At BigTurns, we provide the software for all businesses to easily create, send, and track their email marketing campaigns. But we don’t stop there. We have an amazing technical support department to help you every step of the way, Account Managers to make sure your campaign begins with a bang and stays successful, and a product that is very easy to use. As much as you want your business to succeed, we want to help your business succeed.  Read More

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While 87% of small businesses have a website (Forrester), many of these businesses are being let down by inadequate tools. In response, online software startup BigTurns has a platform, a web-based application that completely replaces traditional web hosting with a fresh, business- oriented approach. BigTurns is the world’s first web hosting platform that automatically tracks and profiles visitors on your website, creating a complete picture of customer behavior. This empowers business owners to know their customers more intimately, make better business decisions and ultimately improve profits.
 

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Last year over 10 million US small businesses were prioritizing eCommerce initiatives (Forrester), yet the eCommerce world remains a nightmare of confusion and complexity. It’s that nightmare that BigTurns puts to rest with it's all-in-one software, a web-based application that makes running an online store easy by bringing together all the tools that business owners need to succeed. In contrast to existing solutions, BigTurns completely replaces the traditional website-ecommerce pair with a holistic “online business” approach that puts the spotlight on understanding your customers and getting better results – whilst saving time and money.



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CONDUCTING AN EMAIL MARKETING REVIEW

Here's a wealth of hints, tricks and suggestions on how to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing programs. Before you start, however, it might make sense to get a good picture of where your campaigns are today by conducting an email marketing review. This review should include an analysis of key performance metrics, a look at any recipient feedback or surveys, a review of your website analytics, a comparison against internal and relevant external benchmarks and a review of your creative and content.

Once this is complete, you can use what you’ve learned to map out an improvement plan for your email marketing programs using the information in the guide. The steps for an Email Marketing Review are listed below.

Analysis of Key Performance Metrics

Your first step in the Email Marketing Review process is to develop a spreadsheet that contains your email marketing program results from the past 6 -12 months. The idea is to give yourself a broad enough sample size to extract meaningful information and to conduct deep analysis as easily as possible. Once this report is developed you should be able to calculate your overall averages and determine the best and worst performing message for each metric. Read More

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Relevance is the right content sent to the right audience, which results in high response rates, delivery rates and reader engagement. Advances in email list management software and customers’ increasing willingness to provide specific information about their preferences mean that email marketers can now use sophisticated segmentation in email campaigns to tailor messaging to be more relevant than ever.



Now, marketers can provide different messages to many different segments of their database, using all sorts of factors that affect buying behavior. This procedure, called segmenting, allows you to create a series of highly-focused mailing lists without having to re-enter the data every time or require subscribers to sign up for many different mailing lists in order to get the email they really want. Read More

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The BC Government has a $5000 grant available to businesses in British Columbia looking to become more competitive in their market place.

The grant is to be used to increase productivity, support the introduction of new technology, support the introduction of new work processes, enhance international competitiveness, or introduce new innovative strategies to increase the long term competitiveness of the firm.

You can spend the grant on a wide range of services and choose any service provider you like. For your convenience we have listed two eligible services designed to get your sales team more productive and motivated to sell

• Set up and training on BigTurns eCommerce Platform (learn more >>)
• Set up and Training for the Managed Inside Sales Strategy (watch presentation >>)

Both services are custom designed specifically for your sales team. We are tailoring the services to fall within the allotted $5000 grant and should be able to save you a few dollars in the transition to selling more using online technologies.

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One of the most important things to keep a grip on when you run a business is the overheads.  It’s so easy to let the cost of the “basics” mount up and start effecting your bottom line. We are going to outline how I first launched my office on a total shoestring but through being a bit savvy made sure that I didn’t compromise on any of the basics.

So in truth this post is half about me being a bit savvy and the half about me having made mistakes that hopefully I can now stop you making.

Google's Email System

This sounds almost too basic to mention, but it’s crazy how many people still get this so wrong.  When I first started working freelance I moved into a shared office downtown Vancouver…  This was probably the first good move I made, I rented a desk in an office with about 10 other freelancers, first off it was so cheap to do it this way and it also gave me an address Downtown Vancouver.  For the first few months I worked from home, this was a false economy for me, I went crazy and work ended up totally dominating my life.  If you’re working independently an office is a god send, it gives you regular social interaction and a regular routine, plus you can’t stay there all night.  Anyway the point of the matter is that I was simply blown away by how bad some of my fellow freelancers’ email setups were.  I would say to one of them did you get my email earlier and they’d be like “which email address?”… “oh that one… yeah that’s on my laptop and someone’s borrowing that at the moment” or it would be like “no it takes about 20 mins to come through because it being forwarded from this account which syncs with this one… but only when my home computer is switched on” and of course needless to say all their emails were stored locally.
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How do you interpret your results? What metrics are available and which are the best metrics to determine success? The
following is a list of the basics, their priority, how to read them and how to use them to refine content:

Open Rate

This metric indicates how often a recipient opened your email. Since so many emails go ignored, it’s good to know how many got subscribers› attention. However, don’t be misled into believing that every opened email was actually read and digested – in some cases, email is scanned and dumped, opened by mistake or only opened to find the unsubscribe link. Open rate is not the best indicator of email success; however, it can be a great pre-response indicator and also a great way to get results on content or subject line testing.

Click-Through Rate

This is a metric that lets you know how often a recipient clicked on a specific link in your email to either go to your website or to take another action. Again, it’s a pre-response indicator, but it can let you know what content and actions in your email are the most attractive to the reader and give you a good idea of what part of the email was of most interest. Be sure and look at each link separately to determine the winners. Also look at the comparison of click-through to conversion or response. Did people click on your email links (showing interest) and lose it when  they got to the response area? This could be an indication that your response form either asks for too much information, the offer doesn’t pay off as promised in your email or that somehow you lost the reader’s interest.

Conversion or Response Rate

This is absolutely the most important metric. All email has a call-to-action, and this metric answers the question, “Did recipients convert to the action you wanted them to take?” Did they sign up for a subscription? Make a purchase? For most email marketers, the question about whether or not someone bought is the most important metric of all.

Unsubscribes and Spam Complaints

The unsubscribe metric is becoming less important over time. Since consumers are getting so overwhelmed with email, many don’t even take the time to unsubscribe or report email as spam. So in most cases, you’ll find that those people not interested will simply delete your email without reading it. But watch this metric for spikes that could indicate that your content is off base. And any spikes in spam complaints can adversely affect your deliverability so it’s important that you pay attention and take action to avoid this.

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