Posts Tagged ‘markets’

Spring is farmers’ markets season

Nov 6, 2010 Bakery Chef

Spring is farmers’ markets season
After the most New England-like winter I’ve experienced while living in North Carolina, I have to admit that spring, and its shift toward foods that are at their best right off the vine, is more welcome than usual.

Read more on The Chapel Hill News


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Asian Food Markets presents “An Asian Food Adventure” in Plainsboro

Oct 7, 2010 Bakery Stores

Asian Food Markets presents “An Asian Food Adventure” in Plainsboro
PLAINSBORO The Asian Food Markets invites you to explore the great varieties of Asian foods without leaving Central New Jersey.

Read more on MyCentralJersey.com


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Email Marketing Can Keep Your Business, Brand or Book in Front of Your Target Markets

Aug 25, 2010 Music Bakery

If we’ve given our target audiences something in exchange for their providing us with their email addresses, they should be thinking of us. Right?

Wrong. All of us are so inundated each day with online information that what’s in front of our eyes at any given moment has much more relevance to us than a free report or special discount we got four weeks ago.

What is a business, brand or book author to do? Even if we all wanted to write weekly newsletters (groan!), our target audiences already receive way too many long newsletters and long emails than they can possibly read. And writing a monthly newsletter is unlikely to keep us top-of-the-mind for our target audiences.

The answer is autoresponders – an automatic series of messages set to be sent at pre-determined intervals to the people who have signed up through our double email opt-in box on our websites.

Let’s review for a moment. A double email opt-in system is used because sometimes people put in fake emails to get our free report or special discount coupon we offer in order to capture email addresses. In a double email opt-in system, to get the freebie people have to confirm the email address they gave us.

They do this by clicking on the link they get in an email message to confirm that they want to be on our email list. And then they are able to download the free report or special discount coupon.

This double email opt-in also helps get autoresponders into the email boxes of our target audiences. If someone has said yes to getting our emails, those emails have a better chance of not being trapped in spam filters.

And because we use a company set up to do double email opt-ins, capture the emails in a database and allow us to send out autoresponders and one-time messages, it’s this company’s job to know more than we do about getting our emails past spam filters.

Now that we understand this, let’s look at an example of a series of autoresponders:

Let’s say that we have a French bakery. On our website we offer a recipe for easy-to-make croissants if people fill in their email addresses. Those people who do, after confirming their email, get taken to a page where they download the recipe.

And then here’s the genius of autoresponders – you’ve set up your autoresponder system so seven days after people first enter their email addresses, they get a short (this is key) email from you talking about the importance of using a certain kind of flour when making your croissants. And they also get another easy recipe right in the body of the short email (or a link to another free download).

Hey, now your potential customers might remember they meant to stop by your bakery or arrange for your pastries to be shipped to them. And the week after this …

You get the point for a bakery. But what’s a book author to do, especially a book author of a novel?

Book authors know that people often don’t buy a book the first time they hear about it. Several “mentions” may be required before a book reader clicks “buy this book now.”

Let’s run with this example. The free gift for the email opt-in could actually be – don’t laugh – a recipe for a dish that is a specialty of the region in which your novel takes place. Thus if New Orleans is your subject, you could offer a gumbo recipe.

The next week you might offer a brief email on historical gems of New Orleans that most tourists don’t know about. The third week you might offer a link to a recording of Zydeco music. See how this works?

And, of course, each autoresponder ends with something like: “If you enjoyed this sample of Zydeco music, you’ll enjoy my novel NEW ORLEANS STREETS, whose main character plays in a Zydeco band.” Obviously you would only say this if it is true. That’s why coming up with the ideas for autoresponders requires strategic marketing planning.

Keep your business, brand or book “top of the mind” by using autoresponders that give value to your target audiences and remind them of your business, brand or book.


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