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If you use email marketing to stay in touch with your current or potential clients, it is important to adhere to a few guidelines. A well crafted email is more likely to be opened and read by your recipients instead of being moved to the trash folder.

Here are 5 Tips for Writing Your Email Copy:

1. Use a relevant subject. The subject of your email should summarize the contents of your message. A reader will be frustrated if they open an email and find content that they were not expecting.
2. Keep it concise. Focus on one idea and ignore the fluff. Your recipient is busy and will likely ignore emails that are scattered and unclear.
3. Write with a human tone. A good email message does not have to sound formal to have value. Your readers hear corporate superlatives every day and will find it refreshing to here the “voices” behind the newsletter.
4. Provide useful information. If the content of your email is to boast your company’s accomplishments, your audience will tire of them quickly. Be sure to provide information that is relevant to their business and helps solve problems.
5. Have a call to action. If the purpose of your email is to evoke an action out of the reader, make sure this is presented clearly. For example use phrases like “click for demo” or “click here to register for our webinar”.

Well written email copy can help can help strengthen brand loyalty and credibility. Your customers are the most valuable part of your company and it is important to reach out to them with interesting and useful information.

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RALEIGH, North Carolina., Jan. 12th /PRNewswire/ — AmericanEagle.com, an industry leader in Web site design, development, hosting, and marketing, is expanding its national footprint with today’s announcement that Raleigh will host a new North Carolina regional office located at 6070 Six Forks Road, Suite-E. The new office will bring onboard the innovative Media and Web Marketing team from RTP Designs.

In order to share information about the new regional office, AmericanEagle.com is hosting an online introduction seminar the last week of January, 2010. Included in the discussion will be web design, hosting, and marketing services. To register for the event and learn more, please contact Jason Jasura at 919.341.0152 or ncinfo@americaneagle.com.

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Our previous entry in the Internet Marketing Strategies focused on researching the marketplace. Today, we continue with Strategy #3.

Strategy #3: Define your Objectives and Target Metrics

Defining your internet marketing objectives may seem too obvious to worth mentioning, but many a marketing effort has failed to deliver the anticipated results because this crucial step was not taken before crafting the campaign. The most important aspect of your campaign will be the actual message content followed by its delivery. By taking the time to define your objectives and success metrics, your internet marketing efforts will have a higher chance of achieving your goal.

Make sure to define objectives align with your overall business strategy. If your overall business strategy depends upon selling a certain product, then create an objective which provides a path towards the product purchase, keeping in mind that the objective does not have to be a direct sales pitch. This objective can be thought of as Building Brand Awareness. Other objectives might include:

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Our previous entry in the Internet Marketing Strategies focused on creating a Marketing budget. Today, we continue with Strategy #2.

Strategy #2: Researching the Marketplace

Let’s face it. The Internet is too vast to market effectively to every corner, so targeting your message delivery to key locations is critical.  How to find those key locations? Fortunately, there are many tools that can pinpoint those locations. A few tools listed by MarketProfs include:

1. Google alerts http://www.google.com/alerts – Sends an email whenever a key word or phrase is mentioned in online content

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Previously, we discussed the creation of this series, Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies for Beginners. Today, we continue our series with Strategy #1.

Strategy #1: Start preparing your Marketing budget

You wouldn’t expect that launching a new television or radio advertising campaign to be free, would you? Of course not, but many businesses are under the mistaken impression that since a web page can be changed with the act of typing, the cost of Internet marketing is free. Or management may say “The intern can handle it by himself, we don’t need to pay for that.” Such notions are common and must be held up for scrutiny. A MarketingProfs study suggests there just a few of the costs which could arise in an Internet Marketing campaign:

• Time and personnel used to create professional, compelling content on a recurring basis ( you wouldn’t let just anyone create a TV ad for you, so why trust that job to the intern?)
• Training of personnel to use social media tools
• Time spent in addition to normal duties to push out new content
• Advertising dollars
• Giveaways, promotional tie-in items

Once the hidden costs related to Internet Marketing are recognized, they can be assessed and refined as you start focusing on the creation of your marketing content and the delivery of it through the Internet.

Check this space again for Strategy #2 in our series, Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies for Beginners.

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Keep things simple, clear the barriers for creativity.
Creativity is often made out to be a nebulous, messy, complicated, difficult thing, and it can be.

But it doesn’t have to be.

The judicious application of simplicity can help someone to create, whether that’s writing, creating art, designing, teaching, starting a small business, or in some other way making ideas take shape into reality.

People who want to create are hampered by complications — tools that are too complicated, projects that are too overwhelming, the distractions of the modern world, too many cooks, too many options, too busy.

Simplify, and many of these problems go away.

Let’s take a brief look at how simplicity can help solve some of the problems of creating:

1. Ideas. It’s hard to find ideas, right? Not necessarily. Simplify things: find vastly different ideas and combine them in a new way. This isn’t the only way to get ideas, but it’s simple and useful.

2. Ideas, again. Instead of finding ways to do more than everyone else, find ways to do less. If your competitor has a coffee shop with a wide array of beverages and food items, narrow it down: offer just one kind of coffee, but make it amazing. “We sell only one thing: the best cup of coffee you’ve ever tasted.” If you’re a blogger competing against writers who cover a vast variety of topics, cover just one, but do it better than anyone else.

3. Clear distractions. One of the biggest obstacles to anyone who wants to create these days is the distractions of the Internet, of email and IM, of meetings and people coming up to us to talk to us, of phone calls and Blackberries and iPhones. Clear these out of the way, so you can focus on creating.

4. Remove complications. Complications get in the way of creating. Find ways to simplify projects, simplify processes, remove barriers, narrow things down, remove choices, but increase focus.

5. Focus on one project till you’re done. This goes against how most people work, and in fact I have a hard time doing it sometimes, as I get excited about several projects at once. But it’s how I’ve been working recently and I can tell you, there’s no better way to create. Clear everything else off your schedule, at least for the moment, and focus on one project. Keep the focus small, so the project doesn’t take more than a week (if it does, break it into more than one project). Then just focus on that one project, until you’re done. It feels great. Now move on to the next.

6. Use one simple tool. For me, I just choose one text editor to write (usually either WriteRoom or TextEdit). The simpler the tool, the better, because full featured tools end up being distracting and you want to fiddle with all the options. A pen and pad are also great. If you must use more than one tool, keep them small and simple.

7. When you’re overwhelmed, focus on less. If the project is too big or complicated or just hard, narrow it down. If you must write a book, don’t focus on the whole book, or even a whole chapter. Just write a section — something you can do in a few hours or less. If you’re starting a new business, don’t worry about getting the whole thing up and running — what’s the smallest amount you can offer at first, the smallest unit you can create? Focus on that.

8. Do just a little each day. If you can write for 20-30 minutes a day, or take a few photos a day, it won’t be long before you’ve created something great. This tip is for those who think they don’t have time to create. It doesn’t have to take all day, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Just clear 20 minutes and create — do nothing else during that time.

9. Be in the moment, let creativity flow through you. When you are creating, feel free to be messy and don’t worry about perfection and just get it out. The best way to do this is to forget about the past and future, and just focus on the moment. Pour yourself into creating, and let it flow.

10. Whittle. Once you’ve created that crappy first draft, and just let everything pour out, it’s time to edit and whittle. Get it down to simple. See if you can cut out everything extraneous.

11. Show up. The simple truth to creating. You just gotta show up. It might or might not happen, you might or might not create something great, but you sure won’t create a thing if you don’t show up.

Contributed by Zen Habits.

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Today, the RTP Designs team took some time to attend Hub Spot’s (via @hubspot) webinar: How to Use SEO, Blogs, and Social Media to Get Found online.

While much of the presentation content was not new to us, some interesting points were discussed and even debated in real time via Twitter.

Here are a few points I found Interesting:

Think of the content you add to your site as an ongoing asset.

We at RTP Designs know content is king, but Hub Spot articulated this in a way that many businesses could relate to in layman’s terms.

Hubspot used the analogy of an asset vault to explain the value of your website’s content. The more you add, the more it grows and the more valuable your asset’s value becomes. When comparing organic SEO (content publishing, blogging etc.) to Paid SEM, it can be said that Organic SEO continuously builds your content asset vault over time while Paid SEM does not. Why is this case? Think about it, after a visitor clicks your PPC ad, the value of that action will not take place again unless you pay. However, after you produce quality content, the results will continue to pay off since it is static.

Businesses that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that don’t.

The figures here say it all. The more content your produce, the more there is to link to, especially if it is quality content. Oh and don’t barrage your visitors with information about your product or service. Focus primarily on their problems, which your product or service should solve.

Hub Spot also discussed the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. Interestingly, they said that PPC was outbound marketing. I would have to disagree on this subject, as PPC ads only show when a visitor is actively searching for something of interest. It is paid inbound marketing, but still inbound marketing nonetheless. @cpenn and myself were in agreement with this throughout the webinar.

Many thanks to @hubspot for a great presentation.

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The days have passed when a website greeted you with a 45 second Flash introduction loaded with delights like music loops, irrelevant flying shapes and text excerpts from a company’s mission statement.

Web Video has been an emerging trend. In fact, research conducted by Comscore states that “More than 10 billion video clips are viewed online every month — providing companies big and small with an incredible opportunity for cost-effective branding, product display and demonstration.”

With any emerging trend, mistakes will be made. The great thing about mistakes is that if acknowledged, you can learn from them.

Here are a few suggestions when using Web Video in your online campaigns:

1. Lose the flair: Focus on getting your message across, not on unnecessary animated elements. You need to connect with your audience. Only use heavy animation if it aids in conveying your message.
2. Think About Action: What do you want  your audience to do as a result of them watching your video? Make sure your videos are more than informational/credibility statements. Guide your audience and provide them next steps, whether it is a free trial, white paper download or registering for a webinar.
3. Test. Test. Test. Like any Internet Marketing Initiative, it is important to test how your messages convert visitors. Take a couple different takes when you are at the studio. This will save you production costs down the road and give your campaign flexibility for multivariate testing.

If you have any questions about Web Video or your current campaign performance, go ahead and drop us a line. We are here to help.

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As the job would gets tougher, more and more people are looking for an edge up on the competition by submitting not only a paper resume, but a digital one as well.

Digital resumes are making their way into the light more with the younger crowd of job seekers. Companies like RTP Designs are trying to help in the increasingly tough job market by providing tools to potential job seekers by creating video presentations of the seeker, including samples of their work, testimonials of past employers, even twitter feeds.

People searching for jobs are at a point where they say “What do I have to loose”. This method of job seeking is proving to be quite effective in quite a few industries. Most companies still want a paper resume along with your new media resume, but in this day and age any leg up on the competition is a good idea and a way to make a potential employer remember who you are. Included in the resumes is a usually a link to their linkedIn profile which shows their professional ability as well as the deep desire for the new opportunity.

HR departments are still unsure how to deal with the new delivery of resumes in digital format. It seems old habits die hard in the HR field. However as it seems now, they will need to adjust their practices as more people deploy personal websites for resumes, and digital media highlighting their talents.

If digital resumes help you get a leg up on your job competitors “What do you have to lose”. Give your self a chance to show your passion for the potential position and a memoriable experience for the employer. For help on creating your digital resume please contact RTP Designs to find out more on what we offer in this area. Click here to learn more

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