7 Tips to Help You Set up a Killer Email Drip Campaign

How are you planning to market your products and services?

That's probably the most relevant question for any business owner.

And the answer isn't an easy one.

Not because you don't have any marketing procedure to embrace, but because you're spoilt for choice these days.

But have you ever given a thought about embracing drip marketing for your business?

They are in-vogue these days.

Want to know why?

Because email drip marketing increases the open rate of emails significantly.

Average single open rate of drip campaigns is 32.85%. In fact, drip open rates are about 3 times higher than the click through rates of emails sent individually.

So, there's no reason why you shouldn't start a drip campaign to increase the return on investment for your business.

So, what's the best way to do that?

In this post, I'll discuss how powerful drip campaigns are and will share actionable tips to build a killer email campaign that'll increase sales and enhance customer retention.

The Path to Poor Local Rankings – Citation Inconsistency [INFOGRAPHIC]

Users are increasingly searching for products or services based on location, putting local businesses in a fierce battle to be the first solution searchers find. A battle that cannot be fought alone!

The following infographic created by OptiLocal - Episode I of the Local SEO Wars - the Citation Inconsistency Awakens encourages local businesses to prepare a reliable army of business citations that will help fight this battle for higher local rankings. The infographic illustrates what citation inconsistency is, how it can negatively influence your local business and ultimately, provides suggestions on how you ended up suffering from inconsistencies in the first place.

By transforming your business citations into the Stormtroopers of the First Order, the infographic puts you on a mission of turning your army of soldiers to the Light (cleaning up your citations to avoid citation inconsistency), just like Finn did in The Force Awakens, escaping the First Order to follow his heart serving the Light.

How to Make Pinterest Work for Both B2C and B2B Marketing - #infographic

“Using Pinterest for marketing is a powerful yet fairly underutilized tool. While many businesses - especially retailers - know how to use it for B2C marketing, the platform offers opportunities for B2B marketing as well. The question, then, is how to make it work best for your company.”

Take a look at this infographic, produced by ExactTarget, that illustrates 8 ways to make Pinterest work for both B2C and B2B marketing.

Finding and Dominating Profitable Niches: How to Hit the Bull's Eye?

Blogging is a big business today that spreads over a vast market. For bloggers, this is a way to monetize their skills and earn a fortune. From cosmetic products to fitness equipment, this form of marketing has taken the blogging business by storm. What could be more alluring than earning money by writing a blog?

For potential bloggers, the million-dollar question is: what are the profitable niches?

Let us guide you…

Let's say you are a food blogger writing for food experts, dietitians and food vendors. Addressing problems of this audience is one thing and earning money by writing on a specific problem is a different story.

What you need to know is how you could attract the profitable businesses in between the broad lines of your industry. In the food blogging, for example, writing only about nutritional benefits of food will not do any good for your blogging business; rather you need to write on the problems of your audience to get their attention.

Assuming that you have built a fundamental familiarity with the idea of niches, let us guide you more on the topic with the following 6 insightful tips:

Targeting and Connecting with Potential Customers – 9 Tactics

The Internet has transformed marketing. Even the small business can now compete on a large scale and grow its profits through dedicated and consistent strategies. It's amazing to think that we can reach huge audiences without the use of TV, radio, and expensive purchased advertisements.

But the lower costs and ability to reach a huge audience come with other challenges. There is so much marketing “noise” out there, it will be tough to stand out, to find potential customers, and to connect with them in meaningful ways. When you do, however, the likelihood of generating sales skyrockets.

Here are 9 proven ways to find and connect with the right customers.

Social Media Marketing Safety and Protection Techniques

Ever since MySpace, social media has been developing into one of the most important customer acquisition and marketing tools around. The ability to speak directly with consumers, for eCommerce and brick and mortar stores alike, has opened up so many opportunities to make lasting connections.

The sad thing for marketers is that as the value of their social media accounts has risen to them, it has also risen in value in the eyes of hackers. A hacked social media account can result in humiliation, and the theft of valuable information about your company and your followers.

How do hacks of social media accounts happen? Any number of reasons:

• An employee falls for a phishing scam.
• Public WiFi results in a data leak.
• Old apps aren't updated with new security measures.
• Failing to use and update security software.

Those are four common ways, but there are others. For common ways that hacks happen, which you can fix yourself and protect your business and your fans on social media, keep reading!

Tip for Cleaning Blind Slats - Today's Homeowner

Follow this tip to clean blinds easily using kitchen tongs and a sponge.

What Social Network Is Best For Your Small Business?

Marketing on social networking sites has become a standard way for many small and large companies to further their business objectives.

Some experts suggest that where a company is heavily reliant upon the Internet for lead generation, having accounts on all the major social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is one way to ensure maximum exposure. As a small business, however, you may not have the time or money to do this. A targeted approach will ensure that you know exactly where to focus your efforts and which social network is best for your small business.

Successfully engaging customers on any social media site means that you will need to provide quality content. The networks can be differentiated, however, by the types of content that are more popular on each, with sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, for instance, rather more geared towards visual content including photos and videos. Twitter has proven effective for the promotion of written blog content, not unlike LinkedIn, a platform where business professionals share written expert opinions and evaluate market trends in a range of industries.

To design an effective strategy it helps to know about the reach of each platform and which businesses are more suited to each. Here is an overview of some of the most popular:

Gone in Sixty Seconds: How to Market to Millennials on the Web

Marketing on the Internet isn't as similar to regular marketing as many would like to believe. The "culture" of the Internet has a fairly consistent history of being skeptical about most commercial endeavors and also has what some might call an over-sensitive sales pitch detector.

In no generation is this more prominent than among the millennials, which includes everyone born between 1980 and the early 2000s. Getting the word out to these folks, even in a video, about something you charge money for can be more difficult than it needs to be if you don't follow a few basic rules.