E-Mail Marketing: A Good Solution for Small Businesses

It’s a no-brainer that small businesses should reduce expenses during a recession to help maintain profitability.

But which expenses?  If you think marketing should be cut back, you couldn’t be more wrong! Marketing should be stepped up during bad economic times, so a company will be well-positioned to take advantage of the economic recovery.

A new study by Hurwitz & Associates, reported in eMarketing.com, supports this theory as it relates to small businesses.  The study found that two-thirds of small businesses that expected increased revenues had raised or planned to raise marketing spending.  That compares with just 32% to 36% of businesses with flat or declining revenues.

The study also found that small businesses are keeping marketing costs in check by switching to cheaper, web-based tools such as social media, e-mail newsletters and search. E-mail in particular, is likely to remain a vital force for marketing.

The decision that small businesses need to make is whether to outsource their online marketing needs to freelance copywriters, or handle the work in-house.  The DIY (do-it-yourself) instinct may be “cheaper,” from a strict-cost standpoint, but it may wind up costing a company more in the long run due to the time spent on blog-writing, e-mail marketing campaigns, and social network management.

Case Studies: A Valuable Marketing Tools

Many businesses typically include testimonials on their website as a way to convince potential clients to buy their products or services.

But if you want to go the extra mile to promote your business, a much stronger marketing  tool to use is the case study. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. A case study allows you to go into detail about why your product or service is superior to your competitor’s. Instead of relying on a customer quote, you can use specific facts and figures to demonstrate how you were able to enhance your customer’s sales,  productivity, etc.
2. A case study allows you to paint a compelling story for a potential client by illustrating the challenge your customer faced, the solution your company provided, and the results.
3. A case study is a powerful sales tool, since the more case studies you have to show to a potential client, the easier it will be to convince that client to do business with you.

How do you go about producing a case study?  The first thing you should do is interview your best customers to see if they’d be willing to be featured in a case study. If you’ve got a client who raves about your product or service, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get them to talk about their experiences.  Ask the client to provide concrete details on how their company benefited from your product/service.
After that, the format is straight forward. The case study should include the company’s background, the challenge it faced in the marketplace, the solution your company provided, and the results.
The finished product can be displayed on your company website, or printed for inclusion in an information packet you hand out to potential clients.

A case study is only a great tool if it’s written in a manner that will enable it to convert your leads into sales.  If you’re a small business owner who isn’t comfortable writing this type of marketing material, hire a professional copywriter to do it for you.

Five things to do before moving to the Cloud

Before moving an enterprise application to the cloud, you need to be sure that your expectations are realistic and your objectives match what the cloud can deliver. The following steps can help guide the thought process when considering a cloud deployment, and provide a starting point for moving forward.

1.   Determine your cloud objectives.  

What are you trying to accomplish? Is the cloud a solution for reducing costs, faster provisioning, data center consolidation, all of the above? Sometimes all goals align, where the cloud allows you to save money, be more responsive and avoid huge infrastructure investments all at the same time. But it may not be possible to realize all the benefits for a given organization or use case. For example, if there’s extra capacity in your data center there may be no obvious consolidation advantage to putting an application in the cloud. However, there could be other issues at play that justify the move, such as high operating costs or an infrastructure that makes it difficult for users to get the support they need.

2.   Pick an application that makes sense.

 For example, how much latency is acceptable to users? The laws of physics slow things down over the Internet and network performance will vary, so if you need millisecond response the cloud may not work for your application. How critical is the application? You may not want to put an application in the cloud upon which the business depends even if infrastructure limitations (scaling, support, response time, etc.) make it seem like an attractive option. Get your feet wet before diving in -- a safer approach might be to start with a low-risk, back office (not-strategic) application before setting your sights on more ambitious targets.

3.   Involve the CSO/risk management team from the beginning. 

 The cloud, perhaps even more than other technology shifts, has raised red flags about security since your applications and data will potentially be moving outside of the enterprise firewall. Engage your company’s security experts and decision makers from the beginning to understand their perspective and address their concerns directly. Get them involved in the discussion early so they’ll understand why the cloud is important to the business and how you want to use it. Give them a chance to review their security concerns with potential vendors before you sign up.

4.   Decide which cloud(s) are acceptable.  Finding a cloud that’s best suited to your needs is as critical as identifying the right target applications. Cloud offerings vary widely—in their APIs, configurations, storage infrastructure, networking options, pricing structures and SLAs. Some of the variables will be essential for your requirements, while others are simply nice to haves. The process is like evaluating any other technology offering, except the environment is probably new and unfamiliar. You may want assistance from a partner with cloud expertise who can help you qualify the various cloud options to make sure you make the right choice.

5.   Create a sandbox where people can experiment.

All of the different user groups should be able to see how a cloud-based application compares to a traditional one. Give business users, administrators and developers a chance to evaluate the benefits of the cloud from their perspective, as well as the limitations. Application experts can use the sandbox to run functionality and performance testing on the application in the cloud to see how it behaves compared to the traditional environment, and if any differences are acceptable.

 Once you’ve done the necessary due-diligence, you’re ready to get started with beta testing and proof-of-concept pilots with vendors. In an area as hyped as the cloud there’s really no better way to learn than hands-on, and these basic best practices will help lay the foundation for a successful cloud strategy.

Why Cloud is now at the companies top priorities?

In the most difficult economic climate in decades, companies are reevaluating their strategies and looking for new ways to reduce data center costs and overhead while improving responsiveness to business requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a much more agile and efficient approach than what companies have done in the past: adding more compute, storage and networking capacity or trying to get more out of what they already own.

Cloud computing did not emerge from a vacuum, but has its origins in three technology trends that most companies are already familiar with. These developments were all born out of the same need -- to drive down costs, simplify data center operations and allow IT to be as agile as possible. As these trends have become pervasive, they've helped put the cloud at the top of the priorities.

Data consolidation: Consolidating sprawling data centers has become a top IT priority as companies struggle with out-of-control costs for hardware, power, administration and service. Many companies have seen their data centers grow beyond anything they ever anticipated, with the result that in many cases they're not only running out of space, they're increasingly running out of power and cooling as well. In response, they look for innovative ways to reduce their data center footprints - to move out anything that adds cost and complexity, and takes up extra real estate.

Growth of virtualization: Many organizations now operate in virtualized environments, where applications can be quickly deployed to available resources, rather than assigning them to a specific physical machine. Not only does this optimize utilization of equipment, it allows IT to become much more responsive to the needs of the business.

Emergence of SaaS: The Software as a Service (SaaS) model has become widely accepted, in which applications are hosted by outside service providers that can apply specialized expertise, the right hardware and economies of scale. The idea of running certain apps outside the walls of the organization is recognized as not only acceptable but often preferable, where an external provider delivers the service just as well (if not better) than companies trying to do it themselves.

Cloud computing builds on these trends, and goes several steps further, providing new capabilities for enterprise computing:

• Not just consolidating the data center, but creating the optimum environment both within the data center and in the external cloud, to match changing demands for computing resources

• Not just virtualizing applications across internal systems, but across whatever environment is most appropriate and cost effective

• Not just software as a service, but enterprise applications running in the cloud on the cloud provider's infrastructure

The ability to run applications in the cloud promises to radically alter the balance sheet by which IT projects are judged, where initial capital expense and ongoing operating costs are factored against value delivered and how quickly resources become available. Companies now have the opportunity to do something much more significant than make small incremental improvements -- particularly as new cloud deployment and management tools come to market. That's why more and more IT executives are making cloud computing a top priority as they plan their strategies for 2010 and beyond.

What is cloud computing?

Every business bigger than one person needs somewhere to store its data and run its business applications and communications, including email. A generation of businesses has installed a server — or many servers in a data centre — and hired specialist IT staff to run it.

With cloud computing, you instead rent capacity in a provider’s data center, and connect over the internet. The provider’s staff install, maintain and upgrade hardware and software as required. Typically you’ll rent a service, such as data storage or email or accounting, rather than ‘a server’ as such, and pay per user or per business per month.

Why is it called cloud computing?
Network diagrams have traditionally used a cloud symbol to denote ‘the internet’ or, before that, the telephone network outside the customer’s zone of responsibility.

What services are on offer?
You name it. Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Windows Hotmail are email in the cloud. In the lucrative business productivity market, Google Docs and Google Apps compete directly with Microsoft Office and Exchange — the latter now ‘in the cloud’ as Microsoft Online Services.
Accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), project management, email marketing, spam and virus filtering, data storage, ecommerce, online publishing, audio and video streaming, general databases — all available in the cloud.

Why use cloud computing?
Potentially cloud services are cheaper and more flexible. Because they’re internet-based, you can access them from anywhere — often including mobile devices.
Most servers and internet links lie idle most of the time. Cloud providers host many businesses on a pool of hardware, sharing the cost of servers, electricity, data links, backup systems, IT staff and even real estate. A cloud provider can quickly add extra capacity or scale it back again when you need it. Capital expenditure on servers and up-front software licenses, and the unpredictable costs of dealing with emergencies, are replaced by a predictable operational cost.

Can it really cut IT costs by 80%?
That’s hype. Hardware and internet costs are dropping, sure, but supporting end users is still a significant cost. Moving to the cloud removes the cost of maintaining your own systems, but you still need to configure the generic cloud-based service to match your business’ unique needs, train your staff and help them find lost spreadsheets.

Is there a downside?
You become dependent on your cloud providers. If there’s no easy way to extract your data in a usable format, your business success is now intertwined with theirs. There may also be legal and privacy issues: will your data become subject to the privacy and data retention laws of another country; will you still be compliant with your industry requirements in Australia?

Is it secure?
Big cloud providers like Microsoft and Google have some of the best security staff on the planet. Their backup procedures are likely to be better than yours too. (Where are your business data backups right now?) However big cloud providers do represent an attractive target to hackers — if they can break in.

Is cloud computing “radically new”?
Not everyone thinks it’s that big a change. It’s more evolution than revolution. “Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present, and the entire past of computing is all cloud,” said Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation and the world’s sixth richest man, in a passionately entertaining rant last year. “It’s not water vapor. All it is is a computer attached to a network. What are you talking about? I mean, what do you think Google runs on?” As Ellison points out, CRM provider Salesforce.com has been running more than a decade.

In many ways cloud computing is indeed just the current buzzword for what has also been called utility computing, grid computing, software as a service (SaaS), IBM’s ‘On Demand’ branded services, the application service provider (ASP) model, or even good ol’ mainframe timesharing.