Internet marketing is everywhere.  There isn’t one industry, large or small, which cannot benefit from marketing to an increasing and unending global marketplace.  Reaching out to customers and clients, while creating your brand awareness, has never been easier which is why restaurant owners have quickly joined the game.  If you are a restaurant owner, this is the perfect opportunity to increase your sales while building a loyal clientele.

What can Email Marketing do for your Restaurant?
•    Sending emails that tell your customers of new menu items, coupon specials or special events – keeps your restaurant in front of their minds and their stomachs!

•    Customer testimonials help build your business reputation, while creating a valuable viral campaign.

•    Sending out customer feedback forms gives your clients a chance to share their views, comments, and observations.  This is an ideal way to find out what your clients want, which in turn, creates repeat business.

•    Increasing website traffic.  If you have a website, include that in your email marketing campaigns.  Directing your clients to your website, gives you another large area of marketing to your target clients, while increasing a new segment of interested prospects.  Use your website to display your special dishes.  Offer some free recipes.  Everyone but everyone loves a good meal.

Building your Opt-in Email List
As your customers arrive simply ask them to drop off their business cards or email address.  Let them know you want to keep them informed of any specials, promotions, or discounts that you may offer during the week.  When you send out your email marketing campaign, don’t forget to include an unsubscribe option.  Don’t hold them captive if they want to opt-out.  Don’t forget to include a forward in your campaigns.  Using that option, your campaign not only builds a list of loyal clients, but at the same time, your clients will be able to send those campaigns easily to their friends, family and colleagues, as well.

Planning your Email Marketing Campaigns
What are your objectives?  Successful campaigns are built on planning and research.  What type of communications do you want to send to your customers?  What kind of dialogue do you want to begin?  As the restaurant owner, you need to know why you are sending out a campaign and what specific goals you hope to gain.  Are you promoting a new cuisine, announcing the addition of a new chef, creating more repeat business, or advertising a special dinner wine?  Having a set purpose of desired outcomes, helps you obtain the results you need.

How many is too many?  You must determine the frequency of your email marketing campaigns.  Frequency normally will depend on your personal needs and concepts.  Frequency ranges from weekly – to bimonthly.  Savvy marketers let their clients set the frequency range, because frequency is very subjective.

Know your Clients:  Ask for customer feedback.  Stay on the same page with your customers.  Knowing what they want takes out any unnecessary guesswork, while leading to another successful email strategy.

Track your e-campaigns: – Obtain live behavioral stats.  Tracking and analyzing your campaigns is the only way to know how your campaigns are performing. Tracking your data enables you to see if your emails were delivered, opened, and if your clients clicked through to your call to action.  Analyzing these campaigns will teach you about your customers’ habits and patterns.

Adding the Social Media Ingredient to your Email Marketing Recipe

Blog on your Website: – Invite your customers to share their thoughts and opinions on your blog.  Read what they are writing about.  Bring your personality into the discussion.  Social media is growing because people want to know you.

Create your own brand ambassadors:  Restaurants always have “regulars”, those people that come in consistently during the week.  Let them spread the good news via Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.
Sign up with the local restaurant search engines: Yelp.com, Urbanspoon.com, and TripAdvisor.com – Don’t hide – be found.

Email marketers are always open to new and creative ways when looking to grow and diversify their client base.  This is an essential key ingredient for any email campaign.  An email marketing campaign is the perfect vehicle when looking to produce greater sales, while creating an interest and desire in your product or service.  So, would why would anyone invest their time creating a dynamic campaign, if they there were no recipients wanting to read it?  What a rhetorical question.  No one would ever plan to do that, but that is exactly what happens when you don’t build your email database lists based upon permission.

Permission Based Email Works

Permission based email marketing is a best practice that enables companies to take advantage of a solid, cost-effective proven marketing strategy, when looking to building a larger market segment while building and sustaining consumer trust.  The payback is well worth it.  In a report posted by Forrester Research, consumers open two-thirds of the email messages they have opted into.

When used properly, email marketing can be an exceptionally compelling and persuasive marketing method.  It’s a channel that makes it possible for a buyer and seller to openly and freely correspond with one another, building a sound and steady relationship founded on relevance, value, and trust. When handled incorrectly, email marketing can be damaging to your brand identity.  Sending unsolicited email can cause you to be identified as a spammer, causing loss of recipients, your reputation, and possibly your ISP provider.  A company’s reputation once lost is not easily won back.

What is Permission Based (Opt-In) Email?

Permission-based email marketing is the exact opposite of a spammer. The significant difference, of course, is that the emails sent have been requested.  Sending permission based emails increase sales, helping to strengthen the relationships you have already nurtured and developed with your clients and subscribers.  Permission based email turn curiosity into clients, and clients into repeat buyers.

•    Using email marketing software will automatically guide your email campaign in the right direction.  With permission based email marketing software, create flawless newsletters and email campaigns.  Our software will automatically manage: subscribes, unsubscribes, and bounces.

•    With autoresponders, you can control the type and frequency of every email campaign you are planning to send as well as thanking your prospects and clients for signing up, automatically.

•     How are your campaigns doing?  You cannot manage what you cannot track.  Tracking real-time behavioral patterns is essential.  Building successful campaigns rely solely on accurate and dependable tracking reports. With advanced tracking reports, you can adapt and adjust your offers, tactics and strategies, automatically boosting sales and profitability.

•    Creating a call to action that leads your recipients to a sign up page on your website or specific squeeze page, is a great way to increase your permission based opt-in list.  Make your form simple, clear, and easy to read.

•    Be Real – Be Relevant.  Nothing but nothing takes the place of relevant content.  Quality is always greater than quantity.  Your message should get to the point quickly.  Whether sending out announcements, promotions, sales, and testimonials, make sure you are not overwhelming them with graphics and unnecessary hype-filled chatter.

By: Email Campaigns
Posted: Oct 18, 2010

EmailLabs (http://www.emaillabs.com), an email marketing solution from J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY), today introduced, “The R’s of Email Marketing Success,” a way of organizing and encompassing the full spectrum of email marketing best practices – so marketers can actually put them to use to improve ROI.

Like the three R’s (reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic) that revolutionized basic education, the R’s of Email Marketing Success represent necessary areas of mastery in email marketing. Each R – requested, relationships, reputation, received, rendering, relevance, reporting and resources – is important in its own right and subsumes several best practices.

EmailLabs launched the framework by publishing a white paper that focuses on the Relationships R and by introducing a suite of consulting services to help marketers learn and leverage best practices.

“Because email is such a high-ROI channel, many marketers don’t fully understand that poorly executed campaigns leave money on the table or damage their brands,” said Lena Waters, EmailLabs director of marketing. “We developed the R’s of Email Marketing Success to make them aware of these challenges, and more importantly, to help them be more efficient and competitive in the future.”

Despite email’s ubiquity, many marketers remain ill-informed of or ill-equipped to implement even the most widely disseminated tools of the trade. For example, a recent survey by the Email Experience Council revealed that fewer than 50 percent of marketers create emails that render appropriately.

The R’s of Email Marketing Success

Everything a marketing organization needs to improve the performance of its email marketing program is summed up in the R’s of Email Marketing Success:

•     Requested: a successful email program starts with a list of subscribers who requested to hear from the company.
•     Relationships: email marketing is about building long-term relationships with customers and prospects.
•     Reputation: ISPs use a company’s reputation to determine whether to deliver its messages to the inbox, the junk folder or not at all.
•     Received: if an email is not delivered to and received in the inbox, the chances of it being read are slim.
•     Rendering: those who design messages that render correctly avoid sending emails that many recipients can’t actually see.
•     Relevance: sending personalized and relevant content – at the right time and frequency – meets recipients’ needs and gives them a reason to read your emails.
•     Reporting: CEOs expect marketers to measure performance against business goals and report how email contributes to the success of the marketing mix.
•     Resources: marketing organizations often lack email-marketing resources, and need help building the right team or leveraging outside experts.

White Paper Covers Ins and Outs of “Relationships”

EmailLabs’ new white paper, “Relationships: A Guide to Acquiring & Retaining Email Subscribers,” (http://www.emaillabs.com/lp/email-marketing-relationships.html) is an in-depth look at how and why marketers should use the email channel to foster long-term connections. It is free to any marketer who signs up for a demo of EmailLabs’ email marketing software.

The white paper features practical articles on how to get permission, implement best-practice opt-in and opt-out processes, build and grow lists online and offline, and optimize existing lists.

As part of the R’s of Email Marketing Success, EmailLabs also developed 11 discrete, task-oriented consulting services to help marketers launch, manage and improve email marketing programs. Email Marketing Services range in scope from an over-the-phone evaluation of an existing program’s strengths and weaknesses, to in-person best-practices training sessions.

About EmailLabs

EmailLabs is a leading provider of high-performance email marketing solutions to agencies, publishers and marketing departments of middle-market and Global 2000 companies. The EmailLabs email marketing platform is provided as an ASP (Web-based) service, and is easily integrated with a company’s Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs’ application programming interface (API). For the fourth consecutive year, EmailLabs has been recognized by http://www.ASPnews.com as one of the Top 50 ASPs worldwide and as a Top 25 Service Provider for the Software-as-a Service (SaaS) and Business Service Provider category. The company provides email marketing solutions to more than 550 companies, including Nokia, Agilent, PalmSource and Jupitermedia. Headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., EmailLabs was founded in 1999 and is a marketing technology solution of J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY). For more information, visit http://www.EmailLabs.com.

Media Contacts:

Ken Greenberg

Edge Communications, Inc.

818.990.5001

Lena Waters

Director of Marketing, EmailLabs

650.388.3544

# # #

Posted On: Menlo Park, Calif. July 17, 2007

Email Data Source (http://www.emaildatasource.com) the leading provider of email competitive analysis, released its study ranking the Email Brand Equity Index™ of marketers in the Automobile Manufacturing sector based on the quality and effectiveness of their email marketing efforts as well as the representation of their brands in third party emails.

Email Data Source monitors the email marketing campaigns of over 36,000 companies in 230 market sectors, providing data and analysis through its core product, Email Analyst ™.

The Email Brand Equity Index™ is determined by compiling historical data on email marketing messages and measuring a combination of factors including the emails’ perceived effectiveness in driving website traffic and the quality of the delivered email.

Email Brand Equity Rankings- Automobile Manufacturing Sector

1) Dodge dodge.com

2) Infiniti infiniti.com

3) Ford fordvehicles.com

4) Saab saabusa.com

5) Land Rover landroverusa.com

6) Porsche porsche.com

7) Mini Cooper miniusa.com

Volvo volvocars.com

9) Scion scion.com

10)Audi audiusa.com

“We are pleased to provide marketers a way of measuring their brand equity across all email marketing channels which reflects how the typical consumer may perceive that brand in their inbox. Understanding how consumers see them as a whole–through in house marketing, as well as 3rd party newsletter sponsorships and affiliate marketing efforts–can help marketers improve their brand equity and their ROI. It has been shown that consumers respond more favorably to email marketing efforts based on positive past email experience. The Email Brand Equity Index™ is the first score that reflects a 360 degree view of email marketing,” said Bill McCloskey, Email Data Source, Co-Founder and Chairman.

About Email Data Source, Inc.

Based in New York City, Email Data Source collects, analyzes, organizes and archives millions of marketing messages, providing competitive intelligence and analytics to the email marketing community. The company has provided email marketing data as well as actionable insights and the intelligence behind them since 2003. Email Analyst™ , the company’s core product, monitors the world of email marketing for advertising agencies, brand marketers, direct marketers and their affiliates and vendors. For more information please visit: http://www.emaildatasource.com

Contact:     

Michelle Hayden

(646) 403-3387

michelle(at)emaildatasource.com

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Posted On: New York January 10, 2008

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Brick Marketing, a success-oriented, full-service Internet marketing company, is pleased to announce the launch of a new Email Marketing Journal. This blog is meant to help people learn about the idea of email marketing, and is written by the professionals at Brick Marketing, who have over 10 years of experience with effective online marketing campaigns and e-commerce.

The founder and CEO of Brick Marketing, Nick Stamoulis, says about his new email marketing journal, “The Email Marketing Journal is a very exciting opportunity. It will help our readers learn more about email marketing, as well as how the aspects of email marketing can improve their online marketing operations. The readers will also learn more about achieving business goals through new, popular marketing avenues.”

The Email Marketing Journal will discuss many topics related to email marketing, and not just the basics of this concept, which is growing in esteem in the online marketing world. Some of these topics include:

•     Email Marketing Basics
•     Why this is Not Spam
•     Email Newsletters
•     Email Marketing

The topics that the Email Marketing Journal will cover will be explored in the weeks to come as the blog becomes more established, and will expand to include more topics that relate to email marketing. Some of these expanded concepts include: Email Design, Email Marketing, List Rental, Open And Click Rates, Opt-In Techniques, Subject Lines and more.

Nick Stamoulis was adamant about reinforcing the point that email marketing is not spam. It is a legitimate form of marketing, and is not meant to harass clients, but to keep them informed of your current news and events. The style of email marketing that is encouraged by the Email Marketing Journal will be completely to the advantage of those who participate. Any blog posts made to the Email Marketing Journal will be written by the experts at Brick Marketing, who are well versed in the concepts that are considered legal and legitimate in the world of email marketing. For more information, please visit: http://www.EmailMarketingJournal.com

MEDIA CONTACT:

Nick Stamoulis

781-223-3651

Brick Marketing

http://www.BrickMarketing.com

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Posted On: Boston, MA December 18, 2007

Email marketing is a very simple concept which is also extremely cost effective. The general idea behind email marketing is that an email is sent to an email distribution list and these emails are intended to create an interest in the products or services offered by the originator of the email. In theory this concept could not be simpler but email marketing can get significantly more complicated. One of the biggest complicating factors is the potential for the emails used in the marketing campaign to be viewed as spam by either the recipient of the email or the spam filter provided by the Internet service provider. This potential alone creates a major complication because Internet marketers have to make a significant effort to assure their messages are not trapped by a spam filter or immediately deleted by the recipients for appearing to be spam.

Once the email messages get through to the recipient, they have a small window of opportunity to make a positive impression on the recipients and influence him to make a purchase or at least visit the business owner’s website. Providing quality content, keeping advertising subtle and at a minimum and providing a clear call to action are all factors which can help to get the message across and entice the potential customer to make a purchase or at least visit the website to research the products and services a little bit more.

As previously stated the goal of an email marketing campaign is to convince the email recipient to either make a purchase or visit the website to obtain more information. When an email recipient performs either one of these actions, it is considered a huge success. However, thanks to the power of the forward button email marketing can actually be much more successful than even the business owner intended.

The great aspect of email marketing is that when the email recipients receive an email which they think is worthwhile they are likely to make a purchase and may also forward the information onto a friend or family member they think might be interested in this information as well. The ability to forward email messages has become comparable satisfied customers using word of mouth to tout the quality of the products or services they received. However, the ability to forward a worthwhile email message is exponentially more effective than using word of mouth to spread the word. With just a few clicks of the mouse, the original email recipient can forward the message to several of his friends at once. This can result in significantly better results than the business owner had originally intended with no additional effort on behalf of the business owners.

Why are Internet marketers so afraid of being accused of being purveyors of spam? This is a common fear for a number of reasons. First of all there may be harsh penalties associated with sending spam emails. Recipients of spam have the option of reporting the spam to their Internet service provider who will investigate the validity of the claim. If the originator of the email is determined to be a spammer there can be harsh consequences.

Internet marketers are also afraid of email marketing because they believe it will not be well received by potential customers. This is an important concept because Internet users are bombarded with spam each day. Receiving this quantity of spam each day can be frustrating and can anger some Internet users. These Internet users are not likely to be receptive to email marketing. The fear that these potential customers will view email marketing and stray to competitors keeps many Internet marketers from taking advantage of this type of marketing strategy.

However, it is important to note that despite the prevalent problem with spam, many Internet users are quite receptive to email marketing. This is especially true in situations where they specifically requested to receive more information from the business owner regarding his products and services. Potential clients are particularly receptive to email marketing which provides something of value to the recipient of the email. Emails which contain in depth articles, useful tips or product reviews may be appreciated by consumers.

Additionally, items such as e-newsletters and correspondence courses offered via email can be of particular interest to potential customers. E-newsletters are typically longer documents than traditional email marketing pieces and can provide a great deal of additional information to the email recipient. Email correspondence courses may be offered in short segments and typically amount to a significant amount of information which is likely to be greatly appreciated by the email recipients.

One final way to prevent email recipients from viewing your email marketing efforts as spam is to only send the emails to recipients who register with your website and specifically request for you to send them additional information and promotional materials. This opt in formula is ideal because it ensures you are not wasting your email marketing efforts on recipients who are not interested in your products or services. It also ensures the recipients of the email marketing campaign do not view the informative and promotional materials they are receiving as spam. This technique for compiling an email distribution list is quite effective but it is important to remember you should always include information on how recipients can opt out of receiving future emails, www.Automatic-Responder.com is a great service to help with this. This is important because the email recipients may have once been interested in receiving marketing emails but over time this may change. If they are no longer interested in these emails, they may begin to view the emails as spam if they are not given the option of being removed from the distribution list.

First we will examine the case of a successful email marketing campaign which is approaching a logical conclusion. In some cases it may be logical for a business owner to conclude his email marketing efforts. The most obvious example is an email marketing campaign which is focused on achieving a specific goal and not selling products or services. For example an email marketing campaign which is political in nature may start off slowly, peak during a time when voters are most interested in obtaining information about the issues and then begin to wane as the voting process begins and the majority of voters have already made their decision. Similarly an email marketing campaign which is focused on collecting donations for a specific charity will logically end as the goal is reached. These email marketing campaigns may be highly successful but there is simply no reason to continue them beyond when the goals is reached.

Next we will consider the case of an email marketing campaign which is not achieving its goal. Deciding when to end an email marketing campaign of this nature can be difficult because it will involve a number of different factors. For example if the business owner is investing a great deal of time and money into email marketing and not generating results despite an honest effort it may be time to end this marketing campaign. However, if the business owner has not invested a great deal in the email marketing campaign and has a few remaining ideas for turning the campaign into a success, it might be worthwhile to continue the email campaign for a little longer to see if the desired goals can be met.

Finally, it is important to note that email marketing campaigns do not always have to come to an end. Consider a niche topic such as search engine optimization (SEO). A business owner who has been producing and distributing monthly e-newsletters on this subject and receiving a positive response to these email marketing tools, there is not reason for him to discontinue the email marketing as long as he is still capable of producing the e-newsletters. Similarly to the way many magazines have been in publication for years and years it is possible for an e-newsletter to remain active for as long s there is a need and an interest in the information being provided. In our example of a business owner publishing an SEO newsletter, the need for this product remains because SEO is continually evolving and recipients of the e-newsletter may anticipate receiving the e-newsletter each month to get more information on current trends in the industry.

First we will consider why a lack of interest from target audience members can result in a failed email marketing campaign. Before investing time, energy and money into an email marketing campaign, it is worthwhile to hire a consultant to conduct market research. This research should provide valuable feedback such as demographics for the target audience and information on the probability these target audience members will be responsive to email marketing. This last piece of information in particular should help the business owner to determine whether or not to pursue email marketing as an advertising option. If market research indicates the members of your target audience are not likely to purchase the products or services you offer online or even use the Internet to research these products or services; investing in an email marketing campaign is not worthwhile. You may enjoy a small degree of success from this marketing effort but it is not likely to significant enough to warrant the time and effort required to achieve this small degree of success.

Another aspect of email marketing which can cause your marketing campaign to result in failure is the inability to properly execute your marketing plan. This is important because even the most well formulated marketing strategy can flounder if you are not able to properly execute these steps. For example, you may plan to use e-newsletters as a critical component of your email marketing campaign but if these e-newsletters do not appear to be professionally designed and written, frequently arrive late and do not offer valuable information, readers are not likely to invest in your products or services based on these e-newsletters. In each aspect of your email marketing campaign, you should strive to ensure the information you provide to your email recipients is informative, accurate and interesting. This type of copy is more likely to pique the interest of the readers.

Finally, poor planning can cause an email marketing campaign to falter. For example, if you were to issue a component of your email marketing campaign hoping to generate a huge interest in your products and receive a great deal of interest, you should be prepared to be able to sell your products. Not having enough stock on hand after you undergo a marketing effort can be a critical mistake because potential customers may lose interest if they have to wait for the products. This is just one example of poor planning causing problems but poor planning can cause a host of different problems including potential customers losing interesting, the creation of confusion regarding your products and services and even potential customers being angered by your email marketing.