina Info Case Study

Over the next few months we would like to demystify some of the ins and outs of email marketing by taking you on a bit of a journey with us and our Ballina Info newsletter.  During this period we will be taking a hard look at the newsletter, which has become a bit of a neglected baby.  We will plan and employ strategies designed to increase the number of subscribers and gain a better understanding of what the subscribers are doing with the newsletter, with the overall goal of transforming a service that has been costing us time and money into a profit maker by providing an extremely useful service to our subscribers which in turn will become an efficient tool for local businesses looking to advertise to local residents.

As time goes by we will report what has been going on here in the blog and hope that you can take away some ideas that may help you with your business. If you’re a Ballina resident (or have any interest in Ballina) please feel free to sign up for the newsletter!

If you would like to follow this series you can be informed of new posts by subscribing to our RSS feed or the e-mail subscription on the top right.  If you have any questions, or if there is something that you would like us to cover as part of this series please leave a comment below.

Where do you begin?

There are a number of member generated stock image sites that we recommend that provide professional images at reasonable prices. These are Royalty Free images but still require you to license them. This allows you to use these in multiple marketing items for an indefinite period, instead of per usage, and have been released by the models and property owners for public use. The license is your agreement not to resell them and licensing also means instead of purchasing the image it allows others to use the same image.

Royalty free images are not free and we do not recommend anyone use or copy images from the web without first seeking permission or having signed a license agreement.

Some sites vary but usually you will…

1. Sign up
2. Search the site using your keywords such as ‘family at beach’ ‘office desk’ etc.
3. Add images to a lightbox (this is the collection of photos you have chosen)
4. Purchase enough credits for your images (usually $1.00 USD each)
5. Agree to lIcense and download images onto your computer -  *You can also send us a link to your lightbox if we are using these on your site.

ROYALTY FREE PHOTO SITES

There are also a few good Free Stock Photo sites so please look there first.
Dreamstime (above) also offer a range of free images so you may just get lucky and find the ones you need in their free library.

These Free Photo sites have their own system but most are a few simple steps…

1. Sign up
2. Search the images
3. Agree to license
4. Download image

Having an alternate e-mail account will allow us to contact you on the very rare occasion that your main e-mail address service may be disrupted.  If you haven’t done so already I encourage you to watch the short video tutorial below that will show you how to add an alternate e-mail address to your client account area.

All Education Department staff and students will now have access to customised Gmail accounts, catering for over 1.3 million users. The US-based information technology analyst Matthew Cain, from Gartner, said it was no secret why Microsoft and Google are “assiduously courting” the .edu community with free email services.

“If the vendors can get students to sign up for email accounts, the hope is they will then use those accounts for life,” Mr Cain said. “Students, alumni, staff and faculty all represent a highly desirable demographic that advertisers will pay top dollar to reach.”

Web-based e-mail clients such as Gmail will only become more commonplace for businesses and organisations of all sizes over the coming years and we encourage anybody (particularly those constantly on the move) to investigate ditching their traditional desktop e-mail client for more flexible and mobile options.

One of the biggest issues with using social media as a marketing strategy is when a business or individual chooses to go heading off like a bull in a china shop without fully understanding the implications or processes of what’s involved in participating in a social network.  For anybody who is new to social media I strongly urge you to watch the video below and then follow it up by reading this great article by Jennifer Laycock – How social media (didn’t) change business.

 
Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.