I’m dealing you that type of hand with this email marketing guide for small businesses. If you read it, it will give a you a competitive advantage over rivals.

But, only if you put the information to use.

Isn’t that the newest and biggest problem these days?

Great information is at your fingertips. In fact, if you click on any one of the articles below, you’ll be swimming in information you can use to grow your business.

I know I have all the information I need. Each day, I read through guides, blog posts, whitepapers and eBooks. And I tell the world about the best ones, here.

But at the end of each one I say, “that makes sense, now who is going to do it?”

The time-consuming work, I mean. Because I want to keep focusing on what I’m best at rather than every thing that’s worth doing, no matter how important.

And then I want to know, “who’s going to do it right?”

I don’t want people trying important, revenue driving activities for the first time on my business–even if they are following a reputable guide.

The ability and confidence to execute accurately on good information comes from experience.

There’s a problem though. I don’t want to pay very much for that experience.

Therefore, this guide provides advice for those trying to run campaigns alone. Each article can help inform your next steps or offer the background you need to know when to ask for help.

It’s also for our clients who have hired us to run email marketing campaigns to grow their businesses. These articles are great for understanding what we do or for reflecting on past email marketing campaigns.

Next step, read the articles below and use them to increase web traffic, leads and sales:

• 15 Email Marketing Tips For Small Businesses - In this article, Forbes offers tips to small businesses looking to start a company newsletter. 

• 7 Email Marketing Services for Your Small Business - About.com compares email service providers: AWeber, Campaigner, Constant Contact, GetResponse, iContact, MailChimp and VerticalResponse.

• 6 Common Email Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make - Mashable discusses email marketing mistakes.

• 3 Award-Winning Email Marketing Campaigns from Small Businesses - Constant Contact provides three small business email marketing case studies.

• 12 Tips: Stay Out of Spam Filters, Run a Successful Email Marketing Campaign - Small Business Trends provides email marketing tips from the Young Entrepreneur Council’s community members.

• 2013: What’s In Store For Small Businesses? - AWeber polled small business owners on their investment in marketing and created an infographic to display the results.

• Six Tips for Maximizing Email Marketing Campaigns – In this article, Entrepreneur Magazine focuses on split tests in the first two points and then offers four more good ideas.

• Small Business Guide To Email Marketing; Interview with Ben Settle - This interview with Ben Settle, a direct response copywriter, offers interesting email marketing advice and tips.

• The Small Business Guide To Email Marketing  - This helpful interactive piece allows you to explore email marketing step-by-step.

Which of these articles had the biggest impact on your thinking and on your business? Please let me know if you have any questions or comments in the comments section below. If you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

As members, this year we’ll be directly donating 1% of our sales to the World Wildlife Fund–one of better than 3,000 established and vetted environmental organizations supported by 1% for the Planet.

We’re happy to participate in such a worthy cause, which gives business owners who understand the essential value of a healthy environment the chance to actively contribute to one. The 1% for the Planet venture got its start in 2002 through the mutual vision of Yvon Chouinard and Craig Mathews–of Patagonia and Blue Ribbon Flies, respectively–and has grown impressively in the years since.

Via 1% for the Planet, SalesBlend will be directing funds to one of the world’s most enduring and active conservation organizations. The World Wildlife Fund, founded in 1961, labors around the globe to protect endangered species and ecosystems while promoting more sustainable, less polluting human activities.

The missions of the World Wildlife Fund and 1% for the Planet nicely parallel our own values. SalesBlend strives to pursue responsible business practices and to support environmentally sustainable initiatives. We’re excited to be able to act on these commitments with our new membership.

Current customers will be frustrated if they are unable to get in touch with you. For many businesses, is important that your phone be covered at all (business) hours.

Although the solution–hiring a receptionist–may be obvious, many small businesses don’t have the budget for one. The good news is that while a full-time receptionist will cost you a full-time salary, offsite receptionists can cost as little as $29 a month.

We decided to take a look at three of the more prominent offsite reception services out there:

• SalesBlend actually tried ReceptionHQ, a $29 per month option. We chose the Message Express Lite plan, which allows for 25 calls per month (extra calls cost $1.55 each). The receptionist takes down a message which he or she then relays via text or email. More complete services which allow for calls to be transferred to you are available as well. The bad news is that you get what you pay for–our customers complained that they encountered long hold times. 

• Front Office Staff doesn’t have their prices listed, so we called them and spoke directly with a friendly representative. She explained that they respond to calls from 9-6 EST or 8-5 in more western US time zones. $175 for up to 100 calls, or $295 for 200 (and $1 per call afterwards) are available plans. They offer call routing and e-mail messaging services and in addition will respond to FAQ’s based on information you provide.

• Of the three companies, Ruby Receptionists has the most human feel to it. However this Portland, Oregon based company is a more serious investment. Their most economical plan offers 100 receptionist minutes for $229 a month. The receptionists–who you can meet on the company’s webpage–field calls from 5 AM to 6 PM Pacific Time. They too will answer FAQ’s, and they also claim to handle calls from new and current clients and urgent calls differently according to your instructions.

Unfortunately we can’t help but notice that even as the price goes up there is no guarantee with respect to customer hold times, also known as queue times. In addition, there is no way to verify the quality of these services without trying them.

An offsite receptionist will probably never be quite the same as an in-house one, but it may be better than sending customers to voicemail. The question is–is trying out one of these services a good idea for your business?

Would you recommend offsite receptionists to other businesses? Please let me know in the comments below. If you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

According to StumbleUpon, Paid Discovery is innovative because it allows businesses to reach their target audiences while they are in the mindset of “discovery.”

StumbleUpon states that this works best when businesses offer something of value to users and present it in an entertaining or informative way.

Approach

To test the Paid Discovery system, SalesBlend used the following blog post on SalesBlend.com: How To Get More And Better Yelp Reviews. The post is more informative than entertaining which we felt would be appropriate for the business people we planned to reach.

We selected the Paid Discovery’s “Standard” pricing level, which is currently $0.10 per visitor. We also employed StumbleUpon’s best practices to guide the campaign.

Hypothesis

SalesBlend hypothesized that use of the Paid Discovery ad system would result in targeted traffic. However, because the users who access the blog post are in the “discovery” phase, we hypothesized that 1000 visitors ($100 x $0.10 per visitor) would not be enough to assume any would contact us for a consultation. Instead, we predicted that 2 percent of visitors would either share the post or convert by signing up for our email newsletter.

Method

To begin our paid StumbleUpon experiment, we purchased 300 impressions (by setting the maximum daily budget to $30). We chose a broad set of six interest areas to help us gather data to determine which single interest area to focus on.

Our initial six interest areas included the following:

1. advertising
2. business
3. consumer info
4. entrepreneurship
5. Facebook
6. marketing

We also targeted our impressions based on the following characteristics:

- U.S. users only
- Males and females age 24 and older
- Desktop browsers only

After several days of utilizing this approach, we used our StumbleUpon data and Google Analytics to determine which interest area received the best response. The business interest area received the highest campaign score so we targeted that area for the rest of the experiment, which was in line with StumbleUpon’s advice.

Intended Results

Through this experiment, we hoped to answer the following questions:

- Is our campaign targeting the correct interest area?

- Do we need to improve our content?

- Do Stumblers like the type of content we are presenting?

- Are Stumblers the type of site visitors who eventually make purchases, or are they just surfers?

- Did we capture any new fans, email addresses or blog subscribers because of our use of Paid Discovery?

- How effective is Paid Discovery for site promotion and sales?

Actual Results

Paid StumbleUpon – Lessons Learned

We would like to continue this experiment with a shorter, visual content piece that elicits more positive emotions. Perhaps an infographic or shorter blog post with more inspiring pictures.

We know that content which provokes positive emotions gets shared more than content which provokes negative emotions. Perhaps the blog’s discussion of Yelp was deactivating if it conjured up memories of dealing with mean customers or created anxiety about having to manage business reputations online. 

Based on the average time spent on the page (00:36), we concluded that How To Get More And Better Yelp Reviews was quickly skimmed, on average. At nearly 1500 words, the blog may have been too long for those surfing in the mindset of discovery, in spite of their interest in business.

Although we did gain two email sign ups for a free subscription to SalesBlend Insider from this, 0.2% of visitors was lower than we had hoped.

All told, $105.50 financed an interesting experiment which has helped prepare us, and hopefully you, for future success with Paid Discovery.

What type of content would you try promoting through Paid Discovery? Please let me know in the comments below. If you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

Mayer is not alone in distrusting remote workers- for many employers working from home is just an excuse to sleep in and spend the whole day in pajamas. They imagine that telecommuters are likely to face constant distractions from housework or family members and will therefore be slower and sloppier in their work.

But how much truth is there to these fears? Research suggests that they are simply off-target prejudices.

Myth: Most telecommuters are women who need to stay at home to take care of young children.

Fact: 53% of telecommuters are male and while 77% of those who work from home have children, so do 75% of those who don’t.

So if taking care of children isn’t the primary reason to telecommute, what is?

Telecommuting saves time, money, and gas

Working from home can translate into savings: per year this amounts to between $2,000 and $7,000 in transportation costs and the equivalent of 2 to 3 weeks of free-time which would otherwise have been spent commuting!

However telecommuters don’t just save time and money for themselves. According to Global Workplace Analytics, an employee who works from home fifty percent of the time means roughly $11,000 a year less in expenses for his or her employer. These savings come in the form of real estate, electricity, absenteeism, turnover and productivity.

That’s right- productivity. Telecommuters are more likely to work more than 40 hours per week (53%) than their office-bound peers (only 28%). In addition, they are 11 to 20% more productive when performing creative tasks. Caveat: The same research shows that telecommuters are 6 to 10% less productive when performing rote tasks.

Telecommuting is really a win-win-win bargain.

Employers and employees are not the only ones to benefit from the situation- the nation and environment also partake. Taking commuters off the highways leads to a series of fringe benefits such as the reduction in imported oil, greenhouse gas emissions, highway wear and tear, and traffic-related accidents.

Are small businesses missing out?

The numerous advantages of working from home are becoming evident to more and more people. Between 2005 and 2011 there was a 73% increase in the number of telecommuters nationwide.

However there is one group of people which may be missing out on the party. Small businesses are much less likely to allow telecommuting than their large counterparts. And yet, as entrepreneur and author of the book Remote:Office Not Required Jason Fried says, “I think it’s easier for smaller companies to [implement remote work] because they’re inherently more flexible.”

Small businesses have many advantages on big corporations, and flexibility is near the top of the list. They also have some disadvantages, but one of these- large companies’ broader access to talent- can be remediated through telecommuting.

Small businesses are often less willing to allow employees to work from home because they are used to carrying out all of their business face to face. Larger companies, on the other hand, commonly use e-mail, phone, and instant messaging in their daily operations even within the same work site, so remote work comes as a natural evolution.

Opening the doors to telecommuters means that a small company based in a small city can have access to talented employees from all across the country and the globe, putting them on even footing with the big guys.

Happier and more productive employees

The lion’s share of those who work at home actually reside near their place of employment and work at home only half of the time. The real benefit of telecommuting for workers- aside from the economic savings- is that they are usually happier and more productive.

And the reduced interaction between employer and employee or between co-workers means that the quality of the work submitted becomes the most important factor in the relationship- trumping office politics. As Fried says, “That’s one of the great things about remote work…that all the other human stuff, the B.S., fades away.”

Remote work is the wave of the future and will likely be the ticket to success for many companies in the new economy.

What is your company’s position on working from home? If you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

Image credit: tome213

Step 1: Choose the Prize

In order for a Facebook contest to garner interest, the prize needs to be sufficiently awesome. After all, people must perceive your prize as valuable to take the time to enter your contest and tell their friends about it. The better the prize, the more the contest will just promote itself.

Your prize should also be relevant to your business. If you attract people who are interested in a relevant prize, they are more likely to also be interested in your products and services. An awesome, but irrelevant, prize will likely attract the wrong audience for you.

For this Facebook contest, the client chose to give away a two night stay in one of their beautiful three bedroom Yosemite mountain homes. A free two night stay is clearly very valuable and exciting to a contest entrant. And since the client chose to give it away in their off-season when they have more available inventory, it was less expensive than it might have seemed.

Step 2: Set up the App

As you learned in How to Run a Successful Facebook Contest, all Facebook contests need to be run on a third-party app. We’ve been using ShortStack to build our apps.

In order to get new Facebook fans, all Facebook contests should require the user to like your Page before they can enter the contest. You achieve this by creating a fan gated page that has a strong call-to-action to like the Page to enter the contest. Keep it simple and graphically relevant.

Here’s what we created:

Your contest app should be set up so that once the user likes the page, they’re shown a new view where they can enter the contest and see more details.

Here’s the signup page:

We added a box to the contest entry form that users could select if they wanted to sign up to receive exclusive offers by email. ShortStack offers integration with Constant Contact and MailChimp, so the subscription process is seamless. Of the 2,502 new likes, 750 people signed up to receive email announcements!

Once you’ve upgraded to one of ShortStack’s paid plans, all contest entries are stored within ShortStack, where they have a feature called ‘Pick Random Entries’ that you can use to select your winner fairly and randomly.

Step 3: Don’t Forget the Rules

Define your rules: what’s the entry period, when will the winner be picked, how many times can a person enter, how is the prize redeemable?

Running a Facebook contest using ShortStack complies with Facebook rules, but to avoid any potential litigation, we recommend you draft your ‘Official Sweepstakes Rules’. We’ve had success using Rocket Lawyer to create rules, but you may prefer to consult with a lawyer.

Step 4: Promote the Contest on Facebook

The first place we promote any Facebook contest? On Facebook!

Use a Promoted Post to make sure your existing Facebook fans and their friends know about your exciting giveaway. If you’re giving away something valuable, you should expect that this post will get shared at a high rate with lots of positive comments.

To promote this contest, we used a combination of Promoted Posts targeting fans and friends of fans and traditional Facebook advertising.

Step 5: Leverage Other Channels

Don’t just stick to Facebook–Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, your blog and email list are all good channels to promote your Facebook contest.

On Twitter, we tweeted about the contest regularly and used promoted tweets to get the word out in a big way!

We made sure to write a blog about the contest, so blog readers could find out too.

An email announcing the contest was a hit, with open rates and click-through-rates double and more than triple historical figures, respectively.

The results?

Yosemite’s Scenic Wonders’ cabin giveaway reached its goals for increasing Likes and email subscribers by attracting targeted fans who were interested in travelling to Yosemite. Many Facebook fans left glowing comments on the Page, about Yosemite and the vacation rental properties themselves, generating buzz about vacations to Yosemite’s Scenic Wonders!

What’s the most successful Facebook contest you’ve run? Do you have any questions about how to run a Facebook contest? Please let me know in the comments below and if you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

If you’re interested in the answer to this question, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham deserves a spot on your reading list. The book is full of inspiring case studies of 14 businesses that aren’t just growing for growth’s sake; instead, they are building a great and meaningful small business, sometimes in the face of adversity.

It’s an axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, a small number of companies have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do . . . creating a great place to work . . . providing great customer service . . . making great contributions to their communities . . . and finding great ways to lead their lives.” - Small Giants

Through Burlingham’s study of the 14 small businesses he identifies as ‘small giants’, he finds 7 common threads that make the businesses great. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to one of these common threads or lessons. What follows are the empowering lessons from the book:

Lesson 1: We are Free to Choose

Small business owners can and should choose how their business will evolve over time. Although the overwhelming pressure for successful businesses is to grow incessantly for a big cash out, businesses today can purposefully choose a different path with different goals.

Lesson 2: Leadership

To choose a different path, small business owners have to be strong leaders. Leaders who want to build a business that is an extension and reflection of themselves may need to do some soul-searching so they can define their distinct values and lead their small business confidently.

Lesson 3: Relationship with the Community

Small businesses should build a strong, nurturing relationship with its community.

The companies Burlingham studied had intimate relationships with their communities  The companies gave back in traditional ways like sponsorships and donations, and the community actually shaped the business too.

Lesson 4: Relationship with Customers and Suppliers

Great small businesses deliver on promises and maintain a personal contact with customers and supplies. These relationships are important to each business – and their customers and suppliers should know it!

Lesson 5: Relationships with Employees

“How would I want to be treated?” Great small businesses create nurturing and intimate workplaces for their employees. In fact, the reason many small businesses feel pressured to grow is to provide growth opportunities for valued employees.

Lesson 6: Ownership Structure

How do you retain ownership of your business and empower employees? The small giants profiled in this book have designed corporate governance structures unique to them. Read the book to get all the juicy details.

Lesson 7: Passion

Great leaders are not the same thing as professional managers. Leaders of small businesses bring a huge amount of passion to their business, community, employees and customers, which can create a giant impact.

As a small business owner myself and champion of small businesses, Small Giants provided plenty of inspiration about the right way to build a successful and great small business. Small is the new big!

Have you read Small Giants? What’s your favorite lesson from the book? Please let me know in the comments below and if you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

You probably know how to make customers feel at home when you are dealing with them face to face, but transferring your human relations skills to the pages, platforms and search engines of the world wide web may not come naturally. Never fear- a well-managed, well-written blog is your secret to developing fruitful relationships online.

We might say that trust is the cornerstone to success on the internet or conversely that a lack of trust will doom any enterprise to failure. From banks to news outlets to online vendors, no business would be able to survive on the web if consumers were not able to trust them.

Trustworthy online companies are serious, professional, transparent, and responsive. Tweet This 

Blog Commenting Creates a 2-Way Conversation

Customers feel safe with companies which openly respond to their problems and queries. Allowing for comments on your blog and responding to them is a must for developing trust.

We recommend using DISQUS for your commenting platform. It’s used by small blogs and large brands and allows you to tap into a community of commenters. DISQUS supports gravatars, which means that many of your commenters will have a headshot associated with their comments.

DISQUS shows how important 2-way communication is to developing trust.

Although I trust my credit card company, they are a huge international corporation which makes me feel small and insignificant- their website is impossible to navigate and I can never find the answers to my questions. I often reminisce of the days when I would walk into the branch of my bank and receive personalized help through open communication.

Showcase the People behind the Brand

As a customer, it is important for me to feel that a company knows me and that I know them.

Doing business on the internet makes this slightly more complicated than when interactions happen in person; nonetheless, familiarity with people that we have never met is really nothing new. Think of the celebrities that you refer to on a first name basis- you know everything about them, possibly even more than you know about most of your neighbors. Virtual distances are often shorter than physical ones.

For this reason, it is particularly important to focus on the people behind your brand- every blog post should be attributed to an actual person, not just ‘Your Brand’. And authors should have a headshot and short bio so readers can put a face to the words of each blog post.

Make sure each author on your blog has a headshot and a short bio.

Speak the Language of Your Customers

Businesses can become familiar to their customers by reminding them that they are regular human beings too. A blog is a perfect place for businesses to speak the language of their clients; to remind them that they too are facing the economic crisis and know what it is like to have to make tough decisions, to lay forth their point of view on important topics in their sector, and to exhibit their goods and services in a more human light.

By presenting themselves in layman’s clothes and as people rather than brands, businesses become more familiar and more approachable. If they do all of this with exquisite charm, they may even become likeable. Getting your clients to like you based on what they see on the internet entails putting a significant amount of effort into the details of your online presence- everything from aesthetics to the quality of your written content.

You know how to dress in a way that makes you presentable- your website should be dressed in the same way. You probably know how to speak in a pleasant, engaging manner- your written content needs to transmit your voice to those who read it.

In a face-to-face interaction with a customer, you know that the experience doesn’t stop with the product or service you provide- how you treat the customer is what makes the difference when it comes to creating a lifelong client. On the internet your blog gives you a chance to forge the type of relationships which keep you in business- relationships with clients who trust, know, and like you.

How do you build trust online? Please let me know in the comments below and if you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

Small businesses don’t need to miss actionable information, even if they don’t have the time to review every issue themselves!

Please note: To make this friendly to non-subscribers, some actionable articles, that require registration, were omitted.

4 Actionable Articles

• The Cult Of Evernote - We aren’t quite Evernote fanatics but we started recommending Evernote to our clients early last year. We use the free version on a daily basis at SalesBlend because it allows us to enter and access our business data from any computer or device. Evernote is highly searchable so you don’t have to remember what you stored or where you stored it – all you need is a vague recollection of what you’re looking for.

• Job Recruiters Eschew Monster to Find Hidden Talent on LinkedIn - Use social data on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to research job candidates and make better hiring decisions. LinkedIn’s Recruiter, at $8000 per year, might be cheaper and more effective than hiring a headhunter.

• The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks - If it’s difficult for one person to have genuine social relationships with more than 150 people, choose your network carefully. It may be time to focus and leverage your resources.

• Meredith, the Publishing Company That Beat the Internet - While the cost of printing magazines has continued to rise, Meredith has figured out how to stay profitable and survive. Key strategies at Meredith, that we’ve also recommended to clients, include repurposing content across multiple platforms and producing evergreen content instead of time-sensitive stories and news.

Which article(s) did you read and put to use? Please let me know in the comments below and if you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!

Lately, we’ve decided to share more of the information we’re filtering, distilling, collecting and, most-importantly, putting to use for our clients. Now you can avoid the tedious process of sifting through entire magazines yourself. Instead, you can save time and cut right to the important stuff we are using to help small businesses grow.

March 2013 | Target Marketing Magazine

The Editor’s Notes of the March 2013 issue of Target Marketing Magazine mentioned five popular blog posts of which two were especially useful to us:

• Copy Starters: 48 idea-starters for letter and email openers - Readers want to know what’s in it for them right away. This article helps you get the first sentence right the first time.
• 10 Email Design Best Practices for a Mobile World - Emails are increasingly being read on the go. This article offers best practices for getting past spam filters and having your emails render properly on mobile devices.

These two articles from the magazine were also very helpful:

• When Less Is More: 8 marketing scenarios that make more sense with shorter copy - Sometimes shorter copy outperforms longer copy. Test, track and analyze these eight situations.
• Who Can You Trust on the Web? - Price discrepancies can result in more profitable one-shot sales. Perhaps at the expense of favorable customer experiences and repeat business.

Please note: Two of the Target Marketing Magazine articles were written by Pat Friesen. She has written a number of great articles that help you learn more about direct response copywriting.

Lessons to Apply

Be honest, enticing and brief. People have short attention spans – to motivate them to take action on your direct mail, emails and calls-to-action you need to test, track and analyze. Keep their attention by making every word count. Finally, your presentation must be honest if you hope to achieve happy, repeat customers.

Which article(s) did you read and put to use? Please let me know in the comments below and if you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!