Make an impact with your email marketing by delivering your content in a custom email design. Your business needs to leverage all of the benefits of email marketing and design is one of those.  Five’s email marketing services offer custom designs, to match your website and branding along with many other features.

Here are two examples of Five Technology clients using custom email designs in their email marketing efforts:

1. Mental Health Association of Minnesota

This non-profit utilizes our email platform for their organizations newsletter as well as special communications to their clients. Our tool allows for multiple custom designs and layouts in one account, you just pick the one you want to use.

2. Rosen Properties

This real estate services firm utilizes custom email delivery to market their properties and communicate with real estate investors.  Rosen switched from Constant Contact to Five’s email offering to gain a custom design and stronger reporting features of their campaign’s performance.

Step Up Your Email Efforts
You can join the ranks of these two, just ask us how.  Our email marketing services are truly a level above many others with a  feature rich offering, backed by our customer service.

How about making something great, even better?  Five has always been proud of our feature rich email marketing service and now campaign reports can hit the palm of your hand when you want them.

View your email marketing reports on your iPhone, Android or newer BlackBerry mobile phone.

A Feature Rich Email Marketing Service
This latest addition of mobile reports is just one more reason clients are often blown away by what Five can offer with our email services. While baseline services like Constant Contact are better than blasting email out of your Outlook, our tool is a complete and robust offering.

Here are just some aspects of our email marketing offering:

• Custom e-letter or e-offer designs
• Web based management tools to give you control
• List building, management & segmentation features
• Pay as you send, no monthly fees
• Service & support from Five, you have a partner!
• Full reporting, Google Analytics integration
• And now, mobile phone report access

Email marketing is a great customer relationship tool and if you are looking for a better service, stronger reporting tools or just want to finally get started, we can help.  Give Five a shout and let’s discuss email marketing.

We thought we would share some of our recent email marketing designs with you. The visual branding and impact is just one reason that professional email marketing campaigns are a fantastic marketing strategy.

Email Marketing Done Right
Email marketing, when correctly designed, structured and launched is an incredible communication tool.  Monthly or quarterly newsletters, announcements, service features, event invitations, sales, promotions and more are all great messages to utilize email marketing.

You get the benefits of:

• Custom email designs
• List building & segmentation tools
• Best delivery practices
• Performance analytics on opens, clicks and conversions
• Consulting & support from our email marketing experts

If you’re organization is interested in the benefits of email marketing, give us a holler, we can help. You can also sign-up for the Five monthly e-letter on our home page.

Two things happened last week that had me thinking about Internet marketing and the opportunity for success a business has with it. It also made me think about why companies seem to be held back from exploiting the benefits of marketing online.

Number One: Who’s The Crazy One?
The first was reading a great Internet marketing article from Andrew Eklund on MinnesotaBusiness.com.  The article easily outlined why Internet marketing is a dream (and reality) for any marketing team/person.  Eklund had some great points that anyone could understand and my biggest takeaways were:

1.  Reworking old and tired traditional marketing is not the answer.

2.  Ignoring the medium (Internet) where prospects are, customers are and that allows for complete tracking of your marketing to sale process is plain crazy.

3.  Internet marketing is not risky, not marketing online is risky.

Give the article a read and you’ll hopefully find a spark to push yourself into investing more time and strategy into leveraging the great benefits of Internet marketing. You’re crazy not too.

Number Two: Ignorance Is Bliss? No.
The second thing that happened was a scenario that unfolded in my email inbox.  I received an email from a business development person I know that contained their newsletter in a PDF attachment.  I froze.  They had a great email subject headline on a topic that I wanted information on but … they would never know that.

I couldn’t believe that the company would ignore the fantastic benefits of email marketing after all that hard work.  They put together a well designed PDF, it had compelling and educating content … yet it was only doing half of its job.  It wasn’t going to clue the business in on its relevance, performance and its outcome.

If they had sent this information via an email marketing program they would have gained these valuable marketing benefits:

1.  Who opened their email newsletter

1b.  Better yet, they would have reduced effort (clicks & time) to get to the goods

2.  What links users clicked on to get more info or take action

3.  The ability to fully track users from email to website to conversion

4.  They can still include the PDF version AND see who downloaded that

This marketing campaign could have been so much more.  Don’t just go half way, take advantage of the simple opportunity to get everything you want from your marketing efforts.

So to get to my title question, what is holding your company back from Internet marketing?  As Ecklund’s article pointed out, it offers accountability, sustained progress, sales, leads, return-on-investment, and deep business intelligence.  Let’s add to that affordability too.  Email marketing is an extremely low cost.  Consider though, at any price, the ability to track and measure makes any number realistic when you know what it produced.

So get rid of your fear (or ignorance), make the move, take the right steps, ask questions, get answers and find the ways Internet marketing can improve your business.  There are many.

Last week we launched the Blackwater Coffee Company & Cafe website. While the web design project was small in size on the surface, but its part of a very big service we are rolling out.

The Blackwater web project included the following:

• Custom design elements over an existing CSS layout
• Full CMS back-end for updating of all website content
• Easy to use menu admin that allows for creating unlimited menus, categories, sub-categories, item name, description, pricing and pricing options. We’ll be adding a photo element per item in the near future as well.
• SEO Friendly URLs, on-page optimization, local search optimization
• Email marketing set-up, e-letter design and support
• Interactive calendar that Blackwater will start using next month

Here is a screenshot of their food menu.

The Big Future of Restaurant Web Design

Last year we decided to start building an industry web and marketing solution for the restaurant, bar, cafe, coffee shop, bakery …. any type of food or beverage service business. That solution is called Taste Trend and Blackwater is the first client. We are just shoring up the Taste Trend website that will allow food service businesses to buy a web and Internet marketing package online and get started. Stay tuned for more on that launch next week.

Taste Trend will provide an affordable web solution for the small food service business. The set-up fees are as low as $450 and monthly fees starting at $75, anyone can use this service. We feel we’ve created an easy to use, great looking, value stuffed, SEO friendly web and marketing tool.

Here is just some of what a Taste Trend website package offers:

• Initial consulting and recommendations
• Semi custom design with desired elements over CSS layouts
• Full web management of content and pages
• Robust menu administration
• SEO friendly design & local search help
• Email marketing set-up, service and support
• Detailed web analytics on traffic and sources
• Ongoing support and education
• Many add-ons for photos, video, calendars, gift certificates and more.

All of these great features will be accessible through the Taste Trend account dashboard, called The Kitchen.

So as you can see, we have a lot going on here and we’re super excited about it. Stay tuned for next weeks roll-out of the website. If you are interested in being a BETA client of Taste Trend, let us know. We have a few spots left!