Build the perfect body for your emails

Most emails sent today are HTML which carries an extra benefit – the hyperlink.

This little fella allows you to direct your reader to a website for further information or an opportunity to immediately buy or sign up to an offer.

But if your email is to be interesting you will need to make sure it is appealing to your reader.

1. Be friendly. Write as you would a letter – use a salutation, if you can, personalise it with the recipient’s name. This adds a personal touch and begins to build a relationship. Always remember to close it in a professional way too.
2. Communicate in a glance. A solid wall of text isn’t going to be very appealing. Use headings and subheadings to allow the reader to see at a glance what information the email holds.
3. Don’t make them wait to the end. You will want to include within your email a link to your offer, but don’t leave it until the end. Buy incorporating it within the email several times you are allowing your reader to click through to it as soon as they have made their buying decision.
4. Short and sweet. There are times when you’ll want to communicate a lot of information to your reader, but sending an incredibly long email is a no no. Give them a taster of what you want them to know and then ask them to click for more information. That link can them take them through to your website or blog where the full article is shown.
5. Benefits and features. As in your website copy and sales letters, make sure you add in your features and benefits. You don’t have to include everything, just the most important ones in relation to what you are writing about.
6. Don’t forget the opt-out. Always, always, always include your opt-out link in all your email communications.

Finally, don’t forget, your emails don’t always have to sell.

To enhance your relationship with your customers use them to also share information that might be useful to them. By giving away free hints and tips you’ll help build trust and credibility and strengthen your relationship.

Confused about selling?

Judging by the number of books there are about “how to sell”, the business world must be full of salespeople and their managers who all believe that they could and should be selling more… if they only knew how.

If only they knew the right sales techniques… or had the right sales staff… or the right training… or any “if only” excuse you can think of…

But ask yourself:

• How can a book you dip into during the train journey into work or read for a few minutes at lunchtime or turn to in the evening while you’ve got one eye on the telly… how can that teach you how to “do” selling?
• How can something written by a complete stranger… who knows nothing about you or your organisation or your products/services or your customers … how can that teach you how to “do” selling?
• How can something that’s written for a mass-market… one size fits all… how can that teach you how to “do” selling?

Then there are all the seminars, conferences, training events, lectures, presentations and exhibitions that are about “how to sell”.

A lot of so-called selling experts are making a lot of money because they know that the business world is full of people who are searching for some kind of magic solution that’ll put their sales into orbit. Everyone, apparently, is looking in the wrong place. Must be, or else why do so many of them keep buying all those how to “do” selling books and attending all those events?

The starting point to getting more people to buy more of what we’re selling is to understand that

SALES SUCCESS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH “SELLING” TO PEOPLE.

What Works and What Doesn’t

In a career as a marketing and business growth specialist, I have had the privilege of working alongside lots of sales people, (some good, some bad, some indifferent!) and their managers (ditto) and their employers in all kinds of businesses, big and small, and in all kinds of trades. In both the public sector and private enterprise. I’ve been able to observe at close quarters what “works”… and what doesn’t… in creating a successful and effective sales environment.

What doesn’t work is trying to “sell” to people. What works is:

Repeatedly and deliberately creating the circumstances in which people actively want to buy what you’re offering.

Create the Circumstances

How much easier and more rewarding would your life be if you didn’t need to put so much of your time, effort, energy and resources every day into “selling” because instead you have created the circumstances where your customers and potential customers come to you. Actively, willingly and happily. Time and again. And, just for good measure, recruit their family, friends, neighbours and colleagues as additional customers on your behalf.

Too good to be true? Back in the real world you have to slog every day in order to make that sale and earn that wage?

If that’s so, maybe it’s because “SELLING” DOESN’T WORK!” And that’s no reflection on your abilities as a salesperson.

Just about everyone of us is naturally capable of repeatedly creating the circumstances in which people actively want what we’re offering.

The key is to understand how to recognize and harness that natural ability and channel it into sustaining and growing our business.

Even though I’m writing on this subject I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself, mainly due to the turns my career has taken as the world of business and the internet have evolved in recent years, opening up opportunities which didn’t previously exist.

So, what do you do?

So – let me expand on my thinking – when a stranger asks “What do you do for a living” – or “What business are you in” “What does your firm do” – can you respond in a way which sums it up in one clearly understandable sentence?

Try asking the question of others – unless you move in circles where everyone is highly focussed you’ll find that very few people can meet the challenge, they’ll babble on about how good they are for so long you’ll wish you hadn’t asked, or they’ll stumble through the answer without actually telling you clearly what they really do.

Really – do try this out – you’ll be amazed at how many people will fail the test.

What’s my solution?

Start off with a piece of paper and write down the following things off the top of your head – no stealing from company brochures – they may be totally wrong!

1. What do you do?
2. Who do you do it for? ie. B to B, Target age group, Sex, ethnicity or other grouping.
3. Why should someone choose you/ your company to do business with?
4. What’s in it for them – what will the key benefit to user be on completion of the transaction?

What’s in it for them?

Many business people become so enthralled with their own offering that they forget how to see it from a customer’s perspective, so you’ve got to strip your offering back to basics and approach it as if you knew nothing about the product or service, starting with a couple of key points:

1. What would / should a customer expect from such a product or service?
2. What other companies would a customer be considering re delivery of this product or service?

When you’ve finished writing out your answers, you need to whittle them down to the key highlights, and then create a sentence that sums it up in as few words as possible.

An example might be,

“I’m Joe Johnston, my company makes square waterproof widgets used worldwide by manufacturers of all weather camping equipment”

One short sentence should say clearly what you do, who you mainly do it for and what marketplace you cater for, the above example is simple, but I feel it gets the point across.

Say what you do then shut-up

When telling people what you do you need to say as much as possible in as few words as possible, then be quiet, don’t babble on about how great you are – that’s is a sure fire way to turn off prospective clients.

Just tell me what’s in it for me

What’s this got to do with my website?

Did you realise that when someone visits your website or blog you’ve got just a few seconds to capture their attention, if you don’t they’re gone in just one click of a mouse, so it’s even more important that you have your message defined for use online – there are few second chances to get visitors back to your website.

When you’ve got yourself a hot intro line you can use it, or subtle variations of it for personal encounters, company marketing materials and on your website or blog, if you have a sales force make sure they use it too.

Don’t take it for granted that what you’ve got already is OK, that may not be the case, as every market place evolves both in terms of products and customers expectations, so should the marketing messages transmitted to the prospective clients.

One good way to try out your message would be to create a Twitter message which effectively sells you, your product or service, as Twitter allows only 140 characters you’ll have to make sure it fits – I hope you enjoy the challenge!

If you’re like most small businesses today, you will have tried several ways of telling people about your business at least to some degree either at a networking event, on an advert, mailshot, email blast etc …

You may have even experienced some successes now and again.

But are you able to make it work consistently for your business?

If not, what’s going on?

Test Your Message

Put your message and materials to the “So What?” test.

• Pull out your most frequently used marketing tool (e.g., your 60 secs or your elevator pitch).
• Stand in front of the mirror and read it out loud and put it to the “So What?” test.

After you read it aloud, is it possible that your target audience could respond with a big… “So What?”… “Why do I care?”… or “What’s in it for me?”

If your message isn’t clearly communicating what problems, issues, and challenges you want to help your audience solve and what outcomes you want to deliver for them, then a “So What?” response is exactly what you might expect.

What’s in it For Me?

Messages and materials that are too much about YOU are likely to fail the “So What?” test.

Remember that your target audience wants to know what’s in it for them.

Now go out and review all your marketing materials, including your website and ask yourself SO WHAT!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the biggest ‘grey areas’ in online marketing. It is full of jargon, confusion and misinterpretation.

I like making things easy, SEO included. So what I am going to do in this article is to go through some of the bare basics of SEO that you, as a small business owner, can implement into your website. This article is not intended for experienced SEO gurus and experts who always seem to comment on ‘basic SEO’ blogs that the content is too simplified. This article is for people who know nothing about SEO or have been told a whole bunch of jargon about it and want to understand it slightly better to get a general jest of it.

SEO is not a quick fix, however, and using the easy methods below will not suddenly catapult you to the top of Google. Successful SEO is made up of many (hundreds, even) factors and contributors and requires patience. To achieve good results, not all factors and contributors need to be met – doing a few of them very well can be enough.

Ok, so obviously you need some good keywords/keyphrases that you want to be found for in the search engines (different search engines like different things in terms of SEO, but that is another article in itself!). For the purposes of this article, I will use the old favourite, ‘Blue Widgets’, as our keyphrase.

Website Optimisation

Depending on how your website is made, it will have the following basic options for you to edit (in no particular order of importance):

• Meta Keywords
• Meta Descriptions
• Page Title
• ALT Text for images
• Body Text
• H1 Headings
• Bold Text
• Anchor Text

Within the above, you will want to have a good density of your keywords/keyphrases (“Blue Widgets”). A basic way of looking at the above for our keyphrase would be like this:

• Meta Keywords: (Meta keywords are made for search engines only — so that they easily grasp your page’s most important topics. There is a special meta keywords tag, which is supposed to briefly list the topics of your webpage. And it is wise to put your most valuable keywords into it. A meta keywords tag is not obligatory, and some sites do not make it at all. Still it takes so little time to make that if you are serious about optimizing your page, there is simply no reason why you shouldn’t have a good meta keywords tag)Blue, widgets, blue widgets
• Meta Description: (this is just a short sentence/paragraph to describe the website/business – must make sense to read in continuous prose! Search engines look at a page’s meta description to find out what your page is about. You also see meta descriptions quite often – if you make a search in Google and look at the results, you will see some text under each link in the results page. Most often, these texts are pages’ meta descriptions. Meta description may not be extremely important for optimization, but still you have to make sure it looks attractive to search engines and to people)Blue widgets supplier based in London can supply all types of blue widgets and can deliver in the UK. For all blue widgets, contact Blue Widgets Ltd for a competitive quote.
• Page Title: (Search engines pay certain attention to titles, and show them in their results pages. this is also the text at the top of your Internet browser’s window)Blue Widgets – London based Blue Widget Supplier
• ALT (Alternative) Text for images: (The image alt text is used to display text when an image cannot be seen, for example in the case someone visits your page with a browser that has image loading turned off to let pages load faster. Obviously, using alt text makes sense for humans: many users prefer to work with images disabled. What is more important for you now, alt image attributes also have value for search engine optimization. Search engines cannot read figures or letters that are drawn on images. They only read normal text. Your keywords may look fantastic and eye-catching on an image — but the only guarantee that Google.co.uk (pages from the UK) will see them is the alt text. Therefore making alt text attributes and including your keywords into them is another efficient SEO technique)Blue widgets, blue widgets LondonThis method used to attract lots of abuse by people ‘stuffing’ lots of keywords ‘behind’ the image. Don’t do it!
• Body Text: You want to strike a good balance between keyword density (how many times you mention your keyword) and keyword prominence (how early on the page your keywords appear). You must write your body text (and much of the website, for that matter) with a human visitor in mind and not for the search engines. If the site has good, fresh content and is regularly updated the search engines will come and find you anyway. Your body text needs to make sense to human readers whilst having your keyphrase mentioned within the text.
• H1 Headings (and H2, H3…): In HTML code, headings are marked with h1 to h6 tags. These tags simply define the size of your headings, as they appear to the user. Among these six levels of headings, h1 is the biggest one and h6 the smallest. This is an example of an h1 tag: <>Blue Widgets< /h1 >As we want our headlines, titles and other important things to look prominent, we normally put them into h-tags. And just like people think that the most prominent text on the page is more important than the rest, search engines pay more attention to what is written within h-tags. It is important to them how you use your keywords in headings. The biggest heading, h1, is most important to search engines. So to get a better ranking, use your major keywords correctly in h1 tags.
• Bold Text:When a website is ‘read’ by Google, bold text stands out. Simple as! If you can put your keyphrases in bold through your body text whilst still maintaining the theme of the website, go for it!
• Anchor Text: Anchor text is when a keyword/keyphrase is linked to another webpage. Commonly known as a hyperlink. For example, instead of having a link to ‘www.google.co.uk’ an anchor is the word ‘Search Engine’ which is clickable and takes you to whatever website it is linked to.A good practice to consider is to find relevant websites to yours that have a good reputation and are legitimate (i.e. not ‘link farms’) and asking the owner of the website to link back to your site, using an anchor link. So instead of them linking to www.bluewidgets.com you would ask them to link to that site, but using the words ‘Blue Widges’.Remember, each link pointing back to your website is seen as a vote of confidence in your website. You just have to be careful what sort of sites you put your link on.

There is much more to talk about, especially anchor texts and building links pointing back to your website. By looking at the above sections of your website, you will have started some basic SEO.

Remember, having a website is like a shop. If nobody can find your shop, you won’t do much business through it!

Suraj Sodha is the operator of CityLocal in Brent, UK. Brent and Harrow’s’s premier business directory and local community website which is a valuable site for the local community — providing local news, local events and local property listings. If you have a business in the Brent and Harrow region contact Suraj on suraj@citylocal.co.uk to discuss getting your business listed in CityLocal Brent.

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