Social media platforms used to just be places where teens and young adults could go to pass the time, to interact with friends and to play games. Now, as their users have matured, so have their favorite platforms. With more diverse people joining these networks each day, businesses have found themselves reaching the customers and potential customers through robust social media presences.

Having an engaging Facebook page and active Twitter can also provide companies with more visibility not only to the public but also to the search engines, as the giants like Google take social metrics into account more and more. This is why today’s businesses, especially the smaller ones, cannot afford not to engage in social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing and Small Businesses

What other way is there for a small sub-shop in a suburb of Florida to inexpensively place itself in front of an audience that is 800-million people strong? Social media is one of the only ways for small businesses to market themselves on a budget and still successfully reach a large amount of people.

Facebook is even jumping into the game now, providing these businesses with tips for engaging users, garnering likes for their pages, and for overall having a well-rounded Facebook marketing presence.

Social Media Marketing is Important for Branding

Beyond reaching large audiences, small businesses are also flocking to social media platforms for the benefits they can reap by branding themselves online. By creating a strong presence on Facebook and promoting it on Twitter and other platforms, these businesses can built up loyal followings, strengthen their brands, and join conversations about their brands by monitoring what others are saying.

By fully engaging with positive and negative comments being made online about their brands, companies can show that they are listening to what their customers are saying, making improvements, and are generally customer friendly.

The Pitfalls of Social Media Marketing

While the benefits of maximizing the potential social media sites provide for businesses are numerous, there are some pitfalls that can leave businesses feeling hopeless. There is no point in creating social media profiles and pages if you are just going to use them to build up fan and follower bases and then not update them or use them ever again.

Social media marketing requires a great deal of time, effort and attention, and expertise when it comes to engaging followers and fans. This is why many businesses turn to agencies to handle their social media marketing efforts for them, and tend to see high return on investment as a result!

Email subscriptions have become a very lucrative way of marketing in the last few years. Any internet marketer will tell you that “the money is in the list”, referring to a subscriber list. A lot of services that automate the subscription and email sending process have appeared and are very successful.

If you are still not collecting subscribers, you need to start doing it right now. Offer a free ebook, report or a useful tutorial in exchange for the user’s email address. Having people willingly subscribe to your email list will help you avoid problems with anti-spam laws and will give you a very good, personal way of communicating with your readers.

Needles to say, you shouldn’t abuse the trust your readers are putting in you, and you must not sent useless advertisements (also called spam, ever heard of it? or you will start losing subscribers fast and in the worst case will get into trouble with email and hosting providers or even law enforcement agencies.

But let’s not talk about the bad things and see how you can profit from email lists and campaigns. The simplest way would be to send an email recommending a certain product and insert affiliate links in it, so that when a person reading the email decides to buy, you get a commission. The details of how you should implement this differ from niche to niche, and that is not the topic of this article.

Let’s say you already have an email list and are successful in making a profit using it. If it’s big (over 10,000 subscribers), you probably earn a few hundred or thousand dollars every time you send an email. If it’s small (500 to 1000 subscribers), you’re probably making a few bucks and trying to grow your list (and you absolutely should).
Regardless of how many subscribers you have, you can always benefit from a few optimizations to you email campaigns, which are totally free if you don’t count the couple of hours you’ll have to invest to implement them.
Here are the best ways to optimize you email campaigns and increase your open and conversion rates, and therefore, your income.

1.Test different subject lines and body templates

This is a no-brainer, really. You should always test different subject lines and body templates. Try sending emails with the subscriber’s name in the subject line and without it (the latter can increase open rates in some cases), try a friendly VS official approach, try using beautiful HTML templates inside the email and if your open rates drop, you can revert back to text only. There are a lot of things you can experiment with here.

2.Adjust the amount of your emails

Different niches have different people, and some may respond better if they only receive 1 email per week from you as opposed to 3-4. If your readers are affiliate marketers, for example, you can email useful newsletters every day, and they’ll read them as they need the information.

But if you are sending out an entertainment newsletter, a limit of 2-3 per week will work better, as people don’t have time to read your emails when they’re busy during the week and will most probably delete the messages.

3.Adjust the quality of your offers

If you have a few offers that you think are not of a very high quality, you can still email them without pissing off your subscribers. You just have to send it along or in between a few higher quality ones, to even things out. This works very well, and sometimes you get to increase your commissions substantially.

4.Note and optimize the times of sending

Timing is very important here. You have to analyze and learn when your subscribers read your emails and when your click-through and conversion rates are the highest. For example, you may have a higher open rate during the day, but the CTR is highest in the evening. This can mean that your subscribers read the emails at work, but don’t have time to act upon them, and many delete your messages, resulting in lost sales. In this case, sending the email in the evening will get you the highest conversion rates and profit.

5.Segment your subscriber list

Analyze your open, click and conversion rates, try to figure out the demographics of your subscribers (maybe via a poll or just straight ask them when they subscribe). Then sort emails into “segments” – lists of different categories of subscribers.

For example, one list can contain all emails that have brought you a sale – if they bought once chances are they will do it again if they like your products, so you can consider them “verified buyers”. Another list can contain the people who opened your email but did not click through to your offer.

You can write a special offer just for them (with a discount or coupon) or try another letter with a different offer. A third list can contain the subscribers who haven’t opened your emails.

For them, you can try different subject lines and body templates, and so on. This is a very powerful technique which has started to see wide adoption in 2008-2009, so it’s quite new and very effective.
There are a few other techniques to increase the success rate of your email campaigns, but the above five are the simplest and most effective ones to get you started.