How to get Great Testimonials

In the midst of endless content and clutter, sometimes a satisfied customer is all you need to get ahead. If someone tries your brand and has a great experience engaging with you, chances are others will do. This is why testimonials are at times the backbone of a good marketing operation – the customers speak for you! Research to prove this fact is ever mounting in both the B2B and B2C markets, making it one of the most powerful tools you can have to arm you for the battlefield that marketing and communications have become.

Here are a few ways in which you can successfully use testimonials to give your marketing efforts a formidable boost:

1. Timing is Everything! Sometimes customers are most delighted immediately after using your product or service. It could be just after eating a meal at your restaurant for instance – you could either video their reactions or give them a feedback form. If they are more than pleased with your meal and service, chances are they will have no problem recommending you! Asking the customer for a testimonial at the right time is key to recording the most positive reaction.

2. Facebook Reviews If you are already operating online through social media platforms such as Facebook, then you should ideally also be using the reviews feature. Go to your page now and activate the review tab that allows customers to leave comments and rate you between one to five stars.

3. Respond to Reviews If a customer mails or call you with a glowing review, be ready to respond to them immediately – it’s the best way to continue the positive experience they have with you and it’s a good way to be able to ask for permission to reuse their comments in your marketing material.

4. LinkedIn Reviews Professional platforms such as LinkedIn allow people to comment and write reviews on your brand or key professionals engaged with you. Considering this is a network of professionals, this could go a long way for you.

5. Simplify the Process If you want customers to give you good feedback that you can use, you need to make the experience of getting this information as simple and positive as the brand experience itself. Look for easy ways in which to get them to respond to you – for instance you could add a small feedback area to a contact form which will allow customers write something short about their experience with you, letting them know you don’t want to take up too much of their time, but would love to know what they thought.

The point with testimonials as with most other elements of marketing is to keep the customer in focus. In this case you are marketing for testimonials vs. sales, so keeping that it mind would be best to build a powerful series of testimonials that will speak volumes for you.

Outbound Marketing & the Business Life-Cycle

Thanks to revolutionary thinkers like Seth Godin who in fact reimagined inbound marketing with reference to digital marketing by demanding that permission marketing be the key; most marketers assume that it’s antithesis, outbound marketing may be slowly making its way out of the door. This may not be entirely true however. The point is to understand the two strategies separately and what each involves. 

Inbound Marketing is all about bringing consumers to you instead of having to go out to them. This means using social media marketing, blogs, eBooks, podcasts, videos etc. that pique consumer interest enough to have them seeking you out for more. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, is now being referred to as cold calling because they use media that is not entirely interactive such as print, television or radio ads. Outbound marketing requires very little information on consumers to be able to disperse in fact; in most cases their media consumption habits by segment would suffice. Inbound Marketing however is harder to maintain as a strategy without continuous data gathering because it also allows you to pin-point very specific people. 

In that sense, it is important to know which types of brands need which type of communications – and at which point in their business life cycle. For one, it is recommended that most brands either adopt both inbound marketing with outbound or at least only inbound as a stand-alone strategy. Mass brands like soft drink giant Coke has never seemed to stop using outbound marketing while still being vigorously active on digital platforms as well. They want to get through to mass audiences in as many ways as possible and do so using all the tools available to them. 

Other brands that don’t require mass sales should ideally use outbound strategies at launch stage of the business lifecycle ideally in order to get mass PR for a brand that may not necessarily be for mass audiences. The PR aspect at launch stage is ideally your reasoning why – but it also means your outbound marketing is not your primary medium but merely a time based one for the early stages of your business cycle. This means you don’t necessarily have to maintain the high costs of production for this medium anymore and should be able to demand more creative agencies to be able to develop low cost production options for a medium that isn’t your primary focus anymore but none the less important to your brands life cycle. 

Understand your brand’s DNA and the habits of your consumers so that that you can identify what you want to achieve at each stage of your product’s life cycle. This is your first step. The decision of which strategy to implement, whether it be inbound or outbound will be depend on being able to identify these key points first.

ListWise is a product of Otimiz re and is email address validator which is capable of cleaning inactive and bad email addresses from your contact lists.

Email Marketing Strategy

We often underestimate the power of email. In a digital world where apps and social media seem to having the lion share of marketing, we tend to forget that email is the one constant – the one thing that has and needs to be checked. With the increase in tablet and smartphone uses, email is also now mobile and real time making it ones of the oldest standing and powerful methods of digital communication.

Sending out large volumes of mail however isn’t enough. You need the right strategy and the right email marketing solution that will deliver this strategy for best results. You may have the right message and the right database but that is where the story begins.

Here are a few tips on how to best use your next email marketing campaign to drive better results:

1.       Segment to Personalize:

Segment your email database into sections based on gender, designation, interests etc that you either know of or can source online and try and skew the content of your email campaign to suit these segments – basically send the same mail out in segmented batches to make you seem more personal

2.       Give it Away:

It’s always helpful to give away something that’s not high cost to you. Free downloadable wallpapers, e-books, widgets, discount coupons etc are a great way to connect with you audiences and stay with them. It’s also the best way to get them to read your content and follow up on your call to action.

3.       Optimize for Mobile:

Over 40% of email uses keep track of their emails with mobile devices or tablets and not once they reach their busy work stations. Ensure that your email formats are mobile friendly so that your message is read.

4.       Permission for Attention:

Getting your recipients to pay attention to your message means getting their permission to do so. Ideally you should use Maxmail or another email marketing solution to start off by sending permission mails that let them know what’s in it for them if they opt-in to receive your content.

5.       The Subject of the Matter:

The subject line is what really gets them wanting to read the rest of your email and you roughly have about 40 characters to do this. Avoid obvious words such as FREE and EXCITING and instead make your subject a relevant statement that piques their interest. Be brief and be real.

6.       Call to Action:

Any good email needs to end off with a good call to action; i.e what do you want your recipients to do after reading your content? Having a link or video attached to your email will create an immediate action.

7.       Branded Content:

Use an email marketing solution such as Maxmail HQ that comes with multiple customizable templates and a simple drag & drop feature, allowing you to input your content, logo, brand imagery, colours and other elements to ensure that your email content is truly yours, further strengthening your relationship with your recipients.

 Find the right solution when it comes to your email marketing software but also remember that you need to do some good groundwork to ensure that you kick things off with a bang. 

Permission Marketing – What’s It All About?

Permission Marketing is an age old marketing term that simply means you need to ask for permission to market something to a consumer unlike advertising that jarringly gives out a message whether people want the message or not. The term became popular recently thanks to a book titled Permission Marketing by Seth Godin and is now a buzzword in the online marketing sphere.

Forbes magazine paid tribute to Seth this year to mark the 15^th anniversary of the release of his book earlier this year, remembering his revolutionary and simple thought process that changed the way consumers look at brands today.

As a marketing principle Permission Marketing states that you need explicit permission from the prospective or existing customer before sending any promotional material or information about your brand. This approach has now become an essential part of online messaging, email and SMS marketing making email list cleaning a must to ensure smooth operations. 

Godin’s book goes on to define Permission Marketing as messaging that is anticipated by your customer as well as being a topic of interest that is relevant to them. He believed that a strong business-consumer relationship could only be possible through empowering your recipient – you only send them stuff they will want to read and know about further enabling the possibility of the communication resulting in an end sale or response. This makes your marketing efforts all the more effective as well, because your target audience is identifying themselves to you and allowing themselves to be recipients. When an inbox is overloaded with spam, permission based marketing on social media and other online platforms become a welcome change to consumers. This is also where email list cleaning can help you.

The concept of Permission Marketing has evolved over the years from merely asking permission via short codes and online subscriptions to really creating demand for your content. As with any relationship, the one you have with your consumer or reader should work on the principle that they look forward to your content and miss it when it’s gone. If they seek you out, then the permission is already granted because they are demanding for your content over you having to ask them for permission to do so.

Consumers today who engage with both traditional and online content are a smarter and more evolved species – they are aware of their power to ignore marketing and tend to exercise this right regularly. This is all the more reason to treat them with the respect they deserve in order to earn their attention. This choice to pay attention is a precious privilege that marketers should be aware of and treat with utmost care if they want to have long-standing relationships with their consumers. It requires marketers to have a more individualized focus to their marketing; if you want people to want you –you have to let them know, personally. This is the essence of Permission Marketing. 

How the Unsubscribe Feature helps your Campaigns

With statistics telling us that an SMS is read within 20 minutes of being sent, text marketing is probably one of the easiest and simplest ways to get a message across to a wide or selected audience. The only thing to take note of when sending out mass texts is that your recipients might not always want to receive messages from you and offering options that make things easier for them such as being able to unsubscribe from your overall texting database should be a must at the end of your message.

The usual format with text marketing for unsubscribing would be to offer a short code that each recipient can then text back to with a simple response such as NO or STOP. This does mean that they would have to incur a cost when they text you back, however. Imagine being able to offer this service, without making your audience incur a cost? This will help you be perceived as a responsible marketer and brand and even if they opt out of your messages, it will give them a positive, long-term view of who you are.

This is actually possible with text marketing platforms such as Texta HQ that has an add-on online unsubscribe feature for those who have smart phones. The process of doing this is also fairly simple; you just need to add a link at the end of your SMS that your recipients needs to click on which will take them to a webpage with an ‘Unscubscibe’ button. They will also be given the option of leaving you a message if you want to hear back from them as to why they don’t want to be receiving a certain type of message, helping you to further fine-tune your future SMS marketing campaigns. Once the recipient unsubscribes, the Texta software will then automatically unsubscribe that specific mobile number and add it to a suppression list, preventing them from being sent a text from you in future.

With research information such as emarketer telling us that there will be 1.75 bllion smartphone users by the end of 2014, it makes things it easier to reach audiences when their data is activated or they are connected to a wifi-network. This also makes it far more convenient to have a two-way dialogue with your customers instead of passive one-way messaging.

SMS or E-mail? What would you choose?

Among all the modern day advertising tools , E-mail Marketing and SMS Marketing stand out as the ones that are most effective and efficient. Once you get a clean subscriber list and an idea for a good campaign, you're left with the question of what advertising medium to use.

Listed below are the advantages of SMS Marketing

Flexible Platform

Text marketing lets you send customized messages to your target customers. This results is a bond being created between the customer and your company or product. The messages could a personalized birthday wishes, personalized discounts, anniversary wishes etc which will make customers feel more appreciated.

High Open Rate

When compared with e-mail marketing, text marketing has a higher open rate and is most likely to reach the target customers.

Short messages

Too much of content is never a good thing. Most email marketing adverts have copious amounts of copy that customers simply do not have time to read or don't bother reading. Text Marketing assures that the receiver will read the entire message as it is short, concise and straight to the point.

Time Saving

When compared with other advertising mediums, text marketing allows you to send messages instantly. Thousands of customers can be reached in the span of a few seconds at the click of a button.

Targeting different segments

Text Marketing can be conducted in a manner that the right message reaches the intended customer every time. Text Marketing allows you to segregate your target audience according to age, location, gender, occupation etc. and deliver messages that best suit their needs, wants and demands.


In conclusion, using text marketing as your preferred advertising tool ensures that you save time and get your message across effectively and conveniently.

Cutting Through the Clutter

Web development can be a tricky thing. It requires boundless amounts of creativity but sometimes that same creativity can bite you in the rump. Web design in Auckland has veered itself onto the correct progressive path however. Companies are hiring more and more web developers and website designers to create simple websites while taking maximum capacity out of the SEO function that search engines provide.

Website designers are so plentiful these days that it’s hard to really make your mark in the industry. The best way to do so is figure out a few tips of making your layouts simple, eye catching and clear on content. Creating a webpage that contains too much unneeded information, too many colour schemes and too many links for visitors to click their way through defeats the purpose of the profession.

A user that clicks on your url doesn’t want to stay there if he/she doesn’t really understand what your website is about. There are simple, more elegant ways of catching someones attention. All you have to do is figure out what goes where and in which quantity.

Lets start with the 80-20 rule. This rule can be taken in two versions, one dictates that 20% of the content has a 80% value of being the reason why a user would visit your page. It could be a sign up form, call to action button, the reason why the site exists or testimonials and reviews. Take this 20% and place it on your homepage. This same rule applies when you’re left with 80% of the content that only has 20% effectiveness. Meta data, media sharing widgets ad sidebar elements all fall under this 80%. Get rid of them. Stick to your purpose.

Another great idea is to put all important content above the fold. Studies have shown that most people only look at what appears on the screen and if the top of the page doesn’t pique an interest, well then whats the point of even scrolling down? Have you ever been to a website that embodies an entire rainbow of colours that invade your thoughts and make it hard for you to concentrate on text? Don’t be one of those web designers. Try to stick to a 3 count colour scheme or keep the colours to a minimum. You can even use different shades of the same colour. Don’t harass people with too many colours is all.

Try to reduce the number of pages that you would have on a webpage. No one needs an about page and then a separate page with contact info. You can easily merge those two pages into one. Or even just have that information discreetly linked at the footer of the page.

Include pictures in your webpage. Make sure they’re big enough to be viewed in detail and not pixelated. A picture always puts the mind at ease from too much text. Speaking of text, try to limit your words to sentences that send a straightforward message to the viewer. Use font that is sans serif and easy to read. Tahoma and Verdana are two easy-to-read fonts you would consider typing with.

Now that we’ve listed out a few tips on simplifying web design. The next step would be ways of making your web page popular. There are brilliant pages out there inside web space that have never been viewed because of bad promotion.

But now theres the SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) Not a lot of definitions have been made about the optimiser but a basic analogy would be that a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing) takes certain keywords and ranks your webpage on those keywords. The strength of your keywords decides if your webpage appears on the first page of a search engine results page.