This is 2012. We are in the 21^st century with email at the nucleus of our communication paradigm. Business people who struggle with technology and especially emails are ‘dinosaurs’.

Now that’s a bold statement to make, but it really is THAT important.

Allow me to contrast the top 10% versus the bottom 90%.

The top 10% respond within a reasonable time frame. It can be within the hour, the day, but rarely ever more than 48 hours (unless they are on leave or otherwise occupied with a project/event). One thing is for sure – you’re never wondering if they got or lost the email.

The bottom 90%…

• Claim to ‘lose’ or not receive emails
• Ask for emails to be re-sent because they accidentally deleted them
• Actually do have problems receiving emails because of their spam folder settings that are too strict
• Are challenged with their spam and junk mail folders – reviewing them only ‘every once in a while’ even though many important emails end up there
• Have hundreds or thousands of emails in their inbox
• Respond to emails erratically sometimes immediately and then are ‘offline’ for days with no communication
• Don’t use meaningful subject lines
• Don’t maintain message threads that are important – creating new emails with each new response
• Use TXT acronyms trying to be “hip or groovy” instead of clear in their explanations – creating the need for additional threads to find out what they meant to say
• Subscribe to every free email list available fearful that they will miss something.
• Don’t read their emails – instead skimming and overlooking the most important and time sensitive information
• Have multiple emails that they don’t monitor appropriately
• Share emails with others so everyone gets the email and multiple people responding with conflicting suggestions
• Don’t have folders for their emails – so can’t quickly locate what they need when they need it. Even though emails are now indexed, not having folders is like not having a filing cabinet for your physical documents.

Poor email management is one of my strongest pet peeves, but the reason I mention it here is because it’s also symptomatic of poor business management.

Without needing to become a Productivity Powerhouse – lack of effective email management skills (and tools) can be an important obstacle to your overall business success.

Anecdotally, over the past 10 to 15 years, I have noticed that the top business people don’t just manage their emails – the MASTER and CONTROL them with an adeptness that is remarkable.

If you’re struggling to grow your business – just look at your inbox and the list above. It’s a quick and easy problem to solve.

If it isn’t – you now have the SOURCE of the real problem!

Even though as a small business, Internet advertising is not something you’re probably engaged in, a recent report by CONTEXTWEB reveals something that I have known all along, albeit anecdotally -

Average click-through rates (CTRs) for ads placed
on long-tail websites are 24% higher than
those placed on short-tail sites.

Long tail versus short tail marketing refers to specialised niches versus broad mass markets respectively. What’s of particular interest is that the MORE specialised and targeted you are with your web strategies, the greater the returns you’ll produce.

Our clients have known this for years – often out-performing their much larger, national competitors with very deep pockets.

Long tail websites—the millions of smaller websites with niche audiences—offer significant ad performance advantages across a wide number of verticals.

Among all 20 categories studied, long tail ads registered increased CTRs over short-tail ads, led by alcohol beverages (50%), B2B (48%) and charities (48%). The lowest long-tail lift observed was for auto advertisers, but still had (12%) better CTRs.

The trade off remains between quantity and quality of the communication. This is something we cover in depth in our Killer Kopywriting Konversations™ workshops as we help our clients design Killer Kampaigns That Konvert Klients™.

As shown below, among 21 publisher categories, 16 categories registered increased CTRs on long tail sites whereas in five content categories, ads on short tail sites underperformed long tail ads.

Data Source: CONTEXTWEB‘s Intelligence Report: Using Long Tail Sites to Optimize Media Spend was published in March 2011. It analysed digital media performance from roughly 18,000 publisher sites across 1,000 campaigns in the second half of 2010.

As a business person, you need you to read the emails that are important – you are losing a lot more than you know by not reading them.

The problem or challenge is that you have too much junk or spam in your inbox. This is 2011 – DEAL WITH IT.

But let’s face it, it’s not really spam is it?

You’re on everyone’s opt-in list and you don’t want to miss anything that’s FREE…

Well guess what?

It’s not FREE – it’s costing you, dearly.

Each time you or someone who needs to reach you has to re-send an email, it DOUBLES the communication effort. It’s not trivial – with many people sending/receiving more than 100 emails/day, that’s a lot of wasted time and effort ON BOTH SIDES.

In some cases, I stopped dealing with people who can’t respond fast enough. In one supplier’s case it was worth more than $1,000. Gone. Not to mention additional on-going sales or referrals…

You need to find the SOURCE of the problem and get rid of it (excess emails).

For the emails you do need to receive -

Are you skimming them?

Are you distracted when you read them?

In this day and age, I can tell you (anecdotally) that I can gauge someone’s success (or lack thereof) by the efficiency of their email communication.

Simple as that – I know what a ‘reasonable amount of time is to respond’ and when that extends beyond the ‘acceptable’ I know it’s symptomatic.

Symptomatic of a lack of discipline.

A lack of organisation.

A lack of responsiveness.

Lack, lack, lack.

As a business coach, mentor and Exponential Growth Strategist, I figure if you can’t deal with emails you’re not anywhere close to being ready to grow your business.

Consider the case of the Michigan man who left the snow-filled streets of Detroit for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail.

Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did his best to type it in from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher’s wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. Hearing the scream, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

“Dearest Wife,

Just got checked in.

Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.

P.S. Sure is hot down here!”

Your name was given to us by a spouse or family member who is concerned about your internet addiction. At Internetaholics Anonymous, we can help.

Yes, you–we’re talking to you. You, looking at this screen for hours on end, online. You, bleary eyed. You, an addict.

Have you looked in the mirror lately? Been outside? Know what day of the week it is? Have you checked downstairs to see if your family still lives with you?

We’re a non-profit society of recovering addicts like yourself that provides support and counselling through weekly (off-line) meetings designed to help you cope with your problem.

We feature a twelve-step recovery program and in extreme cases, interventions. Although it is our firm belief that you are never “cured,” you most certainly can recover.

We have designed a brief checklist to determine if you are an addict. Do you:

1. Have twitches of the hand when you walk by your terminal?
2. Check e-mail more than five times a day?
3. Spend more time chatting than eating or sleeping?
4. Surf aimlessly with no direction, if only to be online?
5. Leave your name and information at countless sites if only to hope you’ll receive a reply one day from a company you’ll never do business with anyway?
6. Log on before important personal habits, such as meal preparation, hygiene or bodily functions?
7. Have red, swollen eyes that hang halfway out of your head?
8. Spend hours online on a holiday from work, where you’d usually be griping about your carpal tunnel syndrome?
9. Do you have thousands of friends on Facebook you never want to meet in a million years?
   
10. All of the above?

If you answered yes to four or more questions (or chose #10), you have a problem. Please call us at Internetaholics Anonymous at:

1-800-LOGOFFNOWFORPETE’SSAKE

We’re here, we’re free, and we’re confidential. The first step to recovery is admission that you have a problem.

Call us today. That is, if you can power off to free up your phone line.

I will expand on this in an upcoming Do It Yourself Google Sales Lead Generation For Small Business series of workshops… But in the meantime have a good read of this infographic. You’ll start to get a sense of where I’m coming from and how I am guiding my clients to avoid being victims of the Privacy Pirates.

Results of the “Social Shopping Study”, conducted by PowerReviews in association with the e-tailing group, indicate that consumers who shop online are on a mission to get thorough information about products and find the best prices before they buy.

About half of the survey respondents spent 75 percent of their overall online shopping time researching products, compared to about one in five just a year ago. That’s a considerable increase.

When it comes to purchases such as computers and televisions, 71 percent of respondents say they spend a few days or more doing online research. Some respondents claim to spend “a few weeks” (18 percent) on research. Almost half of these online shoppers (44 percent) start with a search engine and look for top search results for the products that interest them. That’s a lot of time and effort to save a few dollars…

Amazon gets high scores from consumers as a place for product information, reviews, and price comparisons.

• Fifty-eight percent of survey respondents say they use reviews and ratings at Amazon as part of their research “all the time” or “very often.”
• In comparison, just 29 percent say they use Google Shopping to read product reviews, but that’s a good showing for Google’s relatively new service.
• Sixty-three percent think the reviews and recommendations found at Amazon are “extremely or very credible.”
• Of those who use their mobile phones for shopping, 36 percent look for competitive pricing on Amazon while they are in a physical store.

One of the more interesting findings is what consumers say about social media.

Facebook and Twitter are not highly regarded when it comes to shopping research.

• In fact, half (49 percent) of respondents says they “never” use social media to research products they want to purchase online.
• Only 13 percent say a company Facebook page has a significant impact on their buying behavior, while 59 percent of respondents say it is customer reviews of products that influence them, and 42 percent indicate it is customers asking and answering products about questions that influence them.

The survey respondents were pretty evenly split between male and female, with the predominant age group being 35 – 44 (31 percent), followed by 45 – 54 (26 percent) and 25 – 34 (24 percent). Forty-two percent of the respondents said they shopped online several times a month in the past year.

So what does this mean for your online sales channel approach?

1. Online shoppers have discovered how to do research prior to purchase, they take it seriously and invest a lot of time and effort into it. If you don’t have sufficient information available for your products and services, you’re probably going to miss out on a lot of sales.
2. Online retail shoppers seem to rely on Amazon for product reviews and to check prices. Which is important to know if you’re selling a product that is or could be sold on Amazon…
3. I have been saying this all along… Facebook and Twitter are not a factor in (most) online purchasing decisions. It doesn’t mean it won’t change in the future, just that it’s not your lowest hanging fruit if you’re focused on sales. Sales is a four-step process. Knowing when to engage social media is beyond a free blog post. It’s what I share and teach my clients – sorry!

Just thought you should know!

Psst! Thanks to Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours for forwarding it to me in real time!

Here is an example using an Infographic. Karen Bonanno posted an interesting infographic (shown below) on what happens on the Internet in 60 seconds on her School Management Library Blog.

Along with these amazing stats:

• Search engine Google serves more that 694,445 queries
• 6,600+ pictures are uploaded on Flickr
• 600 videos are uploaded on YouTube videos, amounting to 25+ hours of content
• 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Social Networking site Facebook
• 70 New domains are registered
• 168,000,000+ emails are sent
• 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Social Networking site Twitter
• iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times
• 20,000 new posts are published on Micro-blogging platform tumbler
• Popular web browser FireFox is downloaded more than 1700 times
• Popular blogging platform WordPress is downloaded more than 50 times
• WordPress Plugins aredownloaded more than 125 times
• 100 accounts are created on professional networking site LinkedIn
• 40 new Questions are asked on YahooAnswers.com
• 100+ questions are asked on Answers.com
• 1 new article is published on Associated Content, the world’s largest source of community-created content
• 1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary.com
• 1,200 new ads are created on Craigslist
• 370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype users
• 13,000+ hours of music streaming is done by personalized Internet radio provider Pandora
• 1,600+ reads are made on Scribd, the largest social reading publishing company

This blog post alone has 6 embedded strategies to help Karen and me attract new sales leads.

If you want to know what they are and how other business owners are leveraging their blogs to generate free sales leads, you’ll have to attend the Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation event!

According to recent research, 37% of Australians use smart phones and is predicted to be 50% by the end of 2011. 92% say they use smart phones while consuming other media; 46% while watching TV, 43% while listening to music, 36% while online. A whopping 26% say they have purchased something on their smart phone. Average number of apps is 25, with 8 being purchased. Nearly 50% browse the web every day on their phones.

Nielsen research shows Australians are #1 in usage of social networks

Neilsen reports that Australians spend 7 hours 17 minutes per person each month on social networks and blogs. Australian social media usage was highest for the second year running, out of Nielsen’s Internet-metered markets including: Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, U.K., and U.S. This means Australians used social media 25 minutes more per month than the previous year. That’s quite a bit more.

Most small business owners still don’t fully appreciate the value of social networking for business purposes.

A lot of it is due to ignorance (not knowing) and confusion. For example, there’s a common misconception that links last a lot longer on Facebook than Twitter, because the newsfeed moves slower than the stream, but recent research confirmed this is not the case.

The half life of a link (i.e. the time it takes to receive half its total clicks from when it’s first shared) is on average 2.8 hours on Twitter and 3.2 hours on Facebook – not a massive difference, although on YouTube links last considerably longer.

What’s more interesting is that a link pointing to a topical news story – like an earthquake – is likely to have a lot shorter half-life than a link pointing to something oblique (like lolcats).

The graph below illustrates this phenomenon, but once again ignorance (not knowing) can be damaging. The concept of the half life of a link is important if you’re in the news business, but if you’re a business looking to stay in business for years to come, what is important and relevant to you is the value of the individual links established, not the half life.

Half Life Of Internet Links In Social Media Networks

This is a vitally important concept we will cover at our Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation event, it’s an exclusive by-invitation-only event that you need to contact us if you want to attend.

Why is a blog important for business?

Blogs are used to establish contact and communication with a business. A website by design is static, whereas a blog and Facebook are interactive, engaging the prospect. More importantly, he/she can read and assess the type of communications others have had with you/the business.

In this day and age, it’s not a nice-to-have sales and marketing tool, a blog is a must-have sales, marketing and customer support and brand building tool.

Let’s face it, if you’re not blogging, you’re just not serious about sales lead generation.

More than 300 Australian marketers were surveyed through independent research with the report also revealing 89% of companies don’t use tools to assess how people use their sites.

Moreover, the companies surveyed spend 40% of their budget attracting traffic to their website.

Some 30% of marketers either do not evaluate the success of their website or only evaluate on an annual basis.

A further 25% assess their website biennially. This lack of engagement and measurement of their websites means most marketers have no idea what small simple changes could be made to their websites to increase sales.

Isn’t this alarming?

So how do you stack up to these stats?

If you want help to grow your online presence and bottom-line results, give us a call. We have a RESULTS GUARANTEED Platinum Program that will have you out-performing and out-selling your competitors in no time – if you qualify!

Personalised emails generated 403% more sales on average than non-personalised emails.

Personalised emails generated 42.8% fewer un-subscribes on average than non-personalised emails.

Email Personalisation is not new, the question is does it still work?

Should you expend the effort to personalize your emails?

You should TEST to see what happens. Surveys and reports are great to give you ideas, but you need to test the findings with YOUR suspects, prospects and clients.

Don’t just believe everything you read.

One of the Internet Marketing Strategies you need to consider is finding videos like this and sharing them with your suspects, prospects and clients. The important point to remember is that they must be relevant to your audience.