Wichita, KS—At the recent MarCom Awards marketing and design competition, Kansas-based Internet and direct-marketing firm Prime Concepts Group took home three of the top honors in the website and product design categories.
The company won the Marcom Awards’ highest platinum honors for its design of The Emmerich Financial Group’s website, as well as for the design of its own product, the Internet Profit Kit.
The winning streak continued with Prime Concepts Group winning a gold statuette for the innovative design of its own official website (www.PrimeConcepts.com).
“2007 was incredible for us at Prime Concepts, and this was a great way to end the year on a positive note,” said Prime Concepts Group’s President and CEO Ford Saeks. “We’ve come a long way since the first websites and products we created, and it’s great to be recognized for our accomplishments. We had a lot of tough competition in these categories, so it means a lot to take home the platinum and gold.”
The annual MarCom Awards is an international competition for marketing and communication professionals involved in the concept, writing, and design of marketing and communication programs and print, visual, and audio materials. Entries come from corporate marketing and communication departments, advertising agencies, PR firms, design shops, production companies and freelancers.
About Prime Concepts Group, Inc. Prime Concepts Group, Inc. is an Internet and direct-marketing firm that specializes in positioning people and their products and services for maximum profit using direct marketing methods and innovative technology solutions. For more information about what we can do for you, please visit our website www.Primeconcepts.com or call us directly at 1-800-946-7804 or locally at (316) 942-1111.
Media Relations: Prime Concepts Group, Inc.
1807 S. Eisenhower St.
Wichita, KS 67209
1-800-946-7804
If you’re like me, you already get too many e-mails, and the majority of them are junk and of absolutely no interest to you. Neither you—nor your customer—need more of those, right?
But no matter how much spam you get, I bet you still manage to find time to read e-mails that offer real value in relation to your interests, your business, or your lifestyle.
My point here is that in spite of spam, everybody still reads e-mails of value.
When you send out marketing e-mails of value or interest to your customers, not only will your e-mails get read, but they’ll help you grow your business by building relationships. And building relationships with current and prospective customers is a great way to increase your sales now and in the future.
Before you think this article is going to be too techy for you, let me say that this isn’t about technology—it’s about how to market your products and services effectively using the Internet. If you’re in business, you need to grow that business, and one of the best ways to do that is by using your customer e-mail list.
Do You Have a Customer List?
The greatest e-mail marketing campaign is useless without a list of e-mail addresses to send them to. The better (more accurate, larger) your list, the more likely you’ll receive responses to your promotional e-mails.
Most businesses build mailing lists by asking customers and prospects if they would like to receive e-mails from their shop or place of business. For example, they ask customers for their name and e-mail address at the time of a purchase, or design their website to ask for the information when visitors go to their website. The important part here is having a list, and knowing how customer information is being gathered.
It’s also critical that you constantly update and grow your customer list. Do you know how many people are on your list? Once you’ve compiled a current customer list, decide on how you are going to use it to help you grow your business and forge strong customer relationships.
Any outbound e-mails you send to your list should offer more than just sales promotions. Depending on the expectations of your customers when they signed up for your list, sales pitches may be fine, but a steady stream of “sales only” e-mails isn’t as powerful as e-mails that offer customers information about things they are interested in or want.
“Value” can mean just about anything related to the products and services you provide. Your marketing e-mails should include content about things your customers are interested in, such as…
· Services you offer
· Benefits and features of products you offer
· Top Ten lists of products ideal for moms, dads, grads, etc.
· Your USPs (Unique Selling Poitions)
· Install tips, product reviews, media reports about you/your products
· Brief how-to’s for the “do-it-yourself” customer.
Send out e-mails with this kind of useful content and you’ll quickly amass a list of subscribers who actually look forward to reading your e-mails!
As a rule, your e-mail content should be around 80% valuable information and 20% sales copy (sales text such as “visit our website to subscribe to our monthly e-zine,” “order now to save 25%,” or “come to the big sale this weekend.)
Don’t forget that you can also use your marketing e-mails to guide prospects to your website, where they can learn more about you and the products and services you provide. There are several ways your website can “capture” visitor information.
One way is by having visitors fill out subscription forms on your website. If you sell products and services online, you can use your shopping cart to collect your customers’ e-mail information, too.
One of the best tools we’ve found for managing and ensuring that our e-mails get delivered is to use a third-party service like AWeber.
Sending e-mails that include valuable content to your customers can do wonders. Following the 80/20 ratio will make your e-mails irresistible to your customers. By including content that they are interested in reading about, you also increase the chance that they’ll forward your install tips and product reviews to their friends, who will go to your website and add their name to your mailing list.
Then they’ll forward your e-mail to their friends, who’ll forward it to their friends… and before you know it, you’ve got a viral campaign that is unstoppable.
So while no one may need another piece of !$&#%@ junk e-mail, customers will continue to read your marketing e-mails as long as they contain content that interests them. Your customer list will continue to grow, and so will your business.
These days it is important to keep in mind that no one really wants another piece of e-mail. They want solutions to their problems, to be entertained and informed, to socialize, and build relationships.
If you want to grow your list, start by reviewing your list-building activities. How many people are on your list now? Gather up your other marketing materials and check out your website to see if you’re offering benefit messages that match your target prospect’s needs.
With many search engines, the information displayed on search results page comes from two places: the html “title tag” on the web page and its meta-description tag if you have one, or the search engines select text from the landing page for a site description. I don’t have to tell you that leaving it up to the search engines to find text that describes your site is a bad idea.
Is it the offer itself, the graphic design, or maybe the copy? Nope. The single most important element of every direct-mail campaign is the completeness, accuracy, and relevance of your mailing list.
Without a doubt, it’s the quality of your list that will make or break your direct-mail campaign. If you are going to be profitable with direct mail, you must make certain that the right audience gets your message.
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