25
Apr
2010
Marketing Mix- Top 4 Promotion Mix Plans.
Marketing mix is part of your marketing plan. It defines product, place, price and endorsement. The promotion mix targets raising product or brand consciousness, communicating the unique value proposition of your product and expanding acceptance of your products. The primary target and focus of promotional mix is to get the desired result : the sale of your product. There are more than 7 common promotion mix tactics and while most businesses do not employ all of these tactics to promote and sell their products, they do employ a mix of these tactics.
The Top 4 Promotion Mix Tactics:
Personal selling is one of the most ordinary of the promotion tactics. Most companies will employ people to do the selling: sales representatives, account managers, internal sales representatives, retail sales, sales agents, or telemarketers. Face-to-face advertising is one of the most common methods of selling, although sales by phone, and more lately, sales by email, are becoming well used. These are not necessarily as effective, but they are low cost sales tactics.
Advertising is another common promotion tactic. Advertising focuses on brand recognition and individuality ; not on the product alone. Advertising can be a costly tactic that only the big businesses can invest in; chiefly advertising on television which can cost anywhere beginning from $100,000 to over $1 million for a national broadcast in prime time (for a 30-second spot!). This price is in addition to the cost of producing the commercial. Advertising in industry or consumer magazines is less expensive and typically you can target your advertisement to a particular industry or region. Other advertising can include car or bus ‘wraps’, proceedings (such as sports, music, art), and billboards. The Internet is becoming a very popular place to advertise, and on a relative basis, it is more affordable.
In the retail marketplace, customer promotion is very common. Buy one, get one free. Coupons for discounted or free product. Free trial packages. Cash discounts or refunds. Contests that give back cash, prizes, or products. The commitment by marketers to consumer promotion is that this form of promotion can be intended to be very measurable. Coupons, contests, and packaging can be coded to report redemptions and to report sales increases and/or decreases related to customer promotion. Additionally, packaging new products as a trial, with a mature or descending product, can often provide an opportunity to up-sell and expand the declining product’s life-cycle.
Public relations (PR) is another common promotion tactic. Public relations involves writing and distributing press releases (to the local magazines, the national newspapers, to online PR sites, to radio and television, to newspapers, and more).
The most effective advertising program is usually one that uses a variety of tactics and techniques. It is important to measure the efficiency of the program you engage in, and adjust your promotional program to increase effectiveness and outcome (sales).
To learn more about promotional advertising, promotional marketing material, push and pull strategies, and product life-cycle, go to YourPromotionalAdvertising.com and also peruse that resource for more on promotional marketing services.
29
Nov
2009
Email Advertising Layouts – Five Tips for Success
The subject line is designed to get your contacts to read your emails, but too many email marketers stop there and do not spend enough time on creating successful layouts. Most email advertisements are too cluttered and messy or too plain and boring to be effective. These five tips will help you improve the layout of your email messages and increase click-throughs and conversions.
Use simple graphics. You want to catch the reader’s attention and what better way to do that than with an attractive, colorful picture of your product or service. The problem is that most graphics can be confusing and unclear with the message they send. Research shows that you only have seven seconds to deliver your message in an email. If your graphics are too vague, too complicated, or too numerous, then you will not be successful in getting the desired response. The best graphics are simple ones.
Images are usually disabled when messages are first opened. If you have too many images in your emails then loading them will take up most of the precious time you have to catch your reader’s attention. Be sure to only use graphics that will add to the effectiveness of the message. Place as few graphics as possible in your messages and never more than four.
Put five to seven links in your messages. More links will make it easier for your readers to respond, and a higher response will signal to the email clients that you are not a spammer. If you have a consistent pattern of click-throughs then you are much less likely to get filtered and these two factor will work together to greatly benefit your email marketing campaign.
Use copy sparingly. Too much copy will be the death nail of any email. Most people’s attention span is not long enough to read through a lot copy and figure out the email’s purpose. Write something brief and captivating that will create interest for the reader. Then have them click-through to a landing page where you can say everything you need to.
If you have read my other articles you will know that I, like many other internet marketing professionals, always harp on testing. With email layouts make sure you test to find out what works. A/B testing will improve click-through rates like nothing else you can do. Continually work to improve on your best campaign. Learn from your mistakes and capitalize on your successes.
Another way that you absolutely must test your emails is to do a trial run before you send a message to all of your contacts. Sign up for all the main services your contacts use and first send your messages to your own accounts. You will learn two important things from this test. First, not all email clients display messages the same way. Checking to see how they appear in the browsers will prevent you from wasting a message. The second thing to look for is deliverability. If one message gets filtered by a particular client, it will likely get filtered for everyone who uses that client. This test is well worth the effort. Remember – test, test, test, both A/B and trial.
Do not neglect the layout of your emails and you will not fall into the trap that so many email marketing professionals do. A good layout will take the most advantage of every open and help get your click-through and conversion rates to a level that will make your competition very jealous.
Learn more about email advertising. Stop by Steve O’Bryan’s site where you can find out all about the best email marketing campaign software and what it can do for you.