In other words, in 2008 the email newsletter was KING.

Fast forward to 2012. What a sea change! Today, small businesses are gasping for help managing a plethora of channels as their customers (their ‘fans’) have gone gaga over smartphones, the mobile web, mobile apps, Facebook, and Twitter.

To worsen matters, each marketing channel needs to be play a specific role. Self-anointed marketing gurus wax philosophically about the need to ‘build relationships’ using social media, presumably by owners asking questions daily of their fans like ‘What’s your favorite Brad Pitt movie?” In this age, it seems the DIY Marketer needs to be equal parts gossip columnist, geek, and branding genius.

But do they really?

A growing body of evidence points to what the consumer really wants when he/she clicks ‘Like’, ‘Follow’ or provides an email address to you. Hint: it’s not about Brad Pitt. The number one reason for sharing contact information on Facebook is to save money. In fact three of the top six reasons are savings-related.

Source: Exact Target Survey, 201

A different study focused on the reasons for signing up for email newsletters. And the results were even more pronounced.

Source: Forrester Research Survey, 2009

Finally, if we abstract a little bit from just collecting contact information, saving money is two of the top three reasons consumers shop at certain businesses during the crucial holiday season.

Source: SurveyBuilder Survey, 2011

Now if you’re a DIY Marketer, we’re not advocating price promotions as your only marketing. As you see, consumers want a mix of things from businesses. But the data clearly demonstrate the need for savvy business owners to focus on savings  when they market to their fanbases. It’s simply what fans expect.

So if consumers want savings, Fanminder, a social mobile loyalty tool (disclaimer: I’m the CEO) delivers on this promise.

Last week we launched our biggest set of features yet, Version 2.0. In under two minutes, a small business owner can design and publish exciting price promotions that turn online customers into in-store buyers. 2.0 fills in a big, unmet merchant need to take all those Facebook fans, email lists, mobile lists and Twitter followers and figure out what content actually motivates them to get them to come back to the store to buy something again – savings opportunities!

Overall, we aim to help owners make exciting and visually stunning promotions without having to pay for a professional marketer or graphic designer. We started by analyzing thousands of real-world offers in our database to find the 8 most common types of promotions, which we call offers. Offers like Freebies, Sales Events, and Daily Specials. We templated those in our offers wizard.

Then we scoured the earth and our own database for every holiday, wacky appreciation day, and reason for communicating with your customers, and turned those into hundreds of Bright Ideas, which are exciting headlines that take the guesswork out of what offer to write up.

We’ve always known how much owners want to look bigger than they are, look more professional. So we created a sort of “evite” for promotions with our dazzling holiday and popular themes to wrap together all this content in one great-looking Offers Page.

Check out at www.fanminder.com. It’s free to start and explore while the launch is still new!

The post Fanminder Evolves its Offer to Better Serve Retailers and Shoppers appeared first on DIY Marketers.

With consumers having abandoned the old ways of finding you, it’s a survival imperative to learn new ways of engaging with your customers. At the same time, a crop of new tools are emerging that make it easier than ever to engage those consumers most likely to spend at your establishment – your current customers.

Let’s call these new tools Fanbase Marketing Services, ok? And few things in fanbase marketing are hotter, or more effective, than Mobile Marketing. While there’s as many variations of mobile marketing as there are of Lady Gaga’s outfits, here are five immediately-implementable ideas drawn from the recent text message marketing experiences of our customers:

1. Ditch the Fishbowl or Guestbook! Open an account with a text message marketing service and watch your customers whip out their phones and simply text your business’ name to a 5 or 6 digit # to join your fan club. Voila! Hands-off list building.

2. Give an incentive to join your Fan Club. Think of your incentive as essentially building your own marketing capability, instead of perpetually “renting” access to new customers from a Valpak or Google. Incentives can be Dollar Off, a Discount, Bring a Friend … just make it simple to get and as big as you can afford.

3. Send an Instant Promotion Once a Week. In under five minutes, you can use a text message service to schedule a months’ worth of promotions that go out on slow days. No graphic designer needed. And best of all, each message is typically read within 15 minutes.

4. Give Your Customers What They Want. Often, it’s a deal. Daily Deal sites like Groupon prove today’s consumers are thirsty for deep discounts. Or it could simply be education or inspiration. A fitness center customer of ours sends each new customer one text message a day for her first ten days. Here’s a recent one: “It’s a new week ladies! GREAT workouts and accountability = results” Feedback is off the charts.

5. Make it a dialogue. Use your new mobile list to poll your customers with simple questions for feedback such as “How are we doing?” One online retailer of baby gifts asked her customers to find the birth date of her baby girl on her website. The winner received a shirt. She was shocked when she booked 7 new sales that morning.

There you go! Five ideas in five minutes to grow your fanbase and sales.

What tactics do you use to engage your fans using mobile marketing?

The post 5 DIY Fanbase Marketing Ideas You Can Implement in 5 Minutes appeared first on DIY Marketers.