Small business marketing tips: The best articles from 2012

Happy New Year to you!

The new year is a great time for marketing planning. And whatever’s on your To Do list for the year to come, you’ll find a topic here to help you.

Here’s a round-up of the most popular small business marketing tips from Cornelia Luethi at The Leaky Bathtub from 2012… enjoy!

Hint: bookmark this page so you can easily find the small business marketing tips you need!

How to use technology to generate more repeat business…

… a.k.a “How to grow your beanstalk of customer loyalty”.

This series of articles looks at all the different technologies you have available to you to grow your customer retention rates:

• Customer retention doesn’t happen by itself: How to get your customers to climb the magic beanstalk of loyalty

• Why social media is both great and terrible for customer retention campaigns

• Why the humble telephone is your stealth jet for customer retention

• Snail mail: Why it pays to go retro with your customer retention campaigns

• Business thank you cards: How to grow your business with two little words

• Why email marketing should do the donkey work in your customer retention campaigns

• The 3 different types of email marketing: what they are, and how to use them together

This series on customer retention will resume in 2013 (it ain’t over yet!), so make sure you’re on the Marketing Tips email list to get the latest instalments as soon as they’re released.

More articles on email marketing…

Because email marketing is such an important part of customer retention, here are all the small business marketing tips on email marketing:

• How to get more email newsletter sign ups on your website

• Why you shouldn’t ask prospects to ‘subscribe’ to your newsletter

• Are your email newsletters suffering from the “message in a bottle” approach?

• What’s a “normal” open rate for email newsletters?

• Email marketing breakdown? Here’s your recovery plan

How to increase your website conversions

A lot of the time when I’m engaged for website copywriting and advice, it’s about helping small businesses get better conversion rates from their website.

Here are some of my top website conversion tips:

• How to make your website ridiculously easy (and pleasant) to use

• Which fonts are best for websites?

• What’s the purpose of a website home page?

• Your quick, 10-step guide for building trust online

• Are you using this little-known online trust building technique?

• What’s best: a contact form or email address?

• How to make your business friendly

• How to make your website appeal to both Decisive Dan and Tentative Tom

• Does your website have calls-to-action suitable for both Decisive Dan and Tentative Tom?

Shhh… here are Cornelia’s copywriting secrets!

Did you know that more than 90% of my work is copywriting for clients – and that I often have a waiting list for my services?

(I have a waiting list because I’ve earned a good reputation for getting great results for my clients. Business owners would rather wait for me than make a wrong marketing move.)

Here are some of my most important copywriting tips and secrets…

• Why are headlines important?

• What makes a good headline?

• Common words you need to stop misspelling

• Is your negative language turning prospects away?

• Discover the one word you should never use in your marketing copy…

• 3 cunning ways to use numbers in your copywriting

• Why article writing is the reluctant marketer’s best friend

• How long should an article be?

How (and why) should you write photo captions?

I have a bee in my proverbial bonnet about photograph captions (understatement!).

In the next set of small business marketing tips, you’ll discover why you absolutely must use photo captions in all your marketing.

There are also step-by-step guides that show you how  to write good photo captions:

• How one measly sentence could double your readership:

• How to write photo captions that’ll get remembered

• Understanding Features and Benefits and how to use them in photo captions

Whoa, that’s a lot of small business marketing tips… and those are just the articles from 2012!

Happy reading,

Cornelia Luethi BSc (Hons), DipM