In the world of digital marketing, filtering your prospects isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the key to sustainable growth and higher conversions. The reality is that not all leads are created equal. Without a system in place to filter and qualify prospects, your business could be wasting time, energy, and money chasing leads that will never convert.

After analyzing over 400 sales funnels and generating thousands of leads, we’ve identified the most effective strategies for filtering prospects and transforming them into high-quality leads. Here’s how to implement a filtering system that works for your business.

The Impact of Proper Filtering on How to Get More Qualified Leads

The difference between unfiltered and filtered leads is staggering. Let’s take a look at real-world numbers:

• Unfiltered traffic: 1-2% conversion rates
• Basic filtered leads: 4% conversion at a $497 price point
• Well-qualified leads: 30% conversion at a $97 price point
• Strategy session leads: 51% conversion for high-ticket offers

Why does this matter? Because a clear filtering process ensures you’re focusing your efforts on leads who are ready and able to buy. When you filter for intent and readiness, you’re not just increasing conversions; you’re building a more efficient, scalable business.

Proven Filtering Methods for Generating More Qualified Leads

1. Role and Seniority Within the Organization

Understanding a prospect’s decision-making authority is crucial, especially for B2B offers. For example, in our Done For You sales funnels, we ask prospects:

• What is your role in the company?
• Do you have decision-making authority?
• What is your current marketing budget?
• How large is your team?

These questions allow us to filter out leads who aren’t in a position to make purchasing decisions.

2. Level of Social Status

Social status provides another layer of qualification. Here’s how we apply it in practice:

• Requesting LinkedIn profiles for B2B leads to verify their professional background
• Checking business email addresses instead of generic ones like Gmail or Yahoo
• Assessing company domain authority to gauge credibility

This approach helps us focus on leads who are serious and credible.

3. Current Workflows and Systems

Every lead’s current setup tells a story about their needs and challenges. Here are some metrics we evaluate:

• Existing marketing systems and tools
• Current sales processes
• Key pain points in their funnel
• ROI expectations for new strategies

Understanding these elements allows us to tailor our approach and ensure we’re addressing real needs.

4. Product Interest Level

Tracking engagement metrics provides valuable insight into a lead’s level of interest. Key indicators include:

• Email open rates: Should be 40-55% within the first week
• Landing page engagement: Target a 30-40% conversion rate
• Webinar attendance: Aim for a 50% show-up rate

These benchmarks help us identify which leads are ready for immediate action versus those who need nurturing.

Implementing Strategy Sessions To Get More Qualified Leads

For high-ticket products or services ($2,000+), strategy sessions are one of the most effective ways to qualify leads. Here’s a real-world case study that highlights the power of proper filtering:

Case Study: From 15% to 52% Close Rates

A client selling a $997 product struggled with low conversions on their webinar funnel. Here’s how we transformed their results:

Before Filtering:

• 1,000 webinar registrants
• 300 attendees
• 12 sales ($997 product)
• 4% conversion rate

After Implementing Filtering:

• 500 qualified registrants
• 250 attendees
• 38 sales ($997 product)
• 15.2% conversion rate

What Changed? We added a detailed application form to the funnel. Prospects were asked about:

• Monthly revenue and ad spend
• Team size and decision-making authority
• Specific business goals and timelines

This allowed us to pre-qualify leads and ensure strategy sessions were only held with those most likely to convert. By the end of the campaign, close rates soared to 52% for strategy sessions, resulting in a significant boost in ROI.

Automated Filtering Systems

Automation makes it easier to filter prospects without adding extra work. Here’s the process we recommend:

Lead Magnet Delivery:

• Day 0: Welcome email with lead magnet
• Day 1: Consumption check
• Day 2-4: Engagement content
• Day 5-7: Qualification survey

Survey Segmentation: Based on survey responses, prospects are sorted into three categories:

• Ready to buy: Directly sent to the sales page
• Needs nurturing: Entered into an educational sequence
• Not qualified: Added to the general newsletter

This system ensures each lead is handled appropriately based on their level of intent.

Beyond Filtering: Building a Holistic System for Qualified Leads

While filtering is essential, it’s only one part of the equation. A holistic lead generation system also includes:

• Storytelling: Create narratives that resonate with your audience’s pain points and desires.
• Clear Branding: Ensure your branding reflects your values and aligns with the leads you’re targeting.
• Consistent Follow-Up: Nurture leads with email sequences, retargeting ads, and personalized outreach.

Final Thoughts: Take Action Today

Effective filtering is about more than just improving your numbers—it’s about building meaningful connections with the right audience. By implementing these strategies, you can focus your time and energy on prospects who are ready to take action, ultimately driving more sales and sustainable growth.

If you’re ready to get more qualified leads and take your business to the next level, start by refining your filtering process today. The results will speak for themselves.

The post How to Get More Qualified Leads: Why Filtering Your Incoming Prospects Is a MUST appeared first on Done For You.

A well-optimized sales funnel is the cornerstone of success. Whether you’re selling products, services, or subscriptions, a strategically designed funnel can guide potential customers through the buying journey, nurture leads, and ultimately drive conversions. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of optimizing your sales funnel to maximize conversions and boost your bottom line.

Understanding the Sales Funnel

Before we dive into optimization strategies, let’s start by understanding the basic structure of a sales funnel. At its core, a sales funnel is a visual representation of the customer journey, from initial awareness to final purchase. It typically consists of several stages:

1. Awareness: This is the top of the funnel, where potential customers first become aware of your brand, product, or service.
2. Interest: In this stage, prospects express interest in your offering and seek more information.
3. Decision: Here, prospects evaluate their options and decide whether to make a purchase.
4. Action: The final stage is where prospects take action and make a purchase.

By understanding each stage of the funnel and the corresponding customer mindset, you can tailor your marketing efforts to effectively engage and convert prospects at each step.

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

The first step in optimizing your sales funnel is to clearly define your target audience. Who are your ideal customers? What are their needs, pain points, and preferences? By creating detailed buyer personas, you can better understand your audience and tailor your messaging and offers to resonate with their needs and interests.

Step 2: Create Compelling Content

Content is king when it comes to attracting and engaging potential customers. From blog posts and social media updates to videos and podcasts, create content that educates, entertains, and adds value to your audience. Use storytelling techniques to make your brand relatable and memorable, and incorporate relevant keywords to improve visibility and attract organic traffic.

Step 3: Capture Leads with Lead Magnets

Once you’ve attracted potential customers to your website or landing page, it’s essential to capture their contact information so you can continue to nurture the relationship. Offer lead magnets such as e-books, whitepapers, or free trials in exchange for email addresses. Use enticing calls-to-action and opt-in forms to encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list.

Step 4: Nurture Leads with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful tool for nurturing leads and guiding them through the sales funnel. Segment your email list based on demographics, interests, or behavior, and tailor your messaging accordingly. Send targeted, personalized emails that provide valuable content, address customer pain points, and showcase the benefits of your offering.

Step 5: Drive Conversions with Compelling Offers

At the decision stage of the funnel, prospects are evaluating their options and considering whether to make a purchase. This is where compelling offers and incentives can make all the difference. Offer discounts, promotions, or bonuses to incentivize action and create a sense of urgency. Use persuasive copywriting and compelling visuals to highlight the value of your offering and convince prospects to take the next step.

Step 6: Optimize the Checkout Process

The final step in the sales funnel is the action stage, where prospects make a purchase. To maximize conversions at this critical juncture, it’s essential to optimize the checkout process for simplicity and convenience. Streamline the checkout flow, minimize form fields, and offer multiple payment options to reduce friction and increase completion rates. Provide clear, transparent pricing and shipping information to eliminate uncertainty and build trust with customers.

Step 7: Track and Analyze Results

Once your funnel is up and running, it’s crucial to track and analyze key metrics to measure its effectiveness. Monitor metrics such as traffic, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value to identify areas for improvement and optimization. Use A/B testing to experiment with different strategies and tactics and optimize your funnel for maximum results.

Conclusion: Unlock Your Sales Potential

By following these steps and implementing best practices for sales funnel optimization, you can unlock your sales potential and drive more conversions for your business. From defining your target audience and creating compelling content to nurturing leads and optimizing the checkout process, each step plays a critical role in guiding prospects through the buying journey and turning them into satisfied customers. With a well-optimized sales funnel in place, you can attract, engage, and convert prospects more effectively, ultimately driving growth and success for your business.

The post Optimize Your Funnel for Conversions: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making More Sales appeared first on Done For You.

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, harnessing the power of email marketing on autopilot is a game-changer for businesses seeking efficient and scalable communication with their audience. This blog will guide you through the strategies and systems to set up, allowing your email marketing efforts to work seamlessly, even when you’re not actively managing them.

The Power of Automated Email Marketing

1. Understanding Automation: A Productivity Game-Changer

Automation in email marketing is about streamlining repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on strategic aspects. Explore how automation enhances productivity, ensures consistency, and delivers targeted messages based on user behavior.

2. Benefits of Email Marketing Automation

Delve into the benefits of implementing email marketing automation. From saving time and resources to personalizing user experiences, discover how automation contributes to increased engagement, lead nurturing, and conversions.

Setting Up Your Email Marketing Automation System

3. Selecting the Right Email Marketing Platform

Choose a robust email marketing platform that aligns with your business needs. Evaluate features such as automation capabilities, user-friendly interfaces, and scalability. Popular platforms like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign offer diverse automation functionalities.

4. Building a Subscriber Segmentation Strategy

Effective email marketing relies on delivering relevant content. Implement a subscriber segmentation strategy to categorize your audience based on preferences, behaviors, or demographics. Segmentation allows for personalized and targeted communication.

Creating Automated Email Campaigns

5. Welcome Series: Making a Memorable First Impression

Craft a compelling welcome series for new subscribers. This automated sequence introduces your brand, sets expectations, and nurtures the relationship from the outset. Leverage automation to send emails over a specified period, guiding subscribers through your brand journey.

6. Drip Campaigns: Nurturing Leads on Autopilot

Drip campaigns, or email series, are a cornerstone of automated marketing. Develop drip campaigns that nurture leads through the sales funnel. Automate the delivery of relevant content, educational materials, and promotional offers based on user interactions.

Leveraging Behavior-Based Triggers

7. Behavioral Email Triggers: Tailoring Messages to Actions

Implement behavior-based triggers that respond to user actions. Whether it’s abandoned cart emails, product recommendations, or re-engagement campaigns, leverage automation to deliver timely and personalized messages based on user behavior.

8. Personalization: The Key to Engagement

Explore the power of personalization in automated emails. Use dynamic content, personalized recommendations, and tailored messaging to create a more engaging and relevant experience for your subscribers. Personalization contributes to higher open rates and conversions.

Automating Transactional Emails

9. Transactional Emails: Beyond the Receipt

Transform transactional emails into valuable touchpoints: Automate order confirmations, shipping notifications, and post-purchase follow-ups. Turn transactional emails into opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and building customer loyalty.

10. Feedback and Review Requests: Automated Customer Insights

Automate the process of gathering feedback and reviews. Send automated emails requesting customer feedback after a purchase or interaction. Use insights gathered to improve products/services and strengthen your brand reputation.

Measuring and Optimizing Automated Campaigns

11. Analytics and Reporting: Tracking Success Metrics

Utilize analytics tools your email marketing platform provides to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Monitor metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Analyzing data allows you to optimize and refine your automated campaigns.

12. A/B Testing: Refining for Optimal Results

Implement A/B testing to refine your automated campaigns. Test different elements, including subject lines, content, and call-to-action buttons. A/B testing provides valuable insights into what resonates most with your audience and drives better results.

Ensuring Compliance and Building Trust

13. Compliance: Navigating Regulations

Understand and adhere to email marketing regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Ensure that your automated campaigns comply with privacy laws and respect subscriber preferences. Building trust through ethical practices is fundamental to a successful email marketing strategy.

14. Subscriber Opt-Outs: Honoring Preferences

Include easy-to-find opt-out options in your emails. Respecting subscriber preferences is crucial for maintaining a positive brand image and complying with regulations. Automated systems should seamlessly handle opt-out requests to uphold transparency and trust.

The Future of Automated Email Marketing

15. Emerging Trends: Staying Ahead of the Curve

Explore emerging trends in automated email marketing. From AI-driven personalization to interactive email content, staying informed about industry innovations positions your business to adapt and capitalize on new opportunities.

Conclusion: Email Marketing Excellence on Autopilot

Email marketing on autopilot is a strategic investment that pays dividends in efficiency, engagement, and conversions. Your business can achieve email marketing excellence while you sleep by implementing suitable systems, creating targeted automated campaigns, and consistently optimizing based on data. Embrace the power of automation to elevate your communication with subscribers and drive long-term success.

The post Your 24/7 Marketer: The Magic of Email Marketing on Autopilot appeared first on Done For You.

It has become essential for businesses to have an online presence. With the rise of social media, search engines, and other digital platforms, companies seek ways to reach their target audience online. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through online advertising. However, many small businesses may not have the budget to invest in expensive online advertising campaigns. This blog post will explore ways to revolutionize your marketing strategy by leveraging online advertising without investment.

What is online advertising without investment?

Online advertising without investment refers to using free or low-cost digital marketing strategies to promote your business online. This can include social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and more. These strategies can help you reach your target audience and drive traffic to your website without spending much money on advertising.

How to leverage online advertising without investment for your business

1. Social media marketing

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are excellent channels for promoting your business online. With billions of users, these platforms provide a massive audience for your business. Creating engaging content and interacting with your followers can build a loyal following and increase your brand awareness. Moreover, you can track your performance and optimize your strategy using social media analytics tools.

2. Email marketing

Email marketing is another effective way to reach your target audience online. By building an email list and sending regular newsletters and promotional emails, you can inform your customers about your business and drive traffic to your website. Moreover, you can increase your open and click-through rates by personalizing your emails and segmenting your audience.

3. Content marketing

Content marketing involves creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience and provides value to them. This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. By creating relevant and engaging content, you can attract visitors to your website and establish your business as a thought leader in your industry.

4. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Using relevant keywords, optimizing your website structure, and building high-quality backlinks can improve your website’s visibility and attract more organic traffic. Moreover, by using SEO analytics tools, you can track your performance and optimize your online advertising strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

Online advertising without investment can be a game-changer for small businesses looking to promote their brand online. By leveraging free or low-cost digital marketing strategies like social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and SEO, you can reach your target audience and drive traffic to your website without spending much money on advertising. So, start implementing these strategies today and revolutionize your marketing strategy.

The post Beyond Budgets: Advanced Techniques for No-Investment Online Advertising appeared first on Done For You.

Online advertising has become crucial to any successful marketing strategy as the world becomes increasingly digital. But with so many options available, it can be challenging to determine which method is the best for your business. In this article, we’ll look at the top online advertising methods and compare their effectiveness to decide which one reigns supreme.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC advertising is a popular method of online advertising where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads. This method is particularly effective for businesses looking to drive traffic to their website or generate leads. Google AdWords is the most popular PPC advertising platform, but other options are available, such as Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

Advantages:

• High level of control over ad targeting and spending
• Ability to track and measure results
• Immediate results

Disadvantages:

• Can be expensive if not managed properly
• Requires ongoing monitoring and optimization
• Limited reach compared to other methods

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO involves optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords. The higher your website ranks, the more likely users will click through to your site. SEO is a long-term strategy that requires ongoing efforts to maintain and improve your rankings.

Advantages:

• Cost-effective in the long run
• High click-through rates for top-ranked websites
• Builds credibility and trust with users

Disadvantages:

• Can take a long time to see the results
• Requires ongoing efforts to maintain rankings
• Limited control over search engine algorithms

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising involves running ads on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This method is particularly effective for businesses targeting specific demographics or promoting their brand awareness.

Advantages:

• High level of targeting options
• Ability to track and measure results
• Large user base on social media platforms

Disadvantages:

• Can be expensive depending on targeting options
• Ad blindness due to the high frequency of ads on social media
• Limited reach compared to other methods

Display Advertising

Display advertising involves placing ads on websites, typically in the form of banner ads, to reach a broader audience. This method is particularly effective for businesses looking to increase brand awareness and reach a larger audience.

Advantages:

• Broad reach across a variety of websites
• Ability to target specific audiences
• High level of control over ad placement and targeting

Disadvantages:

• Low click-through rates compared to other methods
• Can be expensive if not managed properly
• Ad blindness due to the high frequency of ads on websites

Email Marketing

Email marketing involves sending marketing messages to a list of subscribers via email. This method is particularly effective for businesses directly promoting their products or services to their target audience.

Advantages:

• Highly targeted audience
• Ability to personalize messages
• High ROI compared to other methods

Disadvantages:

• Requires a list of subscribers to be effective
• Can be seen as spam by users
• Limited reach compared to other methods

Conclusion

So, which online advertising method is the best? The answer is it depends. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, and the best method for your business will depend on your specific goals and target audience. However, if we had to pick one method that reigns supreme, it would be PPC advertising. With its high level of control, ability to track and measure results, and immediate results, it’s a solid choice for businesses looking to drive traffic and generate leads. Ultimately, combining these methods may be the best approach for your business to achieve maximum results.

The post Is “Pay-Per-Click” the Click That Kills Your Budget? The Shocking Truth! appeared first on Done For You.

Do you need help generating new leads for your business? If so, you’re not alone. Many companies need help with lead generation, but the good news is that there are proven techniques you can use to boost your results.

This blog post will cover 10 lead-generation techniques proven to work. By implementing these strategies, you can generate more leads and grow your business.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a powerful way to attract new leads to your business. By creating high-quality content that provides value to your target audience, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and attract new leads to your website.

To get started with content marketing, you’ll need to create a content strategy that includes blog posts, videos, infographics, and other types of content that your audience will find valuable. You can then promote your content through social media, email marketing, and other channels to reach a wider audience.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). You can attract organic traffic and generate more leads by improving your website’s ranking for relevant keywords.

To optimize your website for SEO, you must conduct keyword research to identify the most relevant keywords for your business. You can then optimize your website’s content, meta tags, and other elements to improve your ranking for those keywords.

3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a powerful way to generate leads quickly. With PPC advertising, you can create ads that target specific keywords and demographics and only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

To get started with PPC advertising, you’ll need to create an account with a platform like Google Ads or Facebook Ads. You can then create ads that target specific keywords and demographics and set a budget for your campaign.

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a great way to reach a wider audience and generate more leads. By creating engaging content and promoting it through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you can attract new leads to your business.

To get started with social media marketing, you’ll need to create profiles on your target audience’s social media platforms. You can then create and share content that your audience will find valuable and engage with your followers to build relationships and generate leads.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful way to nurture leads and convert them into customers. By creating targeted email campaigns that provide value to your subscribers, you can build trust and establish a relationship with your audience.

To get started with email marketing, you’ll need to build an email list of subscribers who have opted in to receive your emails. You can then create targeted email campaigns that provide value to your subscribers and encourage them to take action.

6. Webinars

Webinars are a great way to generate leads and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. By creating informative webinars that provide value to your audience, you can attract new leads to your business and build relationships with your existing subscribers.

To get started with webinars, you’ll need to choose a topic your audience will find valuable and create a presentation that provides actionable insights. You can then promote your webinar through email marketing, social media, and other channels to attract a wider audience.

7. Referral Marketing

Referral marketing is a powerful way to generate leads from your existing customers. By creating a referral program that incentivizes your customers to refer their friends and family to your business, you can generate new leads and grow your customer base.

To get started with referral marketing, you’ll need to create a referral program that offers rewards to customers who refer new business to you. You can then promote your referral program through email marketing, social media, and other channels to encourage your customers to participate.

8. Networking

Networking is a great way to generate leads and build relationships with other professionals in your industry. By attending industry events and connecting with other professionals, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and generate new leads for your business.

To start networking, you’ll need to identify relevant industry events for your business and attend them regularly. You can then connect with other professionals and build relationships that can lead to new business opportunities.

9. Direct Mail

Direct mail is a powerful way to generate leads and reach customers who may need to be more active online. By creating targeted direct mail campaigns that provide value to your audience, you can generate new leads and grow your business.

To get started with direct mail, you’ll need to create a targeted mailing list of potential customers and create a direct mail campaign that provides value to your audience. You can then send your direct mail campaign to your mailing list and track your results to see how many leads you generate.

10. Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a powerful way to generate leads and establish trust with your audience. By encouraging your customers to leave reviews on sites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook, you can attract new leads to your business and build a positive reputation online.

To get started with customer reviews, you’ll need to encourage your customers to leave reviews on sites relevant to your business. You can then monitor your reviews and respond to negative feedback to show that you care about your customers and are committed to providing great service.

In conclusion, lead generation is essential for any business that wants to grow and succeed. By implementing these 10 proven lead-generation techniques, you can attract more leads to your business and achieve your goals.

The post Beyond Conversions: Mastering 10 Lead Generation Techniques appeared first on Done For You.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach potential customers and promote your business. With a well-planned email marketing strategy, you can build strong relationships with your audience, increase brand awareness, and boost sales.

In this blog post, we’ll share 10 killer email marketing strategies to help you take your business to the next level. We’ve got you covered, from crafting compelling subject lines to segmenting your audience!

1. Craft Compelling Subject Lines

The subject line is the first thing your subscribers see when they receive your email. It can make or break your email marketing campaign. A compelling subject line should be short, sweet, and concise. It should grab your reader’s attention and entice them to open your email.

Here are some tips for crafting compelling subject lines:

• Use numbers and statistics
• Ask a question
• Use humor
• Create a sense of urgency
• Personalize the subject line

2. Segment Your Audience

Segmenting your audience means dividing your subscribers into smaller groups based on their interests, behavior, and demographics. By segmenting your audience, you can send targeted emails more relevant to their interests.

Here are some ways to segment your audience:

• By location
• By behavior (e.g., opened/clicked on previous emails)
• By interests
• By demographics (e.g., age, gender)

3. Personalize Your Emails

Personalized emails can help you build stronger relationships with your subscribers. Adding the subscriber’s name and other personal details to the email can make them feel valued and appreciated.

Here are some ways to personalize your emails:

• Use the subscriber’s name
• Mention their previous purchases or interests
• Send birthday or anniversary emails
• Use dynamic content to show different products based on their behavior

4. Use Visuals

Visuals can make your emails more engaging and memorable. They can help you convey your message more effectively and make your emails stand out.

Here are some ways to use visuals in your emails:

• Add images or videos
• Use infographics to showcase statistics
• Use GIFs to add a touch of humor

5. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly

More than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. If your emails are not optimized for mobile, you could miss out on potential customers.

Here are some tips for making your emails mobile-friendly:

• Use a responsive email template
• Keep your subject lines short
• Use a single-column layout
• Use large font sizes
• Add a clear call to action

6. A/B Test Your Emails

A/B testing involves sending two versions of your email to a small group of subscribers and measuring which one performs better. By A/B testing your emails, you can optimize your email marketing strategy and improve your conversion rates.

Here are some elements you can A/B test:

• Subject lines
• Call-to-action buttons
• Images
• Layout
• Personalization

7. Provide Value

Your subscribers receive dozens of emails every day. To stand out from the crowd, you need to provide value in every email you send. Your emails should offer something useful or interesting to your subscribers.

Here are some ways to provide value in your emails:

• Share industry insights or news
• Offer exclusive discounts or promotions
• Provide helpful tips or tutorials
• Send personalized recommendations based on their behavior

8. Use Social Proof

Social proof is a powerful tool that can help you build trust with your subscribers. By showing that other people trust and use your products or services, you can convince your subscribers to do the same.

Here are some ways to use social proof in your emails:

• Add customer reviews or testimonials
• Show social media shares or likes
• Mention awards or recognitions your business has received

9. Keep Your Emails Simple

Your emails should be easy to read and understand. They should have a clear message and a single call to action. If your emails are too complex or confusing, subscribers may lose interest or unsubscribe.

Here are some tips for keeping your emails simple:

• Use short paragraphs and sentences
• Use bullet points to highlight key information
• Avoid using jargon or technical terms
• Use a clear and concise call-to-action

10. Measure Your Results

Measuring your email marketing results is crucial to improving your strategy and achieving your goals. You can identify what works and what doesn’t by tracking your open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Here are some metrics you should track:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribe rates

In conclusion, email marketing can be a powerful tool for boosting your business. Following these 10 killer email marketing strategies, you can create compelling emails that resonate with your audience and drive results. Remember to continuously test, optimize, and measure your results to improve your email marketing strategy.

The post Email Campaign Revolution: Implementing Killer Marketing Strategies appeared first on Done For You.

Social media has become a crucial element in the success of businesses today. With over 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide, it has become a powerful platform to reach and engage with potential customers. However, with so many businesses vying for attention on these platforms, standing out and maximizing your social media reach can take time and effort. 

In this blog post, we will discuss the top 10 tips for effective social media marketing to help you boost your online presence and connect with your target audience.

Tip #1: Define Your Goals and Objectives

Before diving into any social media strategy, defining your goals and objectives is essential. What do you want to achieve with your social media marketing efforts? Is it brand awareness, lead generation, or customer retention? Once you clearly understand your goals, you can create a social media strategy that aligns with them.

Tip #2: Know Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is key to creating a successful social media strategy. Who are your ideal customers? What are their interests, pain points, and challenges? By understanding your target audience, you can create content that resonates with them and drives engagement.

Tip #3: Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

Not all social media platforms are created equal. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, and choosing the ones that align with your goals and target audience is crucial. For example, if you’re targeting a younger audience, platforms like TikTok and Snapchat may be more effective than LinkedIn.

Tip #4: Create High-Quality Content

Creating high-quality content is essential to stand out on social media. Your content should be visually appealing, informative, and engaging. Use various formats like images, videos, and infographics to keep your audience engaged.

Tip #5: Focus on Consistency

Consistency is key to building a solid social media presence. Establish a posting schedule that aligns with your goals and audience, and stick to it. Consistency helps build trust with your audience and keeps your brand top of mind.

Tip #6: Engage with Your Audience

Social media is a two-way conversation, and engaging with your audience is essential. Respond promptly to comments, messages, and mentions, and show your followers that you value their feedback.

Tip #7: Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has become a popular tactic for businesses on social media. Partnering with influencers who align with your brand can help you reach a wider audience and build credibility.

Tip #8: Utilize Paid Advertising

Paid advertising can help you reach your target audience more effectively on social media. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer various advertising options, including targeted ads, sponsored posts, and promoted stories.

Tip #9: Monitor Your Metrics

Monitoring your social media metrics is crucial to understanding what’s working and what’s not. Track metrics like engagement, reach, and conversions, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Tip #10: Stay Up-to-Date with Trends and Best Practices

Social media is constantly evolving, and staying up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices is essential. Attend industry events, follow thought leaders, and invest in ongoing education to keep your social media strategy fresh and effective.

In conclusion, social media marketing can be a powerful tool for businesses when executed effectively. Following these top 10 tips can maximize your social media reach and connect with your target audience. Remember to define your goals, know your audience, create high-quality content, and stay consistent. Engage with your audience, leverage influencers and paid advertising, monitor your metrics, and stay up-to-date with trends and best practices. With these tips, you can take your social media marketing to the next level.

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E-marketing has become essential for businesses looking to connect with their target audience. With the rise of social media and online advertising, it offers a cost-effective and efficient way to maximize your reach and grow your business. 

In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of e-marketing and provide practical tips for businesses looking to harness its power.

What is E-Marketing?

E-marketing, digital marketing, or online marketing, refers to the use of electronic media to promote products or services. This can include email marketing, social media advertising, search engine optimization, content marketing, and more. The primary goal of e-marketing is to reach a targeted audience and drive conversions.

The Benefits of E-Marketing

Increased Reach

One of the primary benefits of e-marketing is its ability to reach a large audience quickly and efficiently. With social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, businesses can connect with potential customers all over the world. E-marketing also allows businesses to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, ensuring that their message is delivered to the right people at the right time.

Cost-Effective

Compared to traditional marketing methods like print ads and billboards, e-marketing is much more cost-effective. With social media advertising, for example, businesses can set a budget and only pay when someone clicks on their ad. This means that businesses can maximize their reach while keeping their advertising costs under control.

Measurable Results

Another advantage of e-marketing is that it provides measurable results. With tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, businesses can track their website traffic, ad clicks, and social media engagement. This data can be used to optimize campaigns and make informed decisions about future marketing strategies.

Tips for Maximizing Your E-Marketing Reach

Define Your Target Audience

To maximize your e-marketing reach, it’s essential to define your target audience. Who are your ideal customers? What are their interests, behaviors, and pain points? By understanding your audience, you can create content and advertising that resonates with them and drives conversions.

Use Multiple Channels

To reach the widest possible audience, it’s important to use multiple marketing channels. This could include email marketing, social media advertising, content marketing, and search engine optimization. By diversifying your marketing efforts, you can maximize your reach and connect with potential customers wherever they are.

Create Compelling Content

Compelling content is the key to successful marketing. Whether it’s a blog post, social media ad, or email newsletter, your content should be engaging, informative, and relevant to your target audience. Consider using images, videos, and infographics to make your content more visually appealing and shareable.

Test and Optimize

Finally, it’s important to test and optimize your e-marketing campaigns. Use A/B testing to try out different headlines, images, and calls to action, and track the results to see what works best. Use the data you collect to optimize your campaigns and make informed decisions about future marketing strategies.

Overall, marketing offers a powerful way for businesses to connect with their target audience and drive conversions. By defining your target audience, using multiple channels, creating compelling content, and testing and optimizing your campaigns, you can maximize your e-marketing reach and grow your business.

Click here to see how we can help your business!

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One of the biggest problems that companies around the country or in any town have is that their customers and their clients just forget about them.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of keeping people engaged. Its keeping people know you, keeping people buying your products, consuming your videos, reading your content.

What a lot of companies don’t understand is that they think that just emailing their list once a week, once a month is enough. You really have to treat your email lists like unused hotel rooms. Every day that goes by that somebody doesn’t hear from you is a day that they go a little colder. They forget about you a little more. That’s a problem when you own a business and do not have email marketing ideas.

Send email 3-4x a week

One of the things that we do for our clients is we will actually email their list three or four times a week for them. Letting them know what new products are out there. Our new promotions and what they need to know about the company. In order to maybe bond with them a little bit better. In that way, our prospect never goes cold. Nobody ever forgets about you because they’re getting emails about you on a very, very regular basis.

Whether you’re a local pizza shop that wants to send out discount codes through your email. Or wants to maybe do a limited run of a new pizza or a new dish, then the email works really well for that. The Bean was not only selling all the coffee that you could want but also roasts the beans and sells them by the bag. You can send out emails promoting any of those offers. These fucking incredible live streams every Wednesday at five o’clock showcase the products that they sell in their store and also online.

Sending emails out, getting them fired up about the live streams, getting them fired up about those clips, all incredible strategies to engage with your prospects and customers even more deeply with emails.

As you can see your customers already love you. Your prospects are getting to know you. You need to be talking to them way more often than you are. Email your list at least three times a week and send out one major promotion every month. Do these things, and pull them into your story so that they don’t forget about you.

If you would like to talk at all about anything having to do with email marketing ideas, paid traffic, any of that stuff, go to doneforyou.com/Start. Fill out the little application and we’ll jump on the phone with you. Just have a quick action plan call. This is the first episode of the, Are They Forgetting About You YouTube series. Go ahead and click the light button below if you got any value from this. Make sure to subscribe to our DFY Youtube channel.

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Today, we’re going to talk about why email marketing is important. We just created a very nice-looking video that’s going to kick off the series of why. Basically, this four-part series that we’re putting together is going to be how to always stay top of mind to your customers, your prospects, the people who are doing business with you.

Why email marketing is important?

There are three reasons why email marketing is important for your business. If you are not sending an email or sending too little email, it’s a problem. Most of that is because people, first of all, they’re super, super busy. We all know that. I mean, everybody is living in a very immediate gratification kind of world. Something becomes top of mind, and then it pushes off their plate relatively quickly. That isn’t awesome as marketers, of course.

1. No-cost Sales Generator

One of the best reasons to use email marketing is it is a no-cost sales generator. Now, here’s what I mean. Once you have somebody on your list, you can market to them again, and again, and again, until they unsubscribe or until they just stop opening your email. Sending that email sometimes costs a fraction of a penny. For all intents and purposes, you’re not spending money to acquire that customer anymore. You putting leads on an email list is one of the best ways of future-proofing your business. Recession proofing your business because you always have a way to reach out to them and promote your next thing, promote your product, promote your giveaway, promote your discount, whatever.

Whatever it is, you have a way that you can just log in, write an email, hit send, and it goes to 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 people on the other side of an email inbox. Now, a lot of people say, “Well, email is dead,” and nothing could be further from the truth. You still check your email every day. I still check email every day. Everybody still checks email every day. The thing is, you have to be relevant. You have to not be forgotten, and that’s one of the other reasons.

2. Content marketing

When you send stuff out in an email that isn’t always sales. It isn’t always a promo. Also, it isn’t always something where they have to read an email, click a link, and then put in their credit card.

When you invest in them, through what is known as content marketing, then you’re always reactivating them. You are always adding value to their life and you’re becoming relevant. You’re teaching an education. You’re increasing the know, like and trust factor of you, of your business, because you’re giving them valuable information, valuable guidance, valuable content, whatever it is you want, whatever it is you give them through email. But they’re used to opening emails from you, click the link. When it is time to actually go to a promo, or when it is time to actually buy something. So you’re able to nurture. You’re able to bond with them through content. You’re able to sell something and generate revenue without investing more money.

That’s really the big thing. A lot of our clients, we do a lot of paid traffic, and with paid traffic when you turn off an ad budget, the traffic also goes away. I mean, unfortunately, that’s the reality. When you pause ad spend, or whatever, an ad account gets shut down, and that account gets hacked, any one of several really, really shitty things happen, the traffic also goes away.

3. Pivots business and generates revenue

Email is something you always have in your back pocket that you can just send an email out to and pivot your business. Send an email out to and generate revenue. One more thing, send an email out to and even survey for a new product, or survey for something new, or whatever, a new product variation, or whatever. It’s the benefit of email. That’s why we email every day, every other day, whatever. One little caveat, if you’re emailing too frequently, you should increase the number of emails that you send. A lot of people, especially traditional businesses, but even digital businesses, a lot of people have an email list of five, 10,000 people. Usually, a good portion of them are buyers, and they’re like, “Well, I email them once a week. I email them once a month. I email them twice a month,” whatever.

How frequently should you send emails?

You have to email them more often than that, quite a bit more often. We try to send three emails a week to almost every list. Every list, like our client list, and sometimes it’s one a week, and it depends. It just depends on what kind of content we’re mailing out, but we try to be in front of them, at least, three times. Sometimes it’s three blog posts, and then the next week is a promo, a four or five email series promotion. Sometimes it is full… It might be two emails setting up a promo, so it might be an email on a Monday and Tuesday, and then we send out a promo email on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday promoting a product.

There are lots of different cadences that you can use, but you want to be mailing, at least, three times a week to your universe of active subscribers. We should probably do a video on this management. I think I did at one time, but it’s super important to only mail to the people who are actually engaging with you. It makes your email cost cheaper, and it also helps increase the open rates and all of that other stuff.

That is why email marketing is important. You want to generate revenue, without spending any money. An email will do that. You want to test out new products, new services, and keep your list updated on where you’re at in your business. An email will do that. And then, also, being top of mind for your list, or being top of mind in your customers, in your prospects’ mind. An email will do that.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions, at all, if you’d like to schedule a call with us, where we would actually go through and figure out how, maybe, email would work in your business, or how to increase the level of email, or the effectiveness of email, or, basically, anything else that has to do with digital marketing, go to consultingsession.com. Fill out the little form, and jump on a call with us.

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In today’s episode of GSDdaily 140, it is our five-minute guide rendition. We’re going to talk about split testing email copy. I’m going to show you how to set it up is to split test email copy inside of your campaigns or inside of your autoresponder sequences. It’s the best, most predictable way of doing it. Basically, you’re creating variations of a message, so variation one, variation two, variation three. Usually, we start by testing the subject line. Then after we find the winner, the winning subject line, we’ll test the body copy. After we find the winning body copy, we’ll test features and benefits and calls to action. That is the process for a split-testing email copy.

Why do we do it inside an automated campaign?

Well, because your sales funnels require a lot more than just pages and just sales copy and stuff. Email copy kind of glues it all together. So if somebody opts in for a webinar, then we want to engage them through email copy, like that kind of thing, so by maximizing, even getting, you know, a little bit of a percentage point on an email open, over the life cycle of a campaign, you’re going to generate way, way, way more revenue long term that way, so that’s why we do it.

How to do split testing email copy?

We’re inside Ontraport, which is where we’re going to set up this split test. Now the first step is to take an email message and clone it. This is a sequence that I use for the funnel factor report. Now you can see here that the first email has been sent 3,800 times, so 3,829 times. It doesn’t have a split test activated for it. So what we’re going to do is we are going to copy this email message or clone it, and then we’re going to change out the subject line of it. So, as I said, it’s always the first thing we test. The name of this message, we’re going to just change a little bit.

It’s going to email one, variation two so that we know it is a different variation. We’re going to save it, you know, just in case anything weird happens. We’re going to go to settings and we are going to change this subject line. The subject line we’re going to switch it out with is, “Thank you for downloading the funnel factor master guide.” Simple little subject change or simple little headline change, but you would be amazed at how much just a small little difference in an email subject line is going to drastically alter the copy or the open rate of that email because that’s really what drives the open rate is the subject line. Now, we saved the new variation. We’re going to go back to our main messages screen.

Here is the email variation one, and here’s variation two that we just added. We’re going to go to our campaign. I’m just going to refresh this campaign so it pulls that new message in, and then we are going to go to our first fulfillment email, the one that has been sent 3,829 times. We’re going to hit edit. Then this is the first email that we get. Now to split test it, we just hit this little thing right there, this little toggle, so that turns the split test on. This then becomes version A of the email. We’re going to add a version B. We’re going to search for that email message that we just created, funnel factor fulfillment, and it’s right there. Funnel factor fulfillment, email one version two. You can see there’s our new subject line. The same email, the same email that’s been sent out, but our subject line is different.

I have version A, which is your funnel factor master guide, and I have version B, which is, “Thank you for downloading the funnel factor master guide.” We’re going to very simply hit close, save. The split test is now done. Now, everyone who opts in for the funnel factor from here until the time that this split test is disabled, are going to go through one of two variations. They’re either going to get email one or email two and then I’m going to be able to see stats on what the open rate of each is, which means that I can optimize the email campaign.

Then I do that for every email that goes out. As I said, it’s a pain in the ass. It’s a lot of work, but it makes a lot of sense when you’re sending traffic directly into a couple of front end sales funnels, and you need to maximize the engagement of every single touch, all the emails, all the texts, all the landing pages, whatever.

For Questions and Guide

If you would like some business help, where we go through, look at your sales funnel, look at your ad campaigns, put together an action plan for you, you know, do the marketing for you, go to consultantsession.com and we will take a look at your business and that’s about it for today.

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Introduction: Why You Need Marketing Automation Workflows

You're missing out on significant revenue opportunities if you're not leveraging marketing automation workflows to nurture leads and drive them down your sales funnel. With the integration of marketing automation in popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp, there's no excuse for letting your contacts sit idle.

Neethere'sting Automation Help? Click Here!

What Are Marketing Automation Workflows?

Understanding the Basics

Marketing automation workflows are the backbone of a revenue-generating strategy. They allow you to automate marketing tasks in a structured and systematic manner. For instance, when someone visits your website to fill out a form or seek more information, a marketing automation workflow ensures they receive timely and relevant emails.

The Role of Email Sequences

Upon capturing an email address through an opt-in form, the first step is usually to send a welcome email sequence. This sequence introduces your business, explaining who you are, what you do, and why the prospect should consider working with you.

Setting Up Your Marketing Automation Workflow

The Importance of Automated Welcome Emails

The key to a triumphant welcome email sequence is to introduce your business and set the stage for future interactions. With a well-designed marketing automation workflow, you don't have to send these emails manually; software like Adon'tRM can handle it.

Behind-the-Scenes Automation

The beauty of marketing automation is that it operates behind the scenes. All your marketing activities, including emails, text messages, and other tasks, are automatically triggered without you lifting a finger. This automation lets you focus on warming up your leads for future business.

Segmenting Leads in Your CRM

Why Segmentation Matters

Effective marketing automation workflows rely on segmentation. Depending on your prospects' actions—whether they fill out a survey, download a report, or engage with your emails—you can categorize them into different segments. This ensures they receive content most relevant to their interests and stage in the buyer's journey.

Sales Automation and Workflows

When running buyers ' campaigns, your marketing automation workflows must be tuned. For example, if you're promoting a Memorial Day sale, your entire market should be on that. You don't want to confuse your audience by sending unrelated don'ts during the promotion.

Nurturing Leads Through Automation

The Art of Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is another critical aspect of a robust marketing automation workflow. Through emails, you can introduce your team, showcase case studies, and explain why the prospect should do business with you.

Upsells and Cross-Sells in Marketing Automation

Maximizing Revenue Opportunities

Your marketing automation workflow should also include strategies for upsells and cross-sells. Automated emails can encourage customers to complete the purchase if they buy an E-book but skip the upsell for a video course.

Re-Engaging Your Email List

The Last Chance Offer

If a contact hasn't engaged with your content for 60 days or more, your meeting automation workflow should automatically send them a re-engagement email. This could be a special offer or a free report to recapture their interest.

Onboarding New Customers

Creating a Seamless Experience

The customer journey doesn't end with a purchase; it's just the beginning. Mardoesn'tautomation workflows can help you onboard new customers effectively. Automated emails can guide them through the following steps: scheduling a call, logging into a course, or watching video.

Conclusion: The Future is Automated

Marketing automation workflows are not just a 'nice-to-have'; they are essential for any business looking to scale. from sending welcome emails to segmenting your audience and nurturing leads, automation can handle it all, so if you haven't yet implemented a marketing automation workflow, haven't time to start.

The Power of Marketing Automation Workflows

Marketing automation workflows are the unsung heroes of modern digital marketing. They allow you to automate complex tasks and nurture your leads in a personalized way. In this guide, we'll explore seven essential types of marketing automating workflows that can transform your email marketing strategy.

1. The Welcome Email Sequence: Your First Impression

What is a Welcome Email Sequence?

The welcome email sequence is your first interaction with new email subscribers. It's a one-time workflow designed to introduce your brand. It's set the stage for future communications.

Why is it Important?

A well-crafted welcome email sequence ensures your new contacts don't forget about you shortly after signing up. It provides a brief orientation about your brand and can deepen the relationship immediately.

How Many Emails Should It Include?

Generally, a welcome email sequence doesn't need to be extensive. Three to four emails are insufficient to make a lasting impression.

2. Segmentation and Engagement: The Backbone of Marketing Automation Workflows

What is Segmentation?

Segmentation is one of the most crucial types of marketing automation workflows. It involves dividing your email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria like interests, behavior, or demographics.

Why is Segmentation Important?

You can send highly targeted content and promotions by segmenting your audience and increasing engagement and conversion rates.

Criteria for Segmentation

You can segment people based on various factors, such as:

• The lead magnet they've downloaded
• The landing page they visited
• The automated webinar that they attended
• Their engagement with your campaigns

Note: Surveys can also be a powerful tool for segmentation.

3. Sales Automation Workflow: Converting Leads into Customers

What is a Sales Automation Workflow?

This workflow is designed to convert your leads into paying customers. It's essentially a series of promotional emails aimed at instigating a purchase.

Targeting the Right Audience

The effectiveness of your sales automation workflow depends on how well you've segmented your list. It's best to send this workflow to highly engaged prospects, and It's a segmented list for maximum impact.

Triggering the Sales Sequence

The sales sequence is often triggered when a new subscriber shows interest in a particular type of content or lead magnet. Depending on their engagement, you can present them with various offers until they make a purchase.

4. Lead Nurturing: Building Trust and Credibility

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a marketing automation workflow designed to move subscribers further down your sales funnel by providing valuable content over time.

Why is it Important?

Lead nurturing builds trust and credibility, making it easier to convert subscribers into customers when the time is right.

Crafting the Lead Nurturing Sequence

The sequence should be tailored to the stage of the buyer's journey your leads are in. By addressing their buyer's concerns and demonstrating the value of your offer, you increase the likelihood of conversion.

5. Cross-Sell/Up-Sell Workflow: Maximizing Customer Value

What is a Cross-Sell/Up-Sell Workflow?

Once a subscriber makes a purchase, this marketing automation workflow encourages them to buy more through cross-sells or up-sells.

Why is it Important?

Since the customer has already shown trust in your brand by purchasing, this is the perfect opportunity to increase their lifetime value.

How Does it Work?

This sequence targets only those who have made a previous purchase, offering additional products or services that complement their initial buy.

6. Re-Engagement Workflow: Winning Back Lost Subscribers

What is a Re-Engagement Workflow?

As your list grows, some subscribers will inevitably become disengaged. This workflow aims to rekindle their interest and get them to interact with your brand again.

Why is it Necessary?

Inactive subscribers can harm your email deliverability. A re-engagement workflow helps win them back or identify those who should be removed from your list.

Strategies for Re-Engagement

The workflow should include catchy and compelling offers to encourage subscribers to open your emails and engage with your content.

7. Onboarding Workflow: Ensuring Customer Success

What is an Onboarding Workflow?

Onboarding workflows are designed to help new customers get the most out of your product or service. They are especially crucial for SaaS, mobile apps, and subscription-based businesses.

Why is it Important?

Proper onboarding ensures customer satisfaction and increases the likelihood of retention.

Onboarding Best Practices

The onboarding emails should highlight critical features of your product and guide the customer through the initial stages of using it. This can be coupled with in-app prompts for a more comprehensive onboarding experience.

Work faster with marketing automation templates.

The thing with marketing automation workflows is that they’re set and forget. Take these ideas we’ve outlined here, set them up in MailChimp or any other service, and rest assured that they’ll be working for you 24/7.

Most email marketing companies provide their subscribers with marketing automation templates. And some of them are also free. For example, MailChimp's automation workflows are accessible and templated for its 2,000 subscribers.

Automation templates will make your life easier, as the essential workflows, triggers, and actions are already in place. You only need to customize them to your liking and, of course, add the email content.

The post How to Optimize Your Marketing Automation Workflows for Higher Conversions appeared first on Done For You.

Welcome to the Ultimate Sales Funnel Guide... We're going to break down the parts of a sales funnel for you so that you can build one for your following product or service...

Did you know we actively engage in parts of a sales funnel every time we buy a product? Even before we believe?

It doesn't matter whether we are in a brick-and-mortar business or browsing an online store; we, as consumers, have already entered their funnel.

These days, every online marketer and business owner talks about online sales funnels. Search Google News or read any sales or marketing blog, and you'll see that sales funnels and sales psychology are making the news.

Why is that?

Because competition has grown to be so intense and digital business best practices are so commonplace, companies NEED to have an automated sales process to acquire new customers. The fact that we're exposed to thousands of advertising messages daily reinforces that.

So, from a business perspective, how do you stand out?

The answer: Developing an effective, automated sales funnel.

Parts Of A Sales Funnel

This sales funnel guide will explain parts of a sales funnel in plain English. Our goal is to help you not only understand their value -- you probably know already that your business can't survive without a funnel -- but the integral components of a sales funnel.

Let's say you were about to hire a Sales Funnel Expert to build your online sales process. (Notice, I didn't say designer!)

A designer or developer is going to start and stop at your website. The truth is a website is required. It's mandatory. But it's the least important part of the entire sales funnel conversation.

The parts of a sales funnel, or purchase funnel as put in Wikipedia, as you'll see, are a complete system that starts with web pages, including email marketing, multi-media content, order forms, call scheduling, and more... All built custom for you and your business!

The parts of a sales funnel should automate your sales and reinforce your existing processes, not make you reinvent how you and your team work.

A Basic Funnel Breakdown

A primary funnel (and this is our approach to building successful sales funnel development) is comprised of three stages:

• Your Offer – What you're selling.
• Your Follow-up – Your communication with your lead once they're in your sales process.
• Your Traffic – The people coming to your website or landing page.

You get sales when you combine all three – traffic, your offer, and a follow-up process!

These three parts of a sales funnel are the minimum you'd expect to see in an effective funnel. Let's break them down so you know exactly what comes with each.

1. Your Offer

You cannot expect to have sales if you have nothing to sell. It should go without saying, but some small business owners don't realize they get no deals because they have no offers. In these cases, their bottom line won't reflect increased web visitors.

For your sales funnel to work, you need to have a clear, well-defined, branded product (or productized service) to sell.

Video Sales Page

At a minimum, you need one of the most elementary parts of a sales funnel: a page where the potential customer can click the "Add To Cart" button. This would be your "sales page". Also, thanks to our short attention spans, this page should have at least one Sales Video. Many more people would rather watch than read.

Typically, for offers under $100, a sales video is about all you need to sell.

Downsell / Upsell Pages

To maximize your average customer value, you'll also want to create downsells and upsells, another way to say complimentary products. These are products of a lower or higher price than the initial offer. They will be shown to customers of the initial offer accordingly.

So, if a sales page visitor doesn't buy, they might be presented with the down-sell through an exit pop. On the other hand, if they believe, they will see an upsell on the next page before they get access to the product.

Live or Automated Webinars

If your offer is more than a few hundred bucks or is complex, you'll want to sell it through a webinar. The webinar must be scripted, recorded, edited, and set up to play throughout the day.

We've had the best luck with starting webinars every 15 minutes in most markets. Sometimes, though, they test better when they're set to start every night at, say, 9:00 PM or deliver immediately after registration. Each niche is a little different.

Product

Now, what could your offer be? It could be anything from a physical product to a digital service. A pair of shoes, coaching, consulting, an eBook, a DVD, a downloadable training course, a monthly service, or yearly access to a cloud app.

If you create it and there are buyers for it - it's your offer!

Lead magnet

Before the offer, it's best practice to show people a free offer (called a "lead magnet"). Most website visitors won't be familiar with your brand. This is why they won't buy right away. But still, you don't want them to leave empty-handed.

So, instead of driving traffic to a sales page, you'd want an opt-in page where people give up their email to download a freebie. You can add them to your mailing list and contact them again.

(We always split-test a few things when running traffic for our funnel clients. Usually, we promote a lead magnet and a webinar side-by-side to see where our leads are the cheapest!)

2. Follow-up

The reason why sales funnels have gained in popularity is that they can work for you on autopilot.

Parts of a sales funnel are the exact replacement for a sales process in a brick-and-mortar business, plus they can be fully or semi-automated. Funnels are a nearly set-and-forget solution to attract, nurture and convert customers.

Automated Email Sequences

Let's assume someone enters your funnel by filling out a form. Right after that, you need to have an automated lead nurturing process in place.

So, when people subscribe to your email list, an automated email sequence is triggered. Whether Monday morning or Sunday at midnight, computerized workflows will take over and do the heavy lifting for your marketing on autopilot.

Follow-Up Sales Funnel Guide Checklist

To create Email Automation, you will need:

1. Email marketing service with automation (and optional website tracking features)
2. Emails (copy, images)
3. Automated email sequences are set up to serve different goals or segments

In the sales funnels we deploy for clients, we usually write and schedule between 20 and 25 emails before we go live!

This way, every marketing automation contingency is accounted for. If someone registers for the webinar OR doesn't register for the webinar OR buys OR doesn't buy... We have already automated a response specifically for actions that could be taken.

Endless Automation

You might be wondering where the follow-up stage ends. Well, you can stop following up when a prospect becomes a customer. But then why not have them become a repeat buyer? Email automation can be an infinite process you can set up once and have it work for your business 24/7.

Most parts of a sales funnel have a pre-defined marketing term already done... 30 or 45 days is standard for our clients. So, when someone gets into their funnel, all of the marketing is handled for at least 30 days.

Then, after 30 days, they either get added to the next funnel (Funnel Stacking) or weekly broadcast emails and newsletters take over.

That way, there's always continuity in your marketing messages. And if your prospects and customers jump down another rabbit hole for your next offer - that's awesome!

Setting up the CRM and marketing automation can be tricky. Still, it is doable and 100% worth the effort, as it will put you closer to finally achieving your goals of generating a monthly passive income.

3. Traffic

Sometimes, when you approach a web developer or choose to work with a "Funnel Page Building Software," you won't have a plan for getting traffic. Sometimes, this is on purpose. Web developers are paid media experts. And 'funnel software' does integrate with Facebook or Google Ads.

As far as we're concerned - this is a little bit like selling someone an electric car but not including an extension cord to plug it into the outlet in your garage. You can't hope to have an automated sales process without people there to buy your stuff.

In reality, you wouldn't expect to sell without having a way of getting the right people to see your offer.

Organic vs. Paid Media/Ads

Unless your website already has enough organic traffic (from Google search results), you need a traffic method to attract people interested in your offer.

That is why we are advocates of traffic as a significant part of a sales funnel, AND it's also why we start every sales funnel conversation with traffic! Then, once the funnel is built, you've already got ads ready to go live to promote your landing pages. And, if you have assets like an email list or a social media following, we account for those in the rollout phase!

Traffic  Checklist

Parts of a Sales Funnel: Putting It All Together

In short, all of the above elements are essential for a sales funnel. They won't all be needed for every horn, but they should get you a good overview of the things you'll need to have in place before launching.

In the past five years, we've built and launched over 400 sales funnels in almost every niche. The absolute most popular types of sales funnels we've deployed are:

• Automated Webinar Sales Funnels: The Call To Action is a sales call or a purchase through an order form for higher ticket offers.
• Video Sales Funnels: Featuring a one-click upsell and downsell sales process to maximize customer value.
• eCommerce Sales Funnels: Also with upsell and downsell functionality, but for physical products :0)
• Survey Sales Funnels: These work well in highly volatile advertising markets and where you need to segment buyers into buckets before marketing automation.

We'd love to learn more about your business and determine which sales funnel will work best for you!

Plus, our team will manage the whole process (even the product or lead magnet creation) and deliver a complete done-for-you sales funnel customized to your needs -- but still proven to convert because of the tested funnel parts (e.g., opt-in page) that we plugin and optimize.

Our experts can work from square one to create an offer, design and build all pages, write high-converting copy, and set up automated email sequences. We create, test, and deliver sales funnels that operate like clockwork 24/7 without you having to do the work.

If you'd like to learn how to create and launch a digital product for your business, complete with an upsell funnel that helps you sell it, check out the Launchpad Accelerator at DWY!  Click here to learn more...

The post Unlock Explosive Growth: A Sales Funnel Guide Revealing Essential Parts of a Sales Funnel! appeared first on Done For You.

Today we’re going to talk about email marketing automation. So this is going to finish up our week of email marketing. Last Monday, we talked about email marketing as a discipline, the software you’re going to need. On Tuesday we talked about lead generation and lead magnets. Wednesday we talked about email copy. Yesterday we talked about sequencing. And then today we’re going to talk about automation.

All of those things come into play and it all is very formulaic in how you end up rolling that stuff out. These are the following things that you need to do.

• First: you need to have the software
• Second: you need to have leads
• Third: you need to have a copy
• Fourth: you need to put that copy together inside sequences or campaigns, depending on what software you’re going to choose
• Fifth: you need to trigger that email to go out

There is a method to this madness, which is this helps you grow your business online. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. That’s why we do what we do.

There are three places that I’m going to take you through today.

1. The first is our CRM software called Axis. I’m going to show you how to trigger workflows, trigger campaigns inside Axis using that.
2. The second that we’re going to go, is we’re going to go into Ontraport. I’m going to show you rules-based triggers the run in email marketing automation so that you can start to get some ideas about how to set that up in your business.
3. The third-place we’re going to go is a piece of software called Zapier. Inside Zapier I’m going to show you how I have set it up. If somebody hits a landing page and they are in my CRM, then I can see inside Slack that they are on that page.

It’s funny because I kind of have a running feed of if I know your email address and stuff and you hit an important page on the website. I see it in Slack, the whole team sees it in Slack. If it happens a couple of times throughout a couple of days, I mean, there are times where I’ll pick up the phone and say, “Hey look, I mean, you keep coming back to the same website. Is there anything I can do to help?”

It’s creepy to a degree, but we are also an email marketing automation – or marketing automation company at least.

At the same time, I’m like, “Eh.” It’s kind of a gray area, but it’s kind of what we do. In terms of looking at it on a macro level, if you have a high-end physical product company. You’re doing eCommerce sales and somebody comes back on Tuesday and then they come on Wednesday and then they come on Thursday and then they come on Friday. They’re thinking about that decision. They’re thinking about: Do you think you should pick up the phone and call them? Absolutely. It would be awesome. And now you can do that using automation.

Different Ways of Email Automation

There are lots of different ways you can cut it up and stack it up. But I’m going to show you some of the stuff that we do and then we’ll go from there.

1. DFY CRM Software: Axis

The first place that I think we’re going to go, we’re going to go over into Axis. Axis is our CRM. We built it from scratch. This is Zapier now. So Zapier is the place we’re going.

Inside Axis, I’m just going to kind of walk around Axis a little bit and just show it off a little. This is a fully-featured CRM. It’s an email marketing workflow, email marketing CRM. It doesn’t do a lot of the high-end sales pipeline stuff. But it does a lot of email marketing automation, trigger-based marketing, that kind of stuff. We have our main dashboard.

Dashboard and Marketplace

This is just a test account, but we have a dashboard and a marketplace. Inside the marketplace, you can add different apps so we can integrate it with Zapier and Twillio and there’s the email copy app, which used to be Scriptly, and then we have the CRM. We have analytics that used to be Statly. And then we have the page builder and we’re adding all of our apps into this.

Contacts

Underneath the CRM piece, we have our CRM. This is our main dashboard. If we go down into contacts though, you see that we have some contacts in here and each of those contacts, if we get into a customer record, so we’re just going to go here, we’re going to go into this customer record and then we can actually call from right inside the platform and also send a text message from right inside the platform.

That’s important for the automation piece, for the email marketing automation. We have the first name, last name, all of the major information. If we have their address, it’ll show a map. We can sort based on the company. Put them in email automation and tag them and then add attachments to their account. So if we have documents or photos or whatever that we want to attach to their account, then we can do that there.

Forms

Then we have forms and the forms are all drag and drop. So every record inside the customer record there, you can drag it into the field of play and it will add it, it’ll stack it up. And then as soon as somebody enters the information in that form field, it gets saved to the CRM and then triggers automation.

Messages

The next step is the messages. So there are two different kinds of messages you can send out of Axis. You can send a text message. We can drop a text message in the email marketing automation campaign the same way that we would drop an email in. Somebody opts in, they get a text message and an email at the same shot. Or if we want to just send a text message, we can do that.

There are no third-party integrations. It’s all just native to the software because the third-party stuff sucks to set up and it sucks to support. And there was one time our client called me and we had his integration set up in Infusionsoft, which is now Keep, and he called me and it was a Saturday at nine o’clock and he’s like, “This is super urgent.” He’s like, “I need to send a text message out to my list.” And I was like, “Okay.” Sit down and have the text for the text message.

It takes me an hour and 15 minutes to set up this text message because it isn’t just selecting people and sending a text message. It is creating a campaign that has a timestamp that has a text message to send through this third party platform to Twillio and then add everybody in and sit there and wait to make sure it fires and then watch it fire and then then it’s done.

That’s a whole lot of shit for nothing. What we ended up doing was just doing a native integration inside Axis for that. In the message center, you have emails, you have texts. Now where it all comes together, where all the email marketing automation comes together is here in the campaign, the campaign viewer. So if we’re looking at the report fulfillment piece here, we’re going to go into the campaign and now we have entry points and these are our triggers.

The triggers are all of the ways that this email marketing automation sequence is going to end up firing off. The trigger is the report form, it’s like a form being filled out, so one of these forms. Or it is a tag being added. So we can add any form we want or we can add any tag we want as an entry point, as a trigger.

If that entry point fires, then the rest of this stuff ends up playing out, the rest of this campaign automation. Now underneath the campaign automation, this is all the stuff that’s going to end up happening when these entry points end up firing. So here we have emails, emails are yellow and text messages are green. And then we have our delays. So what we do is we stack up emails and text messages or just emails or just text messages based on how often they want to go out.

If we want to drop a delay in here, then we do that. So this delay is going to be for let’s say four hours. It’s going to be zero-days, four hours. We hit save and then this … So the email is going to go out first and then the text message is going to go out second. So four hours later and then 24 hours after that email and text files at the same time.

That’s how you would end up setting automation inside Axis. It’s powerful when you start getting some pretty complex workflows down. How we end up doing it, how we set up all of our clients is, what we’ll do is we’ll put together a lead magnet promo sequence or a webinar promo sequence. They go through the webinars, the webinar promo sequence, and then they complete that sequence and then they kick over into the webinar replay sequence. They just bounce from one sequence to another sequence. And how you do that is you can drag these tags down at the bottom.

After somebody completes this campaign automation, they then bounce to the next sequence. So it ends up being nice that way just from an automation standpoint. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can queue up your email marketing automation, your email messages and text messages based on them filling out a form or a tag being applied to their account.

You can do all that stuff inside Zapier, which means you can integrate a lot of the tools. Does anybody have any questions on this side? Because I’m going to flip over into Ontraport and show you something else that’s kind of cool, which is URL-based triggers. All right, it looks like we’re good. Okay, cool.

2. Ontraport

Ontraport is a different CRM. We still use Ontraport a lot because Ontraport has order forms and Axis does not have order forms yet. You want to trigger something when somebody buys, you want to trigger an onboarding sequence. But this is Ontraport.

I’ve been with Ontraport for seven or eight years. Great piece of software. It just that a lot of our clients don’t need it, which is why we built Axis. Inside Ontraport, I’m underneath our message list here, so all of the messages that we have sent. And how I work it is, so I have these sequences that are built and the sequences are the same thing as these campaigns. Not these campaigns but … so a sequence, a campaign, same thing, different day. I have sequences for anything you can imagine.

If we go up to like just some of them done for your sequences. Let’s see. So if somebody does something then they end up getting added into one of these sequences. So here you can see there’s a funnel factor autoresponder, 1400 emails have been sent. There are 1400 people in this email marketing automation sequence at the moment. 4,300 emails sent.

Each of those ends up going and there’s the fulfillment email and then there’s some promo stuff in there. But the ones I want to talk about specifically are here, this page visit abandonment sequence. So let me see if I can make this any bigger. Does it go bigger? Yeah, it does. Okay, cool. So here we have page visit abandonment. We’re going to talk about this one. Yeah. This page visit abandonment Facebook ads promo. I’ve reworked this one a couple of times. The same with the sales funnel one.

But in here, this Facebook ads promo sequence, basically what happens is, is when somebody goes to doneforyou.com … I love setting up this kind of automation for clients. It’s just, I don’t want to talk about their stuff. So it’s not great to talk about them as an example especially publicly like this. So not this page, this ad management, Facebook advertising ad management page.

Basically what happens is whenever somebody goes to this page and we know who they are, they’ve already opted into a lead magnet or they have been to the website of CRM or something, then what happens is, is … Or they’ve chatted in here, there’s a rule that fires to kick off or end the email marketing automation.

If you go down here to rules, well the rule that fires is this one, Facebook BSL, remove promo sequence. Yep. Right here. This rule fires and what it does is it says that when somebody visits the sales page. When somebody visits this page, then what they’re going to do is we’re going to add them to the abandonment sequence. Take them off of all promo emails. When contact is added to the page visit abandonment sequence and they are subscribed to the promo sequence, then remove them from the promo sequence. What that does is it triggers the next step.

When somebody hits this page and gets added to this promo sequence, remove them from the other sequence. So if you think about it like an if-then sentence. If they do this, then this happens. And if they don’t, then that thing doesn’t happen. So in the same breath, there’s another rule that fires at the same time.

Facebook Ads View Automation

This is the other rule that works in conjunction with it. Here we have this trigger in the email marketing automation campaign. The contact visits Facebook advertising. Right there, services, Facebook advertising. Contact visits Facebook advertising or contact visits Facebook advertising, FB simple, which is not a split test that is in play anymore. I’m just going to delete it.

I’m always testing different stuff. If they visit this page and the contact is not subscribed to the abandonment sequence, then subscribe them to the abandonment sequence. What we’re doing there is we don’t want to overwrite somebody who’s already in the abandonment sequence.

If they’re already in the abandonment sequence, we don’t want to start them back from the beginning. That’s why we run this little condition and then we add them to be abandonment sequence from there. The other thing it does is this segues over into … I did make a change. So I’m going to save this guy.

3. Zapier

This segues over into Zapier. So check this out. I’m going to log into Zapier and Zapier has the integration with Slack. So watch. Oops. There it is. So DFY VSL page visits, that’s the private folder I’m looking for. Do you guys like this stuff? Are you into it? It gets a little bit complicated. You’ve got to think about it a little bit more than just a passing thought. I mean, this kind of automation tends to get pretty deep, the email marketing automation.

Facebook ads, page visit. So if we look at this zap, what you’re going to find is that … So when a tag is added in Ontraport, the tag is going to be DFY page view, Facebook ads, then we are going to send a message to Slack. And that message is going to be on deck, Facebook ads, sales page, visitor. And then the different information from Ontraport.

What it’s doing is when the URL fires that the person is in, then they get added to a tag, they get added to a sequence. And that sequence then tells Slack, tells Zapier which tells Slack that to send us a message. So it ends up working out nice from an email marketing automation front. It is pretty technical. So setting it up is kind of a chore. I’m happy to go through and look at how we can apply some of this email marketing automation to your company.

At the end of the day, what happens is you get a nice workflow. It takes a couple of hours to set up, takes a little bit of time to set up. But when you do it, then you end up having this workflow where the lead comes in, and then things just start triggering.

The lead comes in, they buy something, they don’t buy something, then they get sent into this email sequence or that email sequence based on what they’re doing. Based on what they’re doing or what they are doing or have done or whatever. Slack is telling you where they’re coming from or what they’re doing on your website. It is feeding you all the information on them, whether it’s phone number or email address or whatever. And then all of a sudden you’re just kind of rocking. So before you know it, you got all kinds of deal flow happening, all kinds of things happening that are moving people towards your business.

It’s interesting. I don’t have Slack on this computer, my live streaming computer. But at the end of the day, I mean, somebody comes in from an ad, they opt-in, you have their email address at that point. Then they hit a website or they hit a page, a sales page or whatever. They hit the sales page, they’re clicking around the homepage. They go to some other important key view page. Then a notification pops up inside Slack and says, “Hey, this person’s on this page.”.

The first time it’s like, “Okay, they’re just kind of checking it out.” It’s so funny though when the email marketing automation fires and it’s like, “Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing.” And you can see them open up all of your sales pages to look at all of your different services.

NOTE: Click here to learn about putting together sales funnels that are entirely automated!

You can see how long they were on that page. Or you can log into a drift and start a message with them, or you can call them on the phone if you have their phone number. There are so many different ways to do it from an inbound marketing sense that it’s like … When it works, it works. It matches everything up and you’re off and running. So that is how you trigger actions based on intent.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is just buyer intent in general. So the person who clicks an ad and doesn’t opt-in, obviously they’re less qualified than the person who opts in. The person who opts in and then visits the sales page is more qualified than the person who doesn’t. And then, of course, the person who buys something is the most qualified of all. So it’s important to think about those stages when you’re building out your email marketing automation campaigns.

Stage one, they’re just learning about you. They’re just getting to know you, they’re just really getting started. They might not even have a real good idea of what they’re doing yet. Then the opt-in gives them a little bit more information about you. It lets them discover a little bit more about you and what you do, what you stand for. And then when you move them closer to being a buyer or when they buy something, they’re invested in what it is you’re doing. They’re invested in bettering themselves and getting that transformation that they are looking for. So it’s a nice journey. It’s a nice process. And you want to set up your email marketing automation to adapt to that.

You have your cold traffic folks and then they get warmer and warmer and warmer. So when you’re setting up your email marketing automation campaigns, you need your promo sequences, you need your fulfillment sequences, you need your abandonment sequence. It doesn’t even have to be shopping cart abandonment, but they go to this page, and then they don’t take the action that you want them to take, well then you should send them emails and say, “Okay. You were on this page. What happened?” Maybe it was a tech issue. I just had that this morning. Somebody sent an email and said, “I tried closing this page down, it wouldn’t close.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Sorry. I’ll X out of it and I’ll fix it later.” Do you know what I mean? Unfortunately, it’s just how it works.

But in setting up email marketing automation, just start slow, start small, write some email copy, put it together into campaigns and then ask yourself, what is the best way to trigger these campaigns? Is it a tag? Is it a URL page visit or whatever?

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start. Book a time with my team and we will get some ideas. Go through, talk about your business, talk about what you’re selling, all that stuff, and put together an action plan for you. Whether it’s paid traffic or funnels or automation or whatever. Just see how it works. Or send me a message on Facebook. That works too.

Next week, so I’m a little up in the air about what we’re going to learn next week. I’m half thinking it’s going to be Facebook ads, like going through and doing a video views campaign.

For those of you watching, if you want to just chime in, that’d be awesome. But the options are creating digital products one by one and having a session on every kind of digital product or doing Facebook ads, so Facebook video ad campaigns. That’s my thought. It’s going to be one or the other. So if you have an idea of what you want to learn, go to doneforyou.com/GSD and let me know. I’ll talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.

The post How Email Marketing Automation Increase Your Revenue appeared first on Done For You.

Today I want to share a little bit about email marketing campaigns, including the strategy behind setting up effective drip campaigns and some tips on getting every last ounce of conversion out of them.

In email marketing automation, there are triggers, campaigns, and goals.

We talked a little bit about triggers in a previous video (available here). Today though, we’re gonna talk about setting up email marketing campaigns.

The most important thing about a campaign is really that you’re able to set it up the way you want to, and you’re able to set it up easily.

What Makes Up An Email Marketing Campaign?

When you set up an email marketing campaign, there are a few things you need to think about.

First of all, how is somebody going to be getting to that campaign? That’s where the trigger comes in. Are they going to fill out a web form on a landing page? Is a tag going to be applied to their customer record? Are they hitting a website and being tracked through analytics? Did they not do something? Maybe not open an email? Did they open an email? What is the trigger in that piece?

The next step is, “If they do THIS or THAT, then what happens?” What campaign do we put together for that person?

Setting Up A Successful Drip Campaign

Campaigns are largely made up of messages.

A message can take the form of an email, a text message, a phone call, or a direct mail piece.  You could also consider push notifications or other forms of outbound communication like a chatbot.

The second necessary element of an email marketing campaign is what we call a ‘delay.’  The delay makes sure that all of your messages don’t stack up on top of each other. When you send a block of emails (like an email autoresponder), you need to put a delay in between those messages so you space them out, whether it’s hours, days, or weeks.

In short, you need to predefine how often those messages are going to fire and what the content of those messages will be.  If you need a hand in planning all of this out, set up an Action Plan call and we’ll help you!

An Example Email Marketing Campaigns in the Real Estate Niche

There’s a Done For You Sales Funnel client that we just rolled out.  They’re in the real estate business and we’re working with them on getting seller leads.

What our client wants to do with those seller leads is get in touch with them as quickly as possible because they know that if they don’t – the deal will die on the vine quickly.

So, when somebody signs up as a lead on their website:

1. They immediately, within five minutes, get assigned as a phone call task to one of the sales reps.  The task is added to the task management piece of the drip campaign.
2. Then five minutes after that, an email gets sent to the prospect.
3. 30 minutes after that text message gets sent to the prospect.
4. An hour after that, another task gets added to the sales reps dashboard.

This might sound a bit aggressive, and it is…  But this is a hot lead!  Someone ready to sell their house.

Basically, within the first day, this person is receiving one email, one text, and up to three phone calls.

Drip Campaign Phases

All good email marketing campaigns are broken down into phases, or stages, that help the prospect move through the buying cycle.  This is all part of why you need a sales funnel.

If any of the drip campaign messages above land, they connect with the seller, and the seller schedules a site visit or a home visit.  That campaign is then officially completed – it’s considered satisfied.

That, my friend, is a goal.  (And goals are the topic of our next video!)

Oftentimes, goals are identified when a tag is added or an action is taken inside the contact record.  Perhaps someone buys something or schedules an appointment…  The goal is fired and that that moves the prospect out of one email marketing campaign into the next.

Webinar Email Marketing Campaigns

We’ve also set drip campaigns up when somebody signs up for an automated webinar (or live webinar for that matter).  After the webinar is done, the prospect would receive an email from the Webinar Replay Sequence four hours later.  That email automation campaign would contain the link to the webinar replay. If the prospect doesn’t buy, then 20 hours after that they get the next email. Then a day after that they get the next email.

… And you can marry text messages and phone calls up with that campaign if you want!  After all, it’s just another type of message.

Now there’s some cool stuff you can do in campaigns. You have your messages and you have your delays. Those are the two big pieces.

You can also add logic.

Email Marketing Logic

With logic, you can take action on a yes or no answer.

If your prospect does THIS, add a tag.  If they do THAT, add a different tag.  And in adding a tag, you can fire off the next email marketing campaign!

A great example is from an ad management manufacturing client of ours. He calls this email marketing campaign a “Proposal Feedback Loop.”  Basically what he had us build into Axis was the ability to send a proposal to his customers that either gets accepted or rejected.

His customers get an email every day, on autopilot, with the link to the proposal in it.  The copy in the email is written to get to one of two answers – yes or no.

• If they hit the YES button, then route the lead to the sales rep.
• If they hit the NO button, send them to a survey asking them why they didn’t like the proposal. Was it 20% too high, 30% too high, 50% too high, whatever…  Then, our client has a better idea of what they can do in their future to service this particular customer.

Email Marketing Campaigns That Get Results

Lots of really cool stuff you can do in campaigns as they’re built. Messages, delays, task management, logic.

We’re constantly adding stuff into Axis as we see it work for clients and as we’re asked to build custom.

If you want to talk about email campaign structure, what your outbound marketing play is, or if you just want us to dive in and build a campaign for your business…  Fill out this short form and book an action plan call with us.

We’re happy to brainstorm and put together an action plan for you!

GSDdaily Episode 24

Today, we are going to talk about email marketing campaigns. It was funny, my son is watching TV right out there and he was like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “Working.” “What are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m going to talk to my computer.” It’s what I do every morning at 10 o’clock, I talk to my computer. All right, so this session is email marketing campaigns, sequencing, and automation that converts. This is email marketing week and basically what we’ve been doing… Shut my door there. [inaudible 00:00:49] Sebastian decides he wants to bang stuff around.

Basically, this week has been entirely about email marketing. On Monday, we talked about email, basically working with email lists, the software for email lists, CRMs, marketing automation, the whole deal. And then we talked about list building and lead magnets on Tuesday. And then… Water? Is right there, yeah. You can take it out there. Okay. And then Wednesday, we talked about email copy and today we’re going to talk about sequencing. Email copy and sequencing kind of go hand in hand. Email copy is really about sending emails that get opens, that get clicks, the whole deal. When you send an email, you want that email to do something.

You want somebody, the reader, to do something. Click go over to a blog post, to watch a video, buy something, sign up for a webinar, the whole deal. Now, an email marketing campaign, when you think about it, is a collection of emails. Oftentimes one email isn’t enough to get somebody to do the thing you want them to do. You need to send two emails or three emails or four emails. And right now, there is more people opening and reading email than there was a month ago. Open rates and we send a lot of email inside of our CRM and then also for clients on behalf of clients and for ourselves, and we’ve seen 7, 8, 9% better open rate across the board with all of our clients’ email marketing campaigns and with all of our campaigns.

The nice thing about right now is people are engaging with email more, which means email is more effective. It also means that business owners who have an email list are able to pivot faster. They’re able to pivot better in launching new products and launching new services because they have distribution, they have an email list. Today what we’re going to talk about, we’re going to go through email marketing campaigns and I have a number of blog posts that I wrote quite a while ago. We’re going to kind of dig through those a little bit. And then I also have a little presentation. I have created a lot of content around email marketing over the years because of our CRM, because of the software that we’ve generated and created.

What we’re going to do is I’m going to go through a short little presentation that talks about the buyer journey and how people end up moving through your sequences, how they move through your campaigns and how all of that should be automated. And then we’re going to go through some examples of these email marketing campaigns and we’re going to go that way. Let me switch. I’m going to share a different screen. We’re going to go here. All right. And there we go. All right. Email marketing campaigns, sequencing, and automation that converts. By automating email marketing campaigns, what you’re doing is you’re influencing the buyer life cycle. Now it isn’t necessarily just somebody who comes to your website and they either buy or they don’t.

Now what we’re doing is we’re able to send emails based on their visit sometimes using email retargeting. You can do even some retargeting through postcards. You have that additional kind of automated marketing campaign. And then, of course, you have the retargeting ads, but what you’re doing is you’re reaching out to all the people who leave and trying to influence them into your products and services. Email marketing campaigns also let you engage with the buyer after they are opt-in.

I’ve said this many, many, many times. A prospect is never ever, ever, ever more engaged than the second they opt-in. The second after they are opt-in. They opt-in on your landing page. They flip over to that confirmation page, whatever you put there as an offer is going to double in terms of conversion because people are just super engaged the second after they opt-in for something.

They’re waiting, they’re expecting something to be there for them to consume. It might be the PDF that they opted in, but ideally what you want to do is you want to email that PDF to their email inbox and use that opportunity to move them into a webinar, to move them into an offer, to do some sort of a low-end kind of tripwire thing. But the person, the prospect has never more engaged than they are in that second. Email marketing also lets you bond more effectively with your prospects. And this part is super, super important because people don’t… A good conversion rate on a sales page, 2%, 3%, depending. That means 98%, 97% of the people who hit your website, hit your sales pages, they’re not going to buy from you the first time out.

If you can get them onto an email list and then market to them over time, then they’re going to know and trust you. You’re going to be able to bond with them. And email marketing campaigns let you do that because you’re sending them blog posts, you’re sending them videos, you’re sending them live streams, you’re sending them all of the material that you’re creating to grow your business, grow your brand, the whole thing. But you’re also using it to bond with them. And they’re growing in that relationship as they go. Email marketing campaigns help in that manner and it can all be automated, and so it can trigger based on if they open this email, they get this email. It’s really nice in terms of just giving them exactly what they want.

The fourth point is, you can promote the right product at the right time. So last week, we talked about the survey segmentation last Friday. In our Livestream, we talked about survey segmentation, putting people in buckets and then sending them an email. This is kind of a continuation of that because the email that goes out based on how they answer a survey is going to be predetermined by the things they’re interested in. If somebody comes through your marketing funnel and they are interested in, let’s say, HIIT workouts, so they’re interested in HITT workouts and then for the next two weeks you can send them HIIT workouts, high-intensity interval training type of workouts.

And you know that they’re going to be into it because they told you they were into it, but all of that can be automated in the email marketing campaign. It ends up being a super nice way of just automating processes. You can also work with abandonments. The cart abandonment on an order form is typically like 70, 80%, which means you can reclaim up to 70 or 80% of your sales or of your possible sales by putting email marketing campaigns in place. And then you can also re-engage death leads. People who haven’t opened an email in 30 days or 60 days or whatever, typically you can send them through a re-engagement campaign and then pull them back into your process.

In understanding the buyer life cycle, there are five different buckets before they actually buy something from you. The first is they’re brand new to you. They’re brand new, they’re just becoming aware of you, they just signed up for your lead magnet. They’re just learning about you. The second kind of stage is they’re on your email list, but they’re still not really sure what you do or whether your stuff is worthwhile or not. They kind of know that you know what the hell you’re talking about, but they’re not in it yet. They haven’t decided but they’re loosely interested. Then the third step is they’ve opened a few emails, they kind of feel like they’re getting to know you, they like you, they trust you, and now they just kind of need to see some offers.

And they need to see what you’re working on. Is it a product, is a service, whatever. The fourth stage, they’ve watched the sales video and they’ve left without buying for whatever reason. Now, they’re getting warm, so they’re approaching a deal. Then the fifth stage is they’ve clicked an add to cart button and they didn’t complete the order. They hit the button, they went to the order form, they didn’t have their credit, whatever, and they didn’t end up processing the order. They either buy or they don’t. And really this is were most kind of marketers and business owners leave it. They kind of front-load everything so that everything is based around this inbound marketing piece.

But then once it gets to the rubber meets the road, this person is on the fence and they’re just waiting for you or somebody to push them over the edge and buy something, and then they’re going to be a hyper buyer with you. This is really where most marketers and business owners just kind of sit back and let it play out. They assume that if somebody didn’t buy, it’s because they didn’t want the product, they didn’t want the service. When they aren’t right for the offer, they didn’t want the product bad enough to pull out their wallet or the sales copy didn’t quite do enough to sell it or they need to add bonuses, or they need to redesign the page or whatever. When what really happened was the new prospect doesn’t know you or your company well enough to place an order.

They haven’t bonded with you that well yet, or they didn’t have time to go through the whole sales video or to try to understand the offer. This is kind of where the price and complexity thing comes in play. The higher the price, the higher complexity, the more the different things you need to do in order to work through the sales funnel. A low ticket, low complexity offer, it’s going to be great for a sales video. An upper ticket or higher ticket, higher complexity offer is going to need a sales to call like an automated webinar or a sales call. It’s all part of this automation piece. Or they didn’t have their credit card on them. I mean, maybe the credit card was at home or at the office or whatever.

Or they wanted to think about it or sleep on it and see if it really was a good idea. I mean, there are lots of reasons why people don’t buy it. Now, I mean my son just walked in here three times while we started this thing and it’s like, okay. It’s always jarring. If you’re just taken out of your element now, especially with the pandemic, it’s like everybody’s just kind of in a funk. There’s some of that at play.

A notification comes in or they feel like they needed to be checking the news or whatever. There’s a lot of external factors that come into the purchase or non-purchase decision that you have no control over. Now, let’s kind of put this thinking into action. We talked about buyer stages, talked about pieces of the buyer journey and as they relate to email and how you can kind of correspond with some email marketing campaigns for it.

Now, after you get the new lead you, you want to deliver that lead magnet through email, then you want to present an offer of some kind and you want to pay attention to what they’re doing. We use a piece of software called Inspectlet for this, I-N-S-P-E-C-T-L-E-T.com. You can read it on the screen. But basically it records the screen of somebody who is going through your funnel. Another one is Hotjar, a great piece of software. And if they escalate, they go through the buying process and then they can go through your upsells, you want to track them through the process. If they buy or sign up, then you’ve accomplished your mission. You have a new buyer in your mix.

Now, here’s kind of the steps as they play out. We don’t really do a lot of image ads anymore. This is kind of how we ended up putting stuff like this together. Step one is you want to build trust. And how we build trust is we don’t go over directly. Usually, we have a couple of email marketing campaigns that are running really cheap cold traffic leads right now. But typically, you want to send them to a blog post or an advertorial or video or some piece of content that is going to give value without necessarily detracting from value. And I think next week we’re going to do a full week on Facebook ads for this so we can put this together, learn how to do Facebook videos, the whole deal.

Step One: Build Trust

Step one is you want to build trust and this is just an image ad with just an ad. And then that image ad goes to this blog post. Notice we have the same images, so the same images in both scenarios. They go to this page and then there’s a blog post. And the blog post has sub-headlines, there’s a couple of calls to action in there with links and you know what else. Banner on the upper right-hand side, more posts. It is an engagement piece, something that they can just read. They don’t have to do anything, they don’t have to take any action. They can back up, go back to Facebook and whatever. The point is that our email marketing campaigns have already started because now they’re on our retargeting list.

Now whether it’s with AdRoll, whether it’s on Facebook, whatever, we’ve placed the pics where we’re able to get back in front of them with our second ad, which is this, there it is.

Step Two: Get the Lead

In this process is we want to get the lead. They know who we are, what the offer is. They don’t and they don’t know what the offer is, but they know in general what we do. They’ve seen a blog post and now we’re trying to get them back to an opt-in form, a lead magnet form so that they can give us their email address, and that’s what this is doing. This is a free workshop, or it can be a free report or lead magnet or whatever, all the stuff we talked about on Tuesday.

It takes them to a landing page, this landing page. You’ve seen it before because it is one of our best converting landing page styles. We’ve got a text on the left, an image button on the rights, two-step opt-in. They enter their email address here and then we’ve got their email. At this point, we can start bonding and promoting products to them so we can start moving them through some of our processes. We send them the lead magnet fulfillment email, which is, hey, thanks so much for downloading this. Here’s the link to your thing. And then pay attention to your email over the next couple of days.

Goal number one is to get them the lead magnet, the thing they just downloaded. We can also pre-frame the rest of what we need them to do, which is there’s a webinar here, there’s a sales video here, there’s a product, there are blog posts. But you don’t want to jump into deep too earlier so else you can scare them off. It’s like you can’t walk up to a girl and propose to her and then hope that she’s going to say yes. It’s just not going to work that way, but you want to warm up. Do you know what I mean? My wife’s probably watching this laughing right now because it took us 13 years to get married. It was fucking funny.

Step Three: Present an Offer

All right, so step number three is we want to present an offer. After they are opt-in, they get the lead magnet and then step three is we present an offer. The offer itself, we’ve got a headline, we’ve got the video and then an add to cart button below it. Chelsea just laughed, this is my wife. We want to present an offer in step number three. Now here, basically what we’re doing is whether it’s a sales video, whether it’s a full-motion sales video, we want to get that first purchase. In this particular case, it’s a free trial, free 14-day trial for a piece of software. In other cases, it’s a free plus shipping offer for a book, or a $37 digital product, or a 495 digital product, or whatever.

But this is all kind of low-end stuff and what we’re doing is we’re trying to pick off sales at this point, pick off buyers. And once that happens, then we can March them through an upsell path. And if they don’t buy this, which most people don’t, I mean 95, 96% of people don’t buy this offer. Then what we want to do is we want to send them emails to bring them back here. That’s where the email marketing campaigns come in. That’s where the automation comes in and the sequencing comes in because we want to bring them back to this point, have them click the add to cart button, and then move them into the next space. At this point, they either continue signing up or they don’t. They’re at the sales page and they either hit the button or they don’t.

If they don’t, they get product promo emails. If they do, they hit the add to cart. They leave, they get the shopping cart abandonment sequence and they’re removed from the product emails. Basically, send them product emails until they add them to the cart. Then once they add to the cart, we remove them from the promo emails, and then we send them a shopping cart abandonment sequence. We’re stepping them up through the email marketing campaigns to get them into what we need them to at the time we need them to do it. Once they get the shopping cart abandonment sequences and they pull the trigger, they are a new member, then we remove them from all prospect lists unless there’s something else that they’re going to be ascending to. Unless there’s something that they’re going to move to.

And you can also mail them upsell offers. For this campaign, there are some services on the backside. Some of those services and stuff can play out. That’s what email marketing campaigns are really meant to move you through, move a prospect through the buyer journey, understanding that they are going to drop off at some point.

That’s what the email marketing campaigns are 100% all about. Let’s talk about some jumping-off points here. For folks who didn’t buy, you want to make sure that you send them a download link, you want to make sure that they’ve got a way to get back to the sales page. Confirmation pages, a lot of times are hidden so what we’ll do is we’ll end up kind of lopping off the front side of that sales video, which is, hey, thanks so much for downloading the report.

We’ll take the first 30, 45 seconds off and then it just becomes a standalone sales page that you can throw anywhere in your site. That works out nice. You want to make sure to include language on bonuses or discounts if you’re going to offer those. And then you really want to promote that first offer for three or four days. Don’t assume that one email is going to be enough. Most people don’t open their first email. That’s accurate actually. 50, 55, 60% of people open that first lead magnet download email. The other 40% won’t, even though they just opted in for it, they just won’t. Sometimes it’s 70%. Literally, you want to engage them as quickly as possible on that page. I mean, full pattern or up style, you know what I mean.

But after that, you promote the offer for three or four days, if they pull the trigger, awesome, they are in the rest of your sequence. If they don’t, send them bonding emails and eventually try to pull them back into that. That’s how you would end up working email marketing campaigns from that front. If you have any questions on this presentation stuff, we’re going to kick through some blog posts and kind of talk about how it all plays out from a sequencing standpoint too. All right, we good? All right, cool. I’m going to stop sharing that presentation. That presentation has literally been waiting in the wings for four years. I wrote that and performed that a really long time ago. I can’t believe I remembered having it.

This page we’re streaming live on right now, so I’m not going to hit play. For all your content marketing junkies out there. Basically what I did was, I found this old blog post that was already optimized for the keyword phrase, email marketing campaigns and I dropped my new GSD Daily on this page. I’m going to grab the transcript and then I’m going to paste it all the way down here at the bottom of this content. This is broke, whatever. As I said, it’s old, which is going to add about 4,500 words with the keyword phrase, email marketing campaigns all through it. We’re going to be ranking like crazy for this keyword phrase to these old blog posts.

We talked about what makes up an email marketing campaign, setting up a successful drip campaign. We kind of covered on Monday, but just as a quick recap, what you want to do is you want to use a piece of software like Convert or Drip or ActiveCampaign or Hours, which is the access you want to basically drip these emails out based on what somebody does on your website. So what they buy, what they opt-in for, and all of those are triggered. If somebody opts in for a lead magnet, like what we talked about, if they opt-in for a lead magnet, then they’re able to receive the emails, getting them their lead magnet and then moving through the product promotional sequence.

Drip campaign phases, we talked about. Webinar email marketing campaigns and email marketing logic. I talked a little bit about logic. If you have a prospect, like how we do it in an active campaign, they go to this URL. If they go to the shopping cart abandonment page, that URL, then what we do is we turn on in the shopping cart abandonment sequence and we turn off our product promo sequences. That’s the logic that I’ve referred to here. If they go through and they hit a blog post with a certain phrase in the URL, then they’re added into that bucket.

As for us, how we use it is if you go to a blog post that has the phrase, email in it, then you’re put into an email bucket. Your marketing messages are going to be weighted more heavily towards email stuff. Whereas if it goes funnel, it’s going to be weighted more heavily to funnel stuff. That’s how the logic and the triggers end up working out. Some powerful email sequences you can’t afford not to have, so we talked about these. There’s a lot of different ways to kind of cut-up email. You have your email marketing sequences, which is basically anything that’s pre-populated. We always plan for the first 30 days of every client’s. Somebody comes in and we plan the first 30 days worth of client inbound marketing materials.

Usually involves three to four emails on promoting a webinar, six emails on promoting a webinar replay, three to four emails promoting sales videos. They step through those email sequences as they go. That is all pre-populated and that is all written from scratch and custom. They’re RSS email sequences. Every blog has an RSS feed unless you actively turn it off. Every time you publish a blog post, the RSS feed publishes its submits. And then the email marketing camp or the email marketing software will actually take that and send an email out with all of those blog posts in it.

It’s a way of automating your blog posts. The ones that are being sent, which is nice and it works, but you have to be able to format it well in order for it to work. And oftentimes, you’re going to find that not all blog posts are relevant to all people. You might send one to one group and another one to another group, and that’s where the bonding and the nurturing come in, in the play. Then you have your regular broadcasts. Yhat’s like every time I email these live streams out, it’s a broadcast email because I have to create new graphics, I got to create new links and there’s nothing I can pre-populate. I email them as broadcasts every morning.

I pick the audience that those people are going to be mailed to and I write the email, hit send, it’s mailed out as a broadcast. It’s a one-shot deal. I don’t automate it. I will automate the replays of these and throw them into sequences because those links never change. The broadcast is for all the one-off stuff. Transactional emails are anything transactional in nature. So things like order confirmations is a transactional email. Things like password reset emails. They’re usually things you have no control over unless you’re actually building software. So member onboarding emails when somebody signs up for a membership. So there’s lots of this kind of little transactional emails that it’s just important to note that they’re important because they usually get only fire when something good happens.

Well, I guess password changes aren’t really good or bad, but… So there’s that kind of email too. Those you’re going to need to kind of think about and personalize in your marketing mix. And then there are email sequences that are important to just think about and engage with, and when you’re putting together your product promo sequences, there’s a couple in here that I just wanted to highlight. The first is a product sales sequence. Whenever you’re promoting a product, whether it’s a physical product or a digital product, it should usually have three or four emails. They are sent to go out like, email one is day one, email two a day two, and then the last day, send two emails. Always come up with a reason to email them, whether it’s a flash sale or a discount or whatever.

Inside our access CRM, there is a product sales sequence that you can plug into, answer a couple of questions and it will create the emails for you. I think I might need the HTTPS, I’m just throwing it over here in the comments. That’s where the software is. But the email copy, Apple actually copy for you. The ascension sequence is when somebody buys your front end offer and they don’t buy your upsells. When they don’t buy your upsells, you want to bring them back to purchase your upsells and the ascension sequence is going to help you do that.

But basically, if they hit the shopping cart but don’t buy within 30 minutes, then they get three emails. And these are patterned after Amazon. The first email goes out 30 minutes after they don’t buy, the second email is 24 hours after that, the third email is 24 hours after that. What we’re trying to do is to get them to take action on something urgently, like you’re missing out on the discount, maybe that kind of thing. We always use flash sale sequences all the time for a lot of our clients. Basically, if somebody doesn’t buy something the first time out, somebody doesn’t buy your digital course the first time out, then you send them a three email or four email sequence.

And then tomorrow, you send them an email. This is this kind of 80%, buy it in 24 hours. Or buy it at 12 o’clock tonight or whatever. What we’re doing is a timed flash sale countdown and there’s lots of little urgency kind of buying triggers in there that we capitalize on for the flash sale. What this does is it spikes your front-end sales so that you have more people running through the upsell process.

It works out tremendously well. Then we have webinar replay emails, which tend to be some of our best performing emails. The webinar replay emails, it’s a six email sequence. The first two emails promote the webinar replay, the third email promotes the webinar replay and also the offer.

The replay is no more. Then the webinar promotion emails, it’s a four email sequence, they get somebody on to the webinar. You can read about all these. The link for this is in the chatbox, or you can just go sign up for access at our triggers.app and jump in and you can get all these sequences for you and your business right now. That is all I got for you today. I’m going a little bit over. We’re at 10:31. These are informally kind of at 30 minutes. But if you have any questions at all, send me a Facebook message or jump into the DFY funnels group, ask in there. Want to start getting some conversation going in there and if you have anything at all, just let me know, all right? Thanks.

For Questions and Guide

If you have questions for a future episode, go to doneforyou.com/gsd. Then if you want us to go through and put together a custom funnel for you, then book an action plan called, doneforyou.com/start.

The post Sequencing And Automation Of Email Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Done For You.

Today we’re going to talk about email marketing. First of all, I hope everybody had a happy Easter, not working, you know. But it’s Monday, so back to work. This week is going to be email marketing week. What I’m going to be doing with these is kind of picking a topic and then just seeing how it goes, seeing what we need to cover. Monday is going to be a very general overview, and then we’re going to dig into individual pieces of that topic throughout the week.

In addition to today, for those of you who want to comment on today, make sure you’re watching this on DoneForYou, the DoneForYou Facebook page. I’m going to drop that link in here. That’s the DoneForYou Facebook page. Make sure to switch over and watch the video there. Also, for those of you who are looking to start a business or transition your business online amid this pandemic because you have skills, experience, knowledge, assets, resources that can help either other people through it or you can leverage in a remote, so you can help somebody across the globe through your computer, and get paid for it. That’s the idea.

We are starting, we’re kicking off a brand new group today called Accelerate. Here is the link to today’s kickoff session, which we’re going to be talking about basically picking and validating a business idea. How to arrive at a six-figure business idea. That is at 3 PM eastern today, so I’m going to drop that in this thread here. You are welcome to join us.

I think we’re going to end up doing eight to ten sessions. So the session is probably going to be every other day. There’s going to be a lesson and then a day of homework, where you post whatever you come to in the group. Today, we’re going to talk about business ideas, and then the homework is going to share your niche, your business idea, with the group.

For a couple of reasons. The first is the group is going to keep us all accountable in what we’re starting, and secondly, everybody in the group has different skillsets and knowledge and expertise and networks and connections and I am hoping that we’re able to leverage the group to grow the business. Who do you know who needs accounting work, or whatever? That’s the idea there.

I have to get a new camera setup because this one is weird. All right, today we’re talking about email marketing. Now, your email marketing list is kind of, truly it is the cornerstone, the foundation of, it’s your get out of jail free card right now. It is.

At the end of the day, if you don’t necessarily have a lot of ad budget, or you don’t have a whole lot of things, a whole lot of assets or anything going on in your business, not a whole lot of traffic. If you have an email list, you can always pivot. The biggest thing, is sometimes pivoting in business is so difficult. It is because if you don’t have an audience if you don’t have distribution, there’s nobody to pivot to. You’re 100% reliant on the traffic that is coming into your website or the traffic you’re buying, spending money on media, spending money on ads.

If you have to, if you don’t have distribution, you don’t have a way to pivot, then it’s always a startup. Do you know what I mean? You’re constantly starting the new business model, the new product. You’re bootstrapping this product idea, but if you have an email list, then you’re able to move that email list in this new direction. That’s one of the biggest keys to marketing to your email marketing list and building your list because you’re not always starting.

You’re transitioning. You’re pivoting. Anything that has any kind of a list is that way, whether it’s an email list, whether it is a social media following, people who like your YouTube feed or your Facebook ads, or whatever. At the end of the day, though, you’re able to pivot when you have a following. Your social media following is a whole lot looser, less committed, than your email list, because your email list, you’re hitting their inbox when you send an email. With social media, you might be hitting them, you might not. The email list thing is the key, and pivoting and then launching something new without necessarily having to spend a bunch more money on traffic or do a whole lot to launch this new thing.

Today we’re going to talk about your email marketing list and how to market to your email list. This is going to be a very 101 level Livestream. It is that way because it’s kind of the introduction of the week if you will. In the chatbox, in the questions, just let me know if you want me to restate anything or you have any questions. I want this to be a Q&A kind of deal.

Email marketing, basically it’s writing an email and sending it to your list. It is as simple as writing an email, hitting send, and then sending it to your 10,000 people. That is what email marketing is. You cannot do that from inside of Gmail or inside a piece of software, your email inbox. You can’t copy 150 people or 2000 people or whatever, in a group and just say, “Boom,” email blast-style, and I hate that phrase. When you’re mailing to your email marketing list the right way, that list needs to be live and hosted in a piece of software.

There are lots and lots of different email marketing software and platforms and CRMs out there. They all have their special sauce. Anything that is email marketing-heavy is usually a marketing automation software or a marketing automation CRM. Now, there are lots of different CRMs as well.

There are sales CRMs, there are email CRMs, there’s contact, basically contact databases, but what we’re looking for, very specifically, is email marketing. In email marketing, there are a couple of different levels of CRM.

When we’re building sales funnels, we build sales funnels in a ridiculous number of CRMs. Everything from AWeber and ActiveCampaign up to InfusionSoft, so it just depends on what level you want to play at. If you have a small list, some are better than others. Let’s see, I’m going to open up a browser tab here. Okay. All right. Let me pull this out. There we go. Stop sharing this guy and then we’re going to share this one.

All right. There are lots of different levels of CRM out there. The first level, this kind of classification one CRM is something like AWeber. AWeber is the first CRM that I ever used and basically what it does is it allows you to put your, it hosts your email marketing list, and then it lets you send email to that list. You can set up autoresponder sequences and you can set up campaigns, and now you can kind of add tags to those contacts.

It does one thing well. It emails your list. Everything else it does meh well. But it does what it needs to do. So class one CRM. Another is ConvertKit. Again, very good at what it does, which is to host your list. People can sign up to your list and it lets you send an email.

MailChimp is probably the industry standard. I dislike MailChimp in terms of some of the stuff that we end up doing with our email marketing list and automation and all of that other stuff. MailChimp works, but I highly recommend not using it. ConvertKit is good. AWeber is good, but they don’t necessarily have a lot of very robust automation packages.

If you’re looking for a class two CRM, which does a lot of marketing automation and really, it ties in with Zapier and gives you a lot of integration, a lot of control over how your customers interact with you in your business. Then there’s a couple of other ones. We created one called Axis.

It is at triggers. app. Triggers. the app is where this thing lives. We’re going to dig into this as the week goes on, but, all right. There you go. That is the CRM that we created. Easy to add email, really easy to setup marketing automation campaigns and sequences. The email copy app is in there, so it’ll write your email for you. We’ll dig into this a little bit as we go.

Another one that we like quite a bit, we set up a lot, is ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation CRM. Again, it has a lot of features and functionality and integrations and all that other stuff, and it does great from an automation standpoint.

Now, from a big boy standpoint, there’s one, which is now Keep, K-E-A-P.com, it used to be InfusionSoft. For those of you who have been around for a while, you won’t ever call it Keep, because InfusionSoft is just the thing you grew up with. Keap, less complicated to use than it used to be. InfusionSoft was great. It did a lot of advanced stuff.

Typically, when you set something up in InfusionSoft, you had to understand that it was going to take three times longer to do anything meaningful. Inside InfusionSoft, you had to click like three times as many buttons. You had to set something up on one screen. Then set it up on another screen and then another screen, but it worked great once you figured it out.

To get into some of the more complex integrations, you had to tie in a couple of pieces of software to work and whatever. This is a class three CRM. Something that has order forms, has an affiliate program. And stores your email marketing list.

It has pages anymore, so there’s InfusionSoft and then there’s Ontraport, which is a favorite of ours. Ontraport, we still do a lot of our stuff in Ontraport, despite having our CRM, because we have our order forms and stuff in here, and our CRM doesn’t have order forms yet. Ontraport, fantastic tool. It’s the same as InfusionSoft.

From an email marketing standpoint, these are kind of the tools that you can play with. If you want to get heavier into sales, like sales pipeline stuff, then SalesForce is a great one, and expensive. Industry leader. I read that they have 15 or 16 trillion dollars, no. 15 or 16 billion dollars under contract for the next three years, so they could literally not sell another customer for the next three years and still make that much money, give or take.

The other one that we like quite a bit is Pipedrive. Pipedrive.com. Pipedrive is a great one. It’s a sales CRM, so you can have a contact, and then you can drag that contract through a sales sequence, a sales channel. It’s great for sales pipelines and sales workflow, but it sucks for email marketing, especially in an automated sense.

The other one, which, I’m friends with the Pipeline Pro. Pipeline Pro is another one that is very, it’s very sales automation, sales dashboard, sales pipelines, all of that kind of stuff. Appraisal workflow management. Again, also super cool software.

From a CRM software standpoint, those are some of your options, depending on what you need. That class one, like an AWeber or ConvertKit, your class one CRM is going to be great, if you have a list under 10,000 people. You’re not necessarily looking to spend a bunch of money hosting your contact records and you want to send an email every once in a while. That’s about it. You don’t have real complex marketing automation challenges or needs or whatever. You just want to be able to set up an automation sequence, set up a campaign, trigger some emails that go out, and that’s about it.

Your class two CRMs, your ActiveCampaign, your Axis, are great when you need to trigger something happening. A new contact moves to a new list, then you want to trigger a certain campaign that goes out, or somebody goes to a certain URL. You trigger a campaign that goes out, that kind of thing. Then your class three CRMs, your order forms, affiliate program, when you need all that stuff to tie in together, that’s when you need that stuff.

All right, we’re going to look at it, let me grab my notes here. We’re going to look at building lists. When you’re building lists, there are a couple of different ways to go about it. The first and biggest thing is you need to have some sort of an opt-in sequence or some sort of an opt-in page, landing page. There are no two ways about it. To collect emails and grow your email list, you need to be collecting them, which means you need to give value. That’s all there is to it.

What I mean by that is you need to have some sort of an opt-in page. This is, currently, we’re running a bunch of paid traffic to this page. This page has been exhaustively tested. We have logos and this sub-headline and then we have our headline and our cover and the download button and all that stuff. This page format has been tested, I think we’ve run 42 or 43 different split tests on this page. It works. This page, right now, right right now is converting at 43% to cold traffic, straight up cold traffic. Not too shabby. Some of you who are on this might have come through this page in the last couple of days, which is awesome.

Best ways of growing an email list:

• building your email list through an opt-in page some sort of a lead generation mechanism

Bar none, point-blank, running traffic, or getting ranked in the search engines and then sending traffic into a landing page is how you need to be growing your email list. The reason I stress this is because so many of our clients come to us and they say, “Is there a shortcut?”.

The answer is yes, there is a shortcut. You should not take it, buy lists, and you can swipe lists, sure you can. You can pull lists out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. There are so many different ways that you can collect email addresses, but at the end of the day, this person did not raise their hand and say, “Yes, I’m interested in the thing you are offering. I’m interested in you or your business or your thing.” You do not want to market to these people.

I had one client how was like, “I don’t want to spend money on ads, I just want to scrape a list.” I’m like, “Okay cool. You can scrape, whatever. I can’t tell you what kind of results you’re going to get, but we can try.” So he scraped 1200 emails. We uploaded it into a CRM, we sent an email out. He got eight opens. Eight out of 1200 people. Normally, he should have gotten between 200 and 280 opens if it was an opt-in list if they had been used to getting email. But literally, they hadn’t. It was spam. I told him, “This is spam. What we’re doing here is spamming. They did not opt-in in any way to any kind of an email list.” So it’s just something you need to be cognizant of, you know.

Yeah, so scraping lists, downloading the list, don’t do it. Get somebody to opt into your email list and go from there. Which is a lot of work, it is. You’ve got to run a paid traffic campaign, you have to write content, you have to do live streams, you have to do whatever, but at the end of the day, growing your email list is the difference between being able to pivot and not, or being able to sell something on-demand or not, you know what I mean?

Landing pages, a great way to do it. You need to build an email list. You need to offer a lead magnet. We should talk about lead magnets tomorrow because it is, I don’t know that we’ve talked about it yet, and it is email marketing related, so tomorrow we’re going to talk about lead magnets. This is the funnel effect of a lead magnet.

There are some other things you can do to grow email lists. I don’t have a pop-up here. There’s an exit pop that comes up. Whenever somebody comes to DoneForYou the first time, there is an exit pop that shows up, and the software that we use for that is Picreel. P-I-C-R-E-E-L.com. Picreel is nice exit pop software. It’s also really cheap compared to some of the other ones that are out there, and it’s mobile-friendly, so when you can put a little bit of code on your website and then it’ll pop up, and the pop-up will be constrained within the view parameters. Nice stuff. There it is. This is one of the versions that we use, only we have an email box right here. This just goes right into a page. You can do all kinds of things with that pop-up.

When someone opts in, it gets added to your email marketing list!

The other one that we have lately been testing is Thrive Leads. Thrive Leads list building software, and that is right here. This does exit pops, it does all kinds of really cool stuff. It’s a monthly deal, but it’s just a WordPress plugin that you install on your website. It does the pop-up lightbox and these cool sticky ribbons, inline forms, two-step opt-ins, slide-ins. It just does a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff, different ways that you can generate leads without necessarily going right to a landing page. The trick is you need to be writing content.

Every way you’re going to be generating leads usually lives on your website, so you need to be writing content, you need to do the content marketing, and you need to do the blogging thing and getting traffic to the website so you can suck up the leads, you know what I mean? Without pulling people to your website, there’s no way to do it unless you’re paid, unless it’s paid ads, literally, like Facebook lead ads. And they don’t hit your website, but they opt-in through the ad.

You’ve got to have landing pages. You have to have content or some sort of something, but you need to be making moves to generate these. That’s all there is to it. Now, those are just some cool, and there’s kind of a cool little exit pop there, so just some different ways that you can build lists.

Now, if you’re going to buy an email marketing list, there’s one place that I like. I discovered it because some of our clients, tag-team mail, postcards, with email lists. The one place that I would buy lists from if you’re going to do direct mail and email is this place. Lists.nextmark.com. This is a mailing list finder. I have been sharing this thing forever. Here we go I’m just going to drop this link in the chatbox or comment box, I should say. Did it go through? Yeah.

This is a mailing list search finder that will give you access to an email marketing list database. Let’s say you are mailing to chiropractors. Or your target audience is chiropractors. We’re going to search for chiropractors in all markets and on all channels. We can just say email, but we’re just going to say on all channels. This is a mailing list, basically, a database.

Each of these lists is lists that they have, they’re being brokered from a broker. If we look at this, we have chiropractors’ email, postal, and phone. It is $100 per thousand, and the list size is 181,000 people on this list, which is pretty good. Then we have chiropractors at home addresses, chiropractor medical professionals, offices, and clinics of chiropractors.

It’s up to you to figure out what kind of selects you want. This right here seems to be a hotlist. It’s sold through ExactData. We have our base rate of $100 per thousand leads, so it ends up being 10, yeah. $100 per thousand leads. Then we have multiple per company emails, we’ve got 22,000 emails, 11,000 telephones, and 90,000 Facebook.

We can grab this Facebook audience if we want, or there are some additional selects. The three-month hotline, or we can do, the city is no charge. If we want all the chiropractors that they heard from in the last three months, then it’s going to be $125 per thousand. If we want to see the company size or the number of employees, these are the additional selects as they go up.

You can grab the email and also the physical mailing address. Usually, with these guys, they’re going to the email from their servers for you. You have to email them the copy, and then go from there. This is super nice for when you’re trying to break into a market. We’ve, again, found the best results being when we tag team a postcard and an email address, but since they are mailing this email marketing list from their servers, and they already have a relationship with the customer, then the open rate tends to be quite a bit better. It’s a place to get lists.

You can also do solo ads, where somebody sends the list on your behalf. I used to do, so I started my list years ago doing solo ads. I would pay somebody $100 and then they would mail their email marketing list to my lead magnet, and that’s how I kind of started my email list.

They’re a little bit more difficult to find. Before, I just went to the Warrior Forum and just looked for somebody with lists, but I got burned quite a bit. About 30% of the time I would pay somebody for a list blast and then it wouldn’t go through. They wouldn’t mail them, they’d disappear. There was some of that stuff. By and large, for the most part, the people who were selling solo ads were pretty good.

If you’re going to buy, option number one: grow your email list organically. Option number two: if you’re going to buy a list, buy an email marketing list from somewhere like this, somewhere reputable. This is their business. Data is their business. Having access to data is their business, and these reps, want to do right by you, so that you come back and buy more access to their data, again and again, and again.

Let’s see. The next thing I wanted to talk about was email frequency. When you’re emailing your list, you want to make sure that you are emailing frequently enough that they don’t forget about you, but not so much that they unsubscribe. Every email marketing list is different, every niche is different. What I have found is that normal frequency, my list, I email my list every day, almost. A lot of lists, we kind of start emailing every day.

Sometimes the unsubscribe rate tends to go up, so we will back up the frequency a little bit and email every other day or every two days, like a two-day pause. Like we’ll email today, then take two days off, and then email again. Every list is a little bit different, and once your list is conditioned to expecting to receive an email every day, then your unsubscribe rate practically vanishes. Our unsubscribe rate, we might get four or five unsubscribes a day, but we email every day.

Some business owners think of it as unused hotel rooms. Every day that you let pass without sending them an email, it’s an opportunity to generate revenue that you didn’t take. The way I like to think about it is every day, you need to be conscious about your email list.

Every day that they get an email or don’t get an email, it needs to be planned. If they don’t get an email, you need to consciously make the decision. They’re not getting an email because tomorrow we’re going to send out this promotion. Today they’re not getting an email because we just hit them hard for a promo over the last two or three days.

I try to be intentional about all of the emails, the frequency in email marketing. That way, we encourage as many people to show up, as many people to open up, as many people to click and subscribe, and all that other stuff. That’s the idea with the frequency piece. One of the ways to increase that frequency is to do a lot of bonding. Probably four or five years ago, I just really marketed to the list, marketed affiliate products, marketed everybody else’s stuff. We had some of our products, and I would kind of do a product promo, and then I would turn it into another, turn it into affiliate promotion. I was kind of constantly promoting affiliate, just offers in general.

Four years ago, I was like, “Wow.” It occurred to me that my list didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know what I did or what I stood for because I was so busy promoting everybody else’s stuff and saying yes to all these other affiliates who asked me to mail for them. So I just stopped. I stopped promoting everybody’s stuff, and I started doing blog posts and all that stuff internally, so promoting our blog posts, and now you see me promoting these live streams and not promoting offers all that often at all. That has kind of been my transition, my shift.

A lot of times, the offers that we do promote, they’re usually through a call. It’s usually not necessarily marketing directly to a sales video and then going from there, although we do that. We’re going to be doing more of it. But just treating the list like mine, as opposed to renting it to any affiliate who wanted to pay per sale. That was kind of a big shift for me, and in that shift, I realized that I needed to write a lot more.

• create a lot more content
• write blog posts
• promote those blog posts
• write lead magnets and promote those lead magnets

When using those for additional people who came in joining the list and that kind of thing. That was a really big shift, a big change in the email marketing strategy that we had, and since then, we’ve had incredible growth to our email open rates, to our click-through rates, to our subscriber counts, because now readers, subscribers, were able to bond to something. They were able to bond to me or the teaching or the thoughts or whatever. It just worked out well that way.

Your list, they want to bond and relate to you at the end of the day. That’s what it’s all about. Let’s see. We are at 33 minutes. That was kind of some of the basics of email marketing. Did you like that? All right, cool.

In the next couple of days, tomorrow we’re going to talk about lead magnets and putting together a lead magnet, which I think is going to be powerful because your lead magnet is going to be the thing that you use in attracting people and putting people on your email list, something like this. We have four or five lead magnets. I think we’re going to redo one and then, that way you can see . . . Maybe I’ll try to do that for tomorrow, put up a new lead magnet that is email marketing-based so you can see what it looks like.

Then we’re going to talk about writing email copy, sort of writing formulaic email copy, copy that’s going to move somebody into your process. We’ll probably talk about that Wednesday. Then we’re going to talk about sequencing that copy, so applying triggers, and automation so that email goes out when it needs to. That will be, yeah, Thursday. Then on Friday, I think we’re going to talk about stats, pixels, kind of clean up all of the email marketing stuff.

Thank you so much for joining me today. Excited about this week. If you haven’t signed up for Accelerate and you want to go through that Accelerate training, that is going to be live at 3 PM Eastern. That is right here, so I’m dropping the link again in the chatbox. Go ahead and jump into the group. It’s free, and then I will see you at 3 PM Eastern.

The post How To Market Your Email List appeared first on Done For You.

We have a lot of clients who use our Done For You Email Marketing service - for both offers, they create and affiliate offers...

Email marketing is different whether you're promoting your products and services...  Or promoting someone else's - as an affiliate.

If you're promoting your stuff, product promo, nurture, and webinar sequences are essential...  You want your prospect to get to know you and your business online.

But, if you're a straight-up affiliate, you want to identify and fill a gap with a product.

Here are some done-for-you Email marketing campaigns we regularly use for our clients.

Done For You Email Marketing Campaigns and Sequences

Email marketing is a cornerstone for fostering business growth and nurturing client relationships in a digitally dominated era. A well-crafted 'done for you email marketing' strategy is central to a successful online marketing strategy encompassing various campaigns and sequences. These strategies aim to entice, educate, and convert prospective customers into loyal patrons. Here, we delve deep into the multifaceted world of email marketing, spotlighting the different types of email campaigns and sequences a digital marketer can employ to promote their product effectively.

Understanding the Essence of 'Done For You Email Marketing

Before we dissect the different types of email campaigns and sequences, it's crucial to understand what 'done for you email marketing' entails. This concept revolves around expertly crafted email campaigns tailored to resonate with your target audience. Leveraging professional services for your email marketing means your campaigns are strategically designed, implemented, and managed to optimize your reach and impact, saving you time and potentially increasing your ROI.

Product Promo Emails: Your Gateway to Higher Conversions

Crafting Irresistible Offers

Product promo emails are at the core of any 'done for you email marketing' strategy. These emails are designed to spotlight your products, offering detailed insights and presenting irresistible offers to your potential customers. A well-structured product promo email sequence may start with a teaser email, followed by a series of emails unveiling the product features and benefits, culminating with a limited-time offer to entice conversions.

Segmentation for Personalized Promotions

Segmentation becomes pivotal to maximizing the impact of your product promo emails. By segmenting your audience based on their behaviors, preferences, or demographics, you can tailor messages that resonate more personally, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Webinar Promo Emails: Building Anticipation and Engagement

Initial Announcement

Promoting webinars is another potent strategy within the 'done for you email marketing' repertoire. The initial announcement email is crucial; it sets the stage, ignites curiosity, and encourages recipients to block their calendars for your event. Ensure that the value attendees derive from the webinar is highlighted, including the speakers' expertise and key takeaways.

Reminder Emails

Follow the announcement with reminder emails, gradually building anticipation as the event date approaches. These reminders keep your webinar at the forefront of the attendees' minds and can help increase attendance rates.

Webinar Replay Emails: Extending the Life of Your Content

Immediate Follow-Up

Once the webinar concludes, the 'done for you email marketing' strategy shifts to nurturing the leads generated. An immediate follow-up email presenting the webinar replay can be a great tool to engage those who could not attend the live session. This email should encapsulate the essence of the webinar, encouraging recipients to watch the replay and engage with your brand further.

Additional Resources

To add more Value, accompany the replay link with supplementary resources such as blog posts, whitepapers, or infographics that further explore the topics discussed during the webinar. This provides an avenue to nurture leads and possibly guide them down the sales funnel.

Getting Started With The Done For You Email Marketing Campaigns...

If you promote your products and services (or work for a company that primarily promotes its stuff), book an Action Plan Call with our team to determine if there's a way to optimize those campaigns and sequences.

Or, if you're working on jumpstarting your passive income through affiliate marketing - your next best step is going through the DWY Affiliate Accelerator.

Either option will help you get your email marketing dialed in FAST!

The Evolution of Done-For-You Email Marketing Campaigns

Introducing Our Latest Software Tool: The Access CRM A few years back, I launched "Scriptly," a software built to ease the email marketing process. Today, it has evolved into "access," a full-fledged CRM that handles everything, from writing email copy to sending messages and managing SMS campaigns.

The Core of Access:

Effortless Email Marketing: The predominant feature of "access" is its unparalleled capability for "done-for-you email marketing." Instead of simple templates or singular emails, it produces entire sequences—three or four for internal arrangements or extensive 30 to 50 email strings for affiliate sequences.

Why Access Was Born:

Addressing A Personal Need Long before acquiring doneforyou.com, my team and I crafted sales funnels from scratch. And after composing thousands of emails, patterns began to emerge. These patterns inspired me to create a solution - the "access."

Two Distinct Types of Done-For-You Email Marketing

• For Your Products and Services: The essence of every email is action. Whether you're narrating a story without an immediate CTA or setting the stage for a significant promotion, it's all about inciting action. With "access," you can effortlessly channel traffic to lead magnets, sales promo videos, and webinar promos.
• For Affiliate Promotions: These campaigns are lengthier, promoting a range of products on platforms like Clickbank. The primary goal? Driving action and boosting affiliate sales.

Striking A Balance:

Pitch and Value Amidst promoting offers, it's crucial to intersperse high-pitched emails with valuable content. This ensures your subscribers don't feel overwhelmed with sales pitches, maintaining goodwill and engagement.

A Glimpse of What Access Offers Currently, "access" has 20 affiliate sequences and 28 internal promo sequences. It's designed to cater to your unique needs for MLM or promoting external offers.

Custom-Built Solutions:

Our Offer To You We at doneforyou.com don't just provide access to our tool but also craft custom email sequences tailored to your needs. If you're keen on harnessing the power of "done for you email marketing," click the button below, book a session, and let's chart out a strategic plan!

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The post The Secret to Done-For-You Email Marketing That Will Boost Your Sales appeared first on Done For You.

[TRANSCRIPT] Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drohn. Today, we're going to get into eCommerce Email Marketing..  Namely, a quick tip for building eCommerce email lists.

One of the questions we get asked from our E-comm clients or E-commerce clients is how do you generate leads? Because E-commerce isn't necessarily ... I mean it's an E-commerce shopping cart. There are physical products. Those physical products are shipped. Oftentimes you don't need the email address at all until there's actually a sale being made. But the problem is is when you're first starting off, you want to build an email list.

So the email list helps, you know, with email marketing, shopping cart abandonment, and then helps, you know, you get more sales. So email marketing is quintessential in the process. So how do you generate that email list in your Shopify website or your Magento or your shopping cart without giving away the farm? So here are some ideas on generating leads that I actually ripped the snippet of a video out of our funnel formula course. So I hope you like it.

If you're going after like a traditional E-commerce play, meaning you are using a shopping cart like Shopify, then you're going to ... You should have a lead magnet so you're collecting leads, email leads. So then when you have a new product launch or you introduce a new category or whatever, you can email that list and now you have baked in customers. To do that, you're going to need to give them something for free. It might be a lead magnet, it might be a promo code, or a discount code, or an event, or access to a webinar recording or a funny video, or access to free products that you're testing.

There are all kinds of different ways to get that email address, but you want to make sure to get the email address somehow. So that is going to require having a lead magnet of some kind. It might not necessarily be written, it might literally be a promo code or it might be a sign up for our freebie list where we pick 10 people every month and send some of our sample products to, and then you can submit reviews. There are lots of very cool things that you can do.

All right. Wasn't that awesome? So if you are interested in learning about E-comm sales funnels and putting together upsell and down-sell sales funnels and all that other kind of crazy stuff, as well as building the foundation of your sales funnel, learning how to write copy, running traffic; click here to check out the Funnel Factor Masterclass.

Or, if you'd like us to look at your E-comm website, map out a sales funnel, and put together your email marketing and upsell/downsell mix; click here to schedule an Action Plan call!

The post eCommerce Email Marketing – Quick Tip For Building eCom Lists appeared first on Done For You.

As a marketer or business owner, your email list and audience are your most significant assets. It's your foundation.  The better you communicate with your audience using email marketing software and autoresponder emails, the more revenue you generate and the quicker you can scale your business.

Your list is your stability. That's why we need to know what the best autoresponder software is...

You can always communicate with your list – your buyers and your prospects.  You can mail affiliate products. You can promote your product launches. You can do surveys.  You can let people know about new offers and product updates.  You can even launch new products.

Email is a compelling medium when you understand it and use it correctly, which is what Axis's Email Copy App was born to help you do by writing email copy for you.

Your Email List Is Your Foundation

Email marketing goes in waves. Now and then, we read reports and blog posts explaining that email marketing is dead and that building a solid email list is a waste of time.  Yet, we continue to hear that email marketing is the most significant business revenue driver, generating more cash than any other form of advertising.

It doesn't matter what niche or business you're in; your email list is one of your most valuable assets. In some cases, it's your ONLY asset!

After talking to clients over the years, there is a lot of confusion over the best way to build a list, store a list, and market to a list. Today's post should help demystify a lot of that.

First, let's talk a little about what you need to have to start building a list so you have a sound system and infrastructure started.

NOTE: Having an 'email list' isn't the same as blasting out an email to 100 contacts in Gmail!  That isn't good! There's a reason why email marketing choosing the best autoresponder software is so important! :0)

Picking The Best Autoresponder Software

Email marketing software and email autoresponder solutions are the glue that makes everything work regarding email marketing.  The software itself is what stores your email list and gives you the ability to mail to them.  In short, it's how you get into their inboxes!

If you're collecting names and email addresses for marketing, you must be CAN-SPAM compliant…  Every email must have an unsubscribe link, the email addresses should be double opt-in, and many other things.

You CAN'T just collect their email addresses and mail them messages from Gmail!

I know a lot of business owners who think mass sending emails from their desktop mail app is the right thing to do, but it's not.  And really, I don't know why you would!  Email marketing software is super cheap, and it keeps you out of the doghouse in terms of being legal and compliant…

Plus, when you send an email, it gets to where it needs to go - the subscriber's email inbox!

There are LOTS of email marketing software providers out there.  Choosing the best autoresponder software is essential since it's a subset of email marketing.  Most of them are very good.  Their job is pretty simple.  They need to get your emails to where they need to go.

For email marketing and automation purposes, we want to make sure that:

• There is an autoresponder feature
• The software has the capability to grow with you
• Price-wise, it's reasonable based on the size of your business

So, here's a roundup of some of the best email marketing platforms out there…  Arranged by 'business complexity.

Getting Started

The post Don’t Miss Out: Top Tips for Choosing the Best Autoresponder Software appeared first on Done For You.

If you’re looking for how to create a landing page that converts, you’ve got a lot more options than were available even a few years ago.  And the good news?  They’re all pretty easy to roll out!

As an email marketer, there is one page on your website that is at the epicenter of your entire business, your landing page.  Single handedly, your landing pages predict your success or failure when it comes to sales and conversion.

You want to make sure you’ve got sales pages that convert, of course.  Generating revenue is important to grow your business!  Having lead capture pages that convert though runs a close second…

It’s not your home page.  It’s certainly not your contact or support pages…  Nor is it your blog or the countless articles that you spent hours putting together.

Now, your landing page goes by many different names, depending on who you’re talking to.  It might be a ‘squeeze page’ or a ‘lead capture page,’ or even an ‘optin page.’  Regardless, the point is that the landing page’s purpose is to take a visitor and turn them into a bonafide lead (or sale) for your business!

Today, I’m going to walk you through what you’ll need to do to get a landing page set up, with or without a website…

You’ll also want to reference this article on email marketing software to make sure you’ve got what you need to tie your landing page with your email list, to get your drip email and email automation rocking further down the page as well…

Do You Need A Landing Page?

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Do I really need a landing page?  I’ve got an optin box in my sidebar – that should be enough…”

Collecting leads in the sidebar of your website or at the bottom of your post is effective, but it’s going to be hard to build a huge list that way unless you have hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.

Let me put it this way.

When you put your lead optin box in your sidebar, it’s easy to miss.  A reader will check out your content and unless they really want to hear from you again, just leave.  If your content is stellar, then they might sign up if you give them an incentive.

That means that your ‘conversion’ rates are going to be really low!  So let’s start with that…

Understanding Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are pretty easy to understand when it comes to landing pages.

Very simply, your landing page conversion is the number of people who SEE your optin form compared the the number of people who FILL IT OUT.

So, if 100 visitors see your optin box and 50 fill it out, you’re conversion rate is 50%.

If 100 visitors see your optin box and 5 fill it out, you’re conversion rate is 5%.

Well, typically when you put your email optin box in the sidebar, you’ll get less than a 1% conversion rate; meaning that less than 1 person out of 100 want to hear from you again!  That’s pretty dismal considering that we use a landing page that gets 52% conversion on average (available inside the Axis Page Builder).

With landing pages, there are really very few places to go if you don’t enter your email address…  That’s the idea.  If the person wants the information on their other side, they have to give up an email address!

That begs the next question, “Jason, what can I give someone to make them sign up?”

I’m so glad you asked :0)  We’re getting to that…  But first, let’s talk about landing page psychology.

Landing Page Psychology

Landing pages (or squeeze pages as they’re called) do something very simple – they collect email addresses from people who may or may not be willing to spend money with you in the future.

They give you their email address with the express consent that you can contact them in the future through email…

You give them some kind of something that incentivizes the prospect to sign up.  That ‘something’ is called a Lead Magnet.

Lead Magnets can be:

• A special report that talks about something they’d be interested in.
• A free video or a series of videos that are related to a problem that they’re facing…
• A mini-course or tutorial series delivered through email helping them overcome some of the roadblocks they’re facing.
• Answers to a question that they’re struggling with…

It goes a little deeper though.  If you read the book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Dr. Robert Cialdini, you start to see something else at work…

That something is reciprocity.

Basically, the Law of Reciprocity says that if you do something for someone else, they are morally committed to doing something for you.  They feel like they have to…

So, by giving you a free download, you are committing them to read a report, watch a video, or otherwise spend money with you.

That, my friends, is the biggest key behind why squeeze pages convert visitors to prospects.  Sure, you have the person’s name and email address…  But the true power lies in the Law of Reciprocity.

Landing Page Setup

If you went through the email marketing software article that we linked to above or you know how to get your ‘lead form’ code from your email marketing platform or autoresponder platform, then it’s time to create a landing page!

There are quite a few ways of doing it from custom code to WordPress plugins to standalone landing page tools like Axis’s Page Builder, but I’ll keep this simple.

If you want one piece of software that you can use for all of your landing pages and your marketing automation CRM, sign up for Axis.  Not only do the landing pages, sales pages and webinar registration pages convert really well; Scriptly’s also got other apps for writing email autoresponders and webinars.

If you’d rather work with WordPress, there is a Page Builder plugin that you can add to your website so all of your pages look like their hosted right on your website!

You can of course code up your own if you know HTML and have Photoshop!  I’m sure not that ambitious though…

Self-Hosted vs. Landing Page Hosting

There are two different ways to set up a landing page – on your own domain with your own web hosting (AKA. self-hosted)…  Or with a landing page hosting service that is run by the landing page provider.  In other words, it’s a function of the landing page software to host your pages for you.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and you’ll have to decide for yourself which you’re more comfortable with.  After all, the leads that you get will be going into your own email marketing software, so those are yours for good…

First, let’s talk about self-hosted landing pages, or setting up and maintaining your own website….

Self-Hosted Landing Page Builder

To create and host your own website, you absolutely need two things:

• A domain name
• Website hosting

Website hosting and having your own domain answers the question about where to host landing pages…

The easiest and fastest way to get set up is to go through HostGator.  Choose the domain that you want for your website, pick a hosting package, and then install WordPress.

Now, once you have WordPress installed, adding landing pages is as simple as activating your free Scriptly account, setting up your landing pages and installing a plugin!

Click here to download the SCR Page Plugin >>

There are other landing page builder scripts like OptimizePress, which we use on occasion.  ThriveThemes has some lead generation plugins as well.

That brings me to my next point…  App-Hosted Landing Pages.

Landing Page Hosting

At the end of the day, we know that setting up and maintaining a website is difficult (albeit a very valuable skill if you take the time to learn it!)…  Not to mention all the issues with backups, corrupted databases, faulty code, and poorly constructed themes…

We’ve worked with a number of clients who run into issues either in terms of compatibility of plugins, or the simple fact that a theme can’t do what it needs to do to convert traffic into leads.

So, what we did is create software inside Axis that makes setting up landing pages and sales pages that convert much easier and way more effective.  And, of course, the landing page hosting is done for you if you’d like…  You can also install the landing page on your own website.

Click here to learn about Axis’s Page Builder >>

To put it simply, it’s squeeze page builder software or lead capture page software that’ll make lead generation easier.

Here’s how simple setting up a converting landing pages is…

Other Necessities For Landing Pages…

Once you start building an email list, there are some things that you need to do to take care of it…

Not many people do ‘email list management’ justice.  Just because someone opted into your newsletter doesn’t mean that they want to hear from you three times a day!  Here are a few things you’ll need to pay attention to make sure your emails get delivered, make you money, and keep you out of the doghouse.

• A/B Testing – Do split testing on your landing pages and make sure to always be improving your landing page optimization.
• Double optin – make sure that people click a verification link in their email to actually optin to your list.  This is BIG when it comes to spam complaints.
• Non active subscribers – In OfficeAutoPilot we have it set up so that after 120 days of not taking action, subscribers are automatically deleted off of our lists.  We do this for two reasons: it keeps our costs down and only people who care about our content actually read our stuff!
• Relevant subject lines – Make sure the subject line of the email is relevant to what’s in the email (and stay away from ‘Notification of Payment Received’ subjects’)
• Advertisement announcement – Include somewhere in the email, preferably the extreme bottom, that the email message is an advertisement, and for the reader to assume that you are somehow making money from anything that they do.
• Email frequency – take note of how often you email, and what your responses are from your list.  Some lists mail daily.  Others a few times a week.  We’ve found that it’s best to take breaks, and then follow that up with a 3 or 4 day sequence of emails.

What To Give Away To Get The Lead

The next thing need to talk about is what we need to give someone in exchange for their email address…  In other words, we’re going to need a lead magnet.   So, we need to talk about how to create them, distribute them, and find an interested group of folks who will sign up for them.

You can read all about that here >>

The idea with a lead magnet is to give something (of value!) away for free in exchange for their email address.  And yes, this strategy has been around for ever.

Think about the last infomercial or commercial you watched that offered a ‘Free DVD’ or ‘Free Brochure’ for signing up?

Guess what?

That’s a lead magnet.

Recap: How To Create A Landing Page That Converts

To recap, the number one page on your website is not your homepage.  Nor is it your about page, your contacts page, or even a blog post.

The number one most important page on your website is your landing page. And the reason being, your landing page is really the gateway into your digital world. When somebody hits your website, clicks an ad, hits a button, or follows an in-post link; they should be directed to a landing page where they have the opportunity to download something for free.

That, my friend, is a lead magnet.

Lead generation in most industries is the number one marketing activity. Your sales pages are important because your sales pages and webinars are what generates revenue. More than anything though, you want to be able to reach out to folks whenever you want to release something new.  You want to be able to send an email out to your list, engaging them in whatever new offer you have to sell.

That’s why your landing page is so important.

3 Options For Landing Pages That Convert

Now, when it comes to landing pages, there are a few ways you can go about creating landing pages that convert.

• Self-hosted landing page. Your self-hosted landing page is really the page that you have on your website kind of natively. You can install WordPress, install a landing page plug-in, and get it built out.  That landing page will be hosted by you and native to WordPress.
• You can also go the more complicated route and you can hire a developer or a designer, or both in some cases. And they will put together the pages for you. It’s more expensive. It’s a lot longer process. It’s much slower to test it.
• (BEST OPTION) Creating landing pages with a landing page builder sofware, like Axis.  The Page Builder app inside Axis creates marketing pages, landing pages, confirmation pages, sales pages, and webinar registration pages. It even has an automated webinar function to it.

Any of those three options are very good solutions for building sales pages and marketing pages that convert.

Why Landing Page Software Is The Best Option

The big thing with landing page builder software is that it hosts the landing page for you, as part of the service. The same as Axis.  The Axis Page Builder hosts the landing page for you. So you have a page that you can just link right to and it’s already set up for your business, ready to accept leads from the traffic you’re driving. From there, it all ties into marketing automation.

Now, with a landing page builder that has hosted landing pages, you don’t have to worry about the technology or the tech setup. Nor do you have to worry about the page design. All that stuff is done for you. You’ve just got to go in and you change the text, images, the opt-in box and all the other stuff that you want to make it a little more personal to you. As soon as you hit publish, it is live on the internet, ready to start accepting leads.

So that’s the beauty of a landing page builder. You can deploy more quickly, so you can test stuff more rapidly.

You don’t necessarily need to go and learn a new plug-in, mess around with themes, get your own graphics, or any of that stuff because all of it is already built into the landing page builder itself. That’s really the big difference between self-hosted landing pages versus landing pages that are hosted by the software company themselves.

What We Use For DFY Clients

98% of the time, we use a landing page builder, especially when we’re deploying campaigns at first.  We don’t just deploy one landing page. We deploy four or five and then we test them against each other. Usually, it’s easier to create those on a landing page builder, alter them slightly, and roll them out with paid traffic.

With the landing page building software, it’s equally easy to install the pages on a client’s website or our own website, as opposed to creating brand new landing pages from scratch every time.

The most prominent landing page inside the Axis Page Builder, we have actually done over 45 split tests on.  We’ve spent over $50,000 just testing that one page, and we cannot find a page that actually converts better… Including any other landing page builders or pages that we have designed! That page just rocks when it comes to a PDF lead magnet. It tests better than anything else we can find.

So that’s why it is in our page builder, and it’s always the control that we launch clients with. It’s always the first page that we put out there. We might test some other pages, depending on the niche or the vertical or the category, but that is the one that ends up converting the best, most often.

In terms of building landing pages that convert, your choice of self-hosted landing pages or using landing page software is totally up to you.

For now though, go ahead and grab a Scriptly account and get your first landing page set up.  And when you’re doing with that, it’s time to get cracking on your lead magnet!

The post How To Create A Landing Page That Converts [Updated] appeared first on Done For You.

You have to understand that being ready for 2019 does not mean you have to be aggressive and pushy. A latest DMA Insights Survey shows, 53% of consumers expressed that they receive too many unwanted and irrelevant emails from different companies. Rather, you should create a league of your own with time-tested and working email marketing tactics.

So, what are the trends you should watch?

1. Targeted emails – Personalization vs. privacy

Nothing new!

As email marketers, we aim to deliver highly relevant and valuable content. With the latest tools and features, and changing consumer expectations, the concept of “relevance” has changed.

Consumers have developed a distrust for data aggregators. They feel uncomfortable with brands purchasing and revealing their data. As a result, new regulations are likely to be formed in 2019.

Subsequently, consumers have certain expectations from brands. They expect personalized communication and web experience. In fact, 33% of consumers opine that companies recommending products not matching their preferences are the primary reason to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

AI and machine learning are playing key roles in marketing. These trends are likely to stay.

So, how do you ensure that your emails are relevant in 2019?

• Segmentation: Effective segmentation would be the norm in 2019. You have to send differentiated campaigns to contacts based on their age, sex, location, and buying behavior.
• Personalization: Customers prefer personalized and direct messages that speak to them. When you start the message with, “Hi John,” it is easier to relate than a simple “Hello there!” Now, you can add more advanced personalization features to your emails to connect with your users. Dynamic content plays a vital role here, and email is an indispensable promotional channel. For example, Netflix uses personalized film recommendations based on user views, or Amazon shows products relevant to the search or purchase history of the user.

Source: medium.com

• Automation: With email automation, you can reach the correct contact, at the right time, with a relevant automated message. It boosts conversion and increases brand loyalty. You can use Scriptly here to send a personalized birthday or anniversary message or reward users with a promo code after their first purchase on the site.

2. Interactive emails

Your emails need to attract the user’s attention. In this crowded field, use your email as a weapon to be exclusive and shine through. We are all fighting for the same goal.

Being interactive with your emails allows users to respond positively. It not only makes the email visually appealing, but it also eliminates the risk of friction. It further allows users to purchase without leaving their inbox. Interesting, isn’t it?

Email developers leverage latest tools like AMP4Email and Email Markup.

However, to deliver a seamless user experience, it is essential to make sure the email is responsive. Understand that over 50% of emails users are mobile. As a result, email templates should be designed for mobiles and other devices. Each of these devices has different screen sizes, which affects responsiveness.

To make it impeccable, use an open-source markup language like MJML, this is responsive and allows coding interactive emails quickly. You can then download the emails in HTML and proceed.

3. Establish brand connection

The marketing space is fiercely competitive and overcrowded. As a result, consumer loyalty is your only way to success. Target email marketing campaigns to establish a connection with the brand.

Source: yotpo.com

In the past, competitive price and promotional offers (discounts, deals) were enough to ensure your customers come back. However, consumers are more conscious today, which is making a remarkable difference and compelling businesses to work harder for customer retention and loyalty.

Establish an emotional connection between the brand and its users to foster the relationship.

In 2018, some brands started making an effort to put their values forward to bond with customers. Having a positive impact is very important. To do that, you have to master the art of storytelling. Consumers are warier these days. You cannot move them by aggressive or pushy selling techniques. Instead they are more receptive to brand stories and values. So narrate your story in such a way so that it appeals to your audience.

4. Data protection and privacy

2018 witnessed a new email marketing trend – data protection and privacy. The GDPR confusion allowed consumers to regain control over personal data and information. Companies were also compelled to adapt to new rules and ensure 100% compliance with the latest regulation.

Data protection shall be pivotal in 2019. Companies would continue to work on providing in-demand data protection and security to consumers.

ePrivacy is going to be the norm very soon. It is a cookie law you must follow. So, if GDPR hasn’t sunk, get it sinking real fast as a new change is approaching. With this new law in place, it may transform the way businesses target online users by allowing visitors to specify whether they want to accept cookies or not.

As a result, marketers must look at a new way of procuring data that could have an impact on the marketing channels.

5. Email marketing to grow as social media landscape declines

People are developing a distrust for social media companies. According to a Sailthru research, almost half of all consumers want to delete at least one of their social media accounts in the coming year whereas 40% claim to have already deleted an account in 2017. The simple fact is that it did not trust the network with their data and information.

Of course, that does not mean social media would disappear. However, marketers gradually realize that depending on social media heavily can be risky. Social media managers understood that organic reach was affected when Facebook monetized in 2012. Until 2014, organic reach dropped from 16% to 6%, which was huge. For pages as large as with 500,000 likes, the organic reach dropped to 2%.

AdStage found that Facebook Cost-per-thousand-ad-impressions (CPM) increased by 91% year-on-year from 2017 to 2018. But it is not a sustainable rate of inflation.

Whereas, email consistently topped the list of channels that users prefer to receive an offer from brands and businesses. As the list size increases, the cost of reaching your subscribers may not increase proportionately. It is likely to see companies investing more in building their email database and improving email programs in 2019.

6. AI to be more prevalent

The year 2017 and 2018 were predicted to witness massive growth in AI use and machine learning technologies. However, AI has not worked as expected. In fact, it has taken on more significant roles in marketing in 2018 and this trend is likely to continue.

Predictive analytics is also reducing the cost of micro-segmentation as well as less labor-intensive. It is more dynamic and makes real-time personalization more accessible for smaller teams of marketing. Today, marketers are writing high converting emails with subject lines guided by machine learning and AI. It can also help marketers time their emails. Besides predictive email marketing is also necessary to decrease churn by identifying the contacts that are likely to unsubscribe.

Companies using AI for email marketing find it better, stronger, and more personalized. It helps email marketers from coming up with effective subject lines to images and predicting how potential leads interact with an email. It further makes emails more and more personal and estimates when viewers may unsubscribe from the email list. Hence, AI for email marketing automation is increasing demand to such an extent that global automated email marketing solely is expected to account for $2.7 billion by 2025.

7. Partnerships

Over the past few years, marketing teams saw changes in size and budget, with teams expanding and more people working together on email campaigns.

Collaborating with new teams and big companies, looking for innovative processes and tools, and working in synergy allows teams to become flexible and productive.

For email marketing, this literally translates into involving more people in creating different campaigns. Both internally and externally, together with other agencies, teams work together for better productivity. However, it is important to fine-tune teamwork internally and avoid mistakes or miscommunication. It is the top priority of companies.

Besides, it is necessary to find the right tools and make the process easier. Email Planner is an excellent solution for team coordination and mapping out email campaigns.

Final word

Email continues to grow. The battle for user attention is only going to get harder. It would be quintessential to target contacts with relevant emails, alluring interactive designs, and cogent storytelling that connects the company with users.

Data protection shall continue to be the key factor in the way brands and businesses operate, and ePrivacy shall influence email marketing heavily.

Overall, in 2019, companies would work on becoming more effective in their email marketing communications.

If you need a helping  hand and a trusted partner in growing your business via effective email marketing strategies in 2019 and beyond, don’t hesitate to contact us. We have the knowledge, skills and experience as well as the software tools mastery to help your business find more quality leads, convert them into paying customers and finally achieve a healthy growth rate.

The post Email Marketing Trends That Will Continue To Rule 2019 appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we've got some email marketing tips for you...  And what we're going to get started with is how often you should be sending email blasts!

First and foremost - The term "email blast..."  These are your customers and your prospects...  Sometimes, describing an email blast as "sending an email" or "mailing to your list" is a little more palatable.  But, I've talked to hundreds of business owners who want to blast their list!

With that, we're going to dive in.

When you're setting up email marketing campaigns and drip email sequences, you want to make sure that you're emailing your prospects frequently enough without going crazy, without making them want to unsubscribe, mark you as spam, or just generally fall out of touch.

In short - send out your "email blast" frequently enough WITHOUT upsetting your subscribers.

Unfortunately, there's no magic answer to how often you should mail. I can't tell you that 4 times a week is the optimal number of times a week or a month. It 100% has to do with your niche, your audience, your offers, your tone, and your content. There are so many X factors in terms of what you mail your list and how often you can mail them.

What you have to do is get a very, very good understanding of what your list expects and actually mail it to them!  Send your email list emails and see what the open rates are, what the engagement is, what the unsubscribes are, and deliver what they want!

Email Marketing Tips: Have A 30-Day Plan

Now there are some general rules of thumb that we like to follow.

Let's say a new lead hits your website and they sign up for your landing page today, what happens?

We always plan for the first 30 days of email marketing campaigns, focused around what we're trying to get a prospect to do.   We have a plan for at least the first month. (I know that's quite a lot, but it's what our Done For You Sales Funnel Client have come to expect - largely because of the best practices we employ for them.)

Typically that plan goes like this.

• Day 0, which is the very first day, 10 minutes after they opt in, is fulfillment. In short, we deliver the ebook or the thing they requested when they opted-in.
• Day 1, which is tomorrow, ask them what they thought of the PDF or lead magnet that you sent them.  You could also include a content marketing piece, blog post or Youtube video.  Send them something that is high content, high value, that you know people like because other people commented on it already.
• Day 2, is bonding. Send an email, linking to your social profiles.  Talk about your experience in the industry, showcase a case study or testimonial.  Explain how you helped somebody do something in the world and it made the world a better place.
• Day 3.  Continue bonding (more of the ^^^)
• Day 4.  Continue bonding (more of the ^^^)
• Day 5.  Don't send anything.
• Day 6. Don't do anything.
• Day 7, do a promotion.  Send emails promoting a product or offer that you have in your repertoire. Send them an email saying, "Buy this." (write it a little better than that though!  My point, you want to kick off a promo on Day 7 and beyond.)

Email Marketing Tips: Get The Clicking

Each email you want them to open, read and click a link. You want them actionable.

You want them clicking the link in the email to go somewhere because that is training them to continue clicking the links in the emails that you send.

If they just open an email and don't ever do anything, you're never going to generate any revenue from them. You don't make money from email opens...

Email Marketing Tips: Go With The Flow In Blocks Of Three

You want to read your list.  Go with the flow.  If they respond to webinars, do some webinar marketing.  If they respond to sales videos or video sales letters, send more sales videos or video sales letters.  If they need more content and education, send more blog posts!

When you're promoting something, always do blocks of three.

If you're promoting a product through a webinar or sales video, do email blasts in blocks of three. Mail three days in a row, then give them two days off.

You also want to make sure you send multiple emails linking to the same thing.  Not everybody opens their email all the time. Send multiple emails. Track the links and the opens. Sort based on who's opening and who's clicking links.

Email Marketing Tips: On Your OFF Days

During the two "off" days, you will probably want to add some goodwill boosting content... Content marketing type stuff that people are going to like. For example, blog posts, videos, podcasts, workshops; they're all great to mail.

You don't need to send multiple emails for content either - one email's going to do it. If you write a blog post once a week then send that email, make sure to send an email out with a link to the blog post.

Email Marketing Tips: Two Promos Per Month Max

Max out at two big promos a month.  More than that, people will get upset.  Less than that and your revenue is less than it should be.

If you do, one per week, your list will be aggravated.  It'll seem a bit aggressive.

The better way is to do one big promo email blast, then send a few pieces of content, then another promo.

The content that you send out in between promos reestablishes goodwill and faith in your business!  Then, it's easier to walk into the next promo because your email list will be 'preframed' for the offer...

Email Marketing Tips: How Many Emails Per Month?

From an email frequency standpoint, you'll get pretty far with two big promos separated by bonding content.

If the frequency is too high, which sometimes happens, send fewer emails. If you have a list of people who enjoy sewing, 10 to 15 emails a month might be too much!  They might log in to look at their emails once every three or four days and they see four emails from you. They're going to say,"Meh, they send too much email.  I'm going to unsubscribe."

So just make sure to watch your numbers and you should be fine.

So if you need to lighten it up, that's awesome. And if you need email heavier, that's fine too.

I will tell you that the longer you go without emailing your list, that next email, unsubscribes are going to be through the roof. After that, it calms down. If you mail two or three days in a row, the unsubscribes and spam complaints will go down.

The simple fact is, people forget about you in four to five days. It's kind of crazy to think about, but if you have 20,000 people on your email list and haven't emailed them in 10 days...  They've already started forgetting they signed up in your email broadcast list! You will get unsubscribes.

The more often you mail, the lower total unsubscribe rate you have.

Email Marketing Tips: Unused Hotel Rooms?

I know a lot of marketers who think of the people on their email list as "unused hotel room.

They send email blasts out each and every day because for every day that they don't mail them, they're missing out on revenue. So it really just depends on the type of relationship that you want to have with your customers, with your prospects.

Personally, we treat our email list like family.  We want to send them content, videos, webinars and lots of stuff that'll make their business better.  We don't send email blasts for affiliate promotions and a bunch of random stuff.  That's us, though.  You may want to grow a list, mail the heck out of it, and let those people go sooner than later.

Need Some Help?

If you want to talk about email marketing campaigns, frequency, campaigns, sales funnels, or any of that kind of stuff; set up an action plan call with us or click the button below.

The post Email Marketing Tips: How Frequently You Should Send Email Blasts appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we're going to learn about CRM setup, namely how to get your email automation tools in place so your outbound marketing strategy can be automated. We'll be talking about setting up marketing automation campaigns and the two levels that you and your team need to think about when setting up your CRM.

Inside that CRM, you'll have your contact records (customers, prospects, etc), your messages (drip campaigns), your messages, and task management.

When it comes to CRM Setup, there are two different schools of thought, mostly based on who's driving the need for the CRM.

CRM Setup On The Macro Level (ie. CEO's & Managers)

The first is the macro level thought process.  Macro level CRM thinking tends to include a general explanation of how your buying sequence progresses.

Here's what I mean... When you walk into a grocery store, you usually walk in the front door, you go to the right, you go through produce, then you proceed through the outer wall of the store.  Next, you get into the aisles and then you end up at the cash registers.

That's a macro level view of grocery shopping.

CRM Setup On The Micro Level (ie. Marketers & Sales Managers)

Then you have your micro level automation.

Your micro level automation includes the things that happen in each of your email marketing campaigns. So somebody goes to your landing page, they fill in the opt-in form, they download your lead magnet.

Now what happens?

Like specifically... what happens?

What is the text of the email that they are getting sent?

What is the text of the text message that they are being sent?

Are they getting a phone call, and if they are getting a phone call, who is making it?

Are they getting a postcard if we have their physical mailing address?

How many emails are they getting before they either do something or not? And of each of those emails, what is the content of those emails?

That is the micro campaign level that you need to think about.

The Buyer Journey Understood As A 4-Year Old

So we have a four-year-old, and he loves this show on YouTube called Mighty Machines. It's really a cool show. We've learned a lot about how tractors operate, how front loaders work, and all kinds of other crazy stuff.

One of the episodes was this semi truck assembly line. (If anybody is familiar with my story, I used to drive a semi truck 14 years ago, and then I went off to start digital marketing.)

In the assembly line, way off in some distant corner of the factory, they start by building the frame of the tractor-trailer. Then, the undercarriage starts taking shape when the airbags for the suspension are added, the transmission is bolted on, and the engine is added.  It goes from stage to stage to stage, until you have this freshly-painted, polished, beautiful truck rolling off of the assembly line, ready to go to market.

Now if that frame was to skip a bunch of steps and then go right over to the paint booth, there's nothing to paint because the cab isn't put on it.

Or if it was to skip the engine loading phase, there's no engine in the semi. It can't drive off the assembly line when it's done.

Your CRM setup can't skip stages either.  Your email marketing campaigns need to have a framework applied.

CRM Setup - You Need Macro And Micro Level Automation

When a prospect comes to see you, they're all over the place. They bounce from one campaign to the next to the next, and if they drop off, your automation system moves them to some sort of a nurturing campaign.

Now we've worked with a lot of Done For You sales funnel clients over the years.  Oftentimes, when we're setting up marketing automation, we're setting up campaigns for them. What they give us is very different than what we actually need to get the job done.

Oftentimes, they explain their business processes - the buyer journey - and they say setup a CRM for us.  Now, that's usually fine because we write email copy and text messages and put all of those things in place. But with email automation tools, you need to have much more than a macro-level view of marketing to get it set up correctly.

Then you have the micro level view of email automation.  The micro level consists of these emails that go out, these text messages that go out, these tags that need to be applied, these forms that need to be filled out. That is the stuff that makes up the campaign.  That's what gets the job done in an email automation tool.

So if you have the macro level without the micro level it won't work because you have a lot of idea and strategy around the general framework without the individual components of the campaign...  The stuff that actually sells a prospect.

Without the individual components in your CRM setup (like emails, text messages, phone calls, tasks, etc), the whole thing falls apart and you aren't able to go to market with it.

Your Campaign Collateral Will Take Time

That's really what I wanted to get at in terms of building marketing automation campaigns inside your CRM.  You need to understand that there is a high-level campaign that needs to be built out with the right framework. Then, you also need to know that it's going to take a bunch of time to write the emails and the text messages and all collateral to get your email automation tools firing the right way.

Oftentimes, somebody downloads a lead magnet, they might get three or four pieces of marketing before they engage. That marketing could be emails, texts, or phone calls. So moving through those campaigns, you have a lot of different collateral that needs to be written.

When Traffic Comes In, What Happens?

In talking through this macro and micro level campaign layout, imagine you have traffic.

Traffic comes in, and a new lead gets added to your email list. What do you want them to do?  Book a sales call?  Assign a rep to actually call them?  Go through a sales sequence?

On the micro level, they'll start being sent emails, texts, calls, and other email automation-type material.  Those all need to go out. Then the next campaign would fire if they're interested in what it is you have to offer.

When they get on a sales call and say yes, you send them a proposal.

Or if they're not interested, you still want to keep them engaged, so we add them to a nurture sequence. The nurture sequence would consist a selection of blog posts or emails to keep them engaged.

If they are interested, then of course they become a buyer. They pay you money, they become a customer, and they're added to a fulfillment sequence. After they're added to the fulfillment sequence, they get a welcome call, log into their member's area, or have their materials mailed.

Each of these macro-level campaign elements, need to be backed up by the actual creative that fires with the micro level campaign content.

What setting up a CRM, how often should creative go out?

Follow-ups should to be broken down into days, because not everybody checks their email every single day.  You should think about your campaign in terms of what someone will receive from you on each day AFTER they become a lead.

For example:

• Day one, you're sending an email, text and a call.  (3 pieces of collateral that need material for).
• Day two, email, text, call.
• Day three, email, text, call.
• And so on...

If there isn't a response, you put them in the nurture sequence.

You'll be sending a LOT of campaign material from your email automation tools.  You don't want them to forget about you or what it is you're doing. All of that campaign material is really focused on getting somebody to schedule a call. Then, after they schedule the call, you need to be reminded about the call... After the reminders, we break the campaign in the CRM down into a logic switch...  Did they attend the call or didn't they attend the call?  Are they are they interested in what you're selling or are they not interested?

Need Help With Your CRM Setup?

What ends up happening is to get all this done, you need a lot of content...  Specifically, a lot of email to get your CRM setup. Plus you need the sales material, lead magnets, marketing, and all the marketing pages.

There's so much that goes into this marketing automation sales funnel, and we are happy to help work with you through it, starting with an action plan call.

Click here to sign up for an action plan call with us. We will get on, talk about your business, figure out where you're looking to go and what it is you want to build, and we will put together an action plan for that,

The post CRM Setup: Email Automation Tools And Startup Tips appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we're going to talk about marketing goals as they relate to marketing automation and smart marketing in your business.  Set up correctly, when a goal fires inside your Axis CRM, it'll end the subscriber's current campaign and kick off the next - advancing them through the buying process.

There are basically three pieces to a marketing automation campaign.

• The first is a trigger, or what happens in order to add them into a campaign?
• The second is the campaign, or the emails, texts, phone calls, and other messages that go out.  Also included in the campaign is the 'logic' and task management.
• The last piece is a goal. That what we're going to talk about today.

Goals are really pretty interesting. Goals signal the CRM to stop messaging because your prospect did what you wanted them to do.  That's what goal marketing is all about.

Let's say a smart marketing campaign has three texts and seven emails to go out all as part of the drip campaign automation.  Then, when somebody takes your desired action, the thing you want them to do, you don't want them to continue receiving those text messages and emails. That would drive them nuts, right?

So, what you do is you set up a goal.

Setting Up Marketing Goals In Your CRM

We use marketing goals all the time in our CRM.  Let's say you're doing webinar marketing by running a webinar promo sequence (ie. we're promoting a webinar, sending them to a webinar registration page!).  Then, we have a goal at the end when someone signs up for the webinar.

Obviously those emails are trying to get them to do something - we're trying to get them to sign up for a webinar. As soon as that sign up happens, then we move them into a webinar replay sequence. Whether they sign up on day one or day four, the goal in the CRM fires, and they immediately move into the replay sequence.

... Then, they continue getting the five or six emails in the replay sequence. If they purchase, the next goal fires, and they move into the buyer's sequence.

Break Down Your Buyer Journey Into Smaller Steps

That's why in smart marketing, goals are so important.  Email marketing automation doesn't work without them.  As a smart marketer, you always want your customer, your prospect, to be doing the next thing in your business.

You want them becoming a better customer and to advance along in your buying cycle.

More Complicated Goal - Shopping Cart Abandonment

Now, that goal is pretty easy. If they sign up for webinar replay, if they buy a product, they're added to a new list. That's when the goal fires.

Now, one that's not quite so easy is shopping cart abandonment.

With the shopping cart abandonment campaign, what you're doing is you're saying, "If somebody hits this page and they doesn't buy, send them an email 30 minutes later."

That's a little bit more tricky.

Then, when they purchase, then it takes them off of that shopping cart abandonment list. The same is true with a webpage visit. If somebody visits this webpage, then the goal happens.

Multi-Video Launch Sequences

For instance, let's say you're doing an evergreen multi-video launch sequence, like a Jeff Walker product-style launch promotion.  What happens there is you have:

• Three emails promoting video one
• Three emails promoting video two
• Three emails promoting video three
• Then six emails promoting the sales video or the webinar or whatever.

You have a series of emails that promote each piece.

Now, if you're accelerating that...  You want to send out all the videos as part of a marketing automation campaign or compress the promotions to 4 or 5 days...

Accelerated Launch Video Campaigns With Goals

By activating CRM goals, you can accelerate that multi-video launch process.  There's two ways you can actually fire the goal.

• Scenario One - if somebody hits the video page, then goal is satisfied. You've got that person to the page, and then they can bounce to the next sequence down.  The problem there is you don't know if they watched the video.
• Scenario Two - through an API, you track how much of the launch video they watched.  If somebody watched more than 50% or 75% of a Wistia video, then have the API add a tag in the CRM.

What you don't want is to send somebody three emails when they already watched the video!

Ideally, you want to move them to the next campaign as soon as they click over to the page.

Smart Marketing With Calendar Appointments

Another goal you can activate in your smart marketing campaigns is a calendar appointment.

If a calendar appointment is set by contact record, then this goal happens, moving them to the next campaign. Really in thinking about triggers, campaigns and goals, you're able to set up some pretty dynamic marketing automation by just imagining what's possible.  Is it a page visit? Is it for a goal or a trigger? Is it something they did? Is it something they bought? Is it something they signed up for?

Getting Marketing Goals And Automation Set Up For You

If you'd like to talk about marketing campaigns or our Axis CRM, set up an action plan call with us here.

We'll talk about your business, your marketing, and put an action plan together for you!

The post Marketing Goals: How To Automate Smart Marketing In Your Business appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we're going to talk about trigger marketing... Namely, how to drip email campaigns out based on what prospects and visitors do!

With marketing automation, there are lots of different things that you can do in terms of outbound marketing. You can send emails, text messages, fire out outbound calls... You can even send postcards and letters depending on the platform.

At the root of marketing automation, though, are three things that you need to be familiar with:

• Triggers
• Campaigns
• Goals

Look at any campaign builder, MarTech or AdTech tool, and you find that they're all based around those three fundamental components.

We'll be doing individual videos on each component.  Today we're going to talk about triggers and how they are used in trigger marketing and email automation as a whole.

What is a Trigger?

A trigger, sometimes named a rule, is any action that causes another action to happen.

Think of an if-then statement. If someone does this, then that happens.

There's a really, really popular app called IFTTT. It stands for If This Then That.  If you take a photo, then it'll automatically upload it to Facebook for you.  If a sale comes in, then it'll send a notification to your email address or send you a push notification.  It'll add a string of text to a Google Drive doc...  It's infinitely configurable and it brings two pieces of software together.

In trigger-based marketing, when the "IF" statement is fired, there's a "THEN."

What makes a Trigger fire?

Marketing automation triggers can take on a few different forms.  One of the most common is when someone fills out a form on a landing page (for, let's say, a lead magnet).  When someone opts in, it then triggers them to be added to a campaign.

Another type of trigger is a tag.  When a tag is applied to a customer record, it triggers the campaign.

A third form of trigger in marketing: if a person visits a website.  That page visit can actually be a trigger that'll send a drip email campaign.

Automatically adding someone to a email promotion sequence

One of my absolute favorite things to do with marketing automation is firing a trigger based on a page view.

Inside Axis, we have an advanced analytics tool that tracks page views.  When a page is visited AND we have the email record on file, then we add them into the promo campaign.

I've been doing this for a really long time in our software sales pages and for clients.

So, what happens is, the prospect is clicking around...  Maybe they go over to the sales page to watch the sales video...  Then a day later they get Email #1 of the Product Promo Sequence.  Two days later they get Email #2.  Three days later, they get Email #3.

We set this whole trigger marketing / drip email automatoin up with little blocks of five and six emails for all of the major sales pages...

If they added that product to a cart, but didn't buy it within 30 minutes, we would send them a shopping cart abandonment email. And then a day later, another shopping cart abandonment email.

One of the most effective things to do is think about what actions my prospect will take, and what needs to happen because of those actions.

In terms of trigger marketing, page views, opt-ins, and tags are great ways to kick off an email automation campaign.

If you want to talk a little bit more about how trigger marketing and drip email campaigns can be used in your business, make sure to book an action plan call here.  It's free, we'll dig into your business and what you need to do to optimize your sales and marketing campaigns, and give you an action plan to get it done.

The post Trigger Marketing: Drip Email Based On What Prospects Do appeared first on Done For You.

At the end of the day, whether you're selling coaching, consulting, real estate and properties, or investment opportunities; you really are in the lead generation business.

Being able to reach out to those leads when you want to market your product or market your services is really the biggest key to success.

To do that, you need CRM software.  More specifically, you need a CRM Stack that'll handle your email automation.  You need something that has email marketing automation built in that warms up and nurtures your list while you're concentrating on growing your business.

Choosing The Right CRM Software

CRM software really should be simple enough that you don't need a team to do what you need to do.

Picking the right one is totally about what you need it to do. The marketing that you need to pull off in your business is what that software should be capable of.

The way I see it is there's really three classes of CRM software

Class 1 CRM software is very easy to use. Email is a primary the message medium, meaning it's really great at email and sucks at everything else or it can't do anything else. These email marketing software platforms usually have some good campaign builders. The problem is they don't have rules, so you don't necessarily have any way to trigger automation for the most part. There's no phone, no text, no print, and no marketplace, so you can't add functionality very easily.

AWeber, ConvertKit, Drip, ActiveCampaign would all be considered Class 1 CRM software tools.

Then you have Class 2 CRM software apps, which use rules as triggers. There's task management oftentimes. There also usually a marketplace with some integrations. Most of those integrations are third-party middleware though, and you have many message mediums...  You can send text,  send emails, send direct mail pieces, and even call from within the customer record.

Class 2 CRM software tools are usually much more difficult to set up and understand. You actually need the onboarding. You need a team to be able to support you in that. (In fact, we do a lot of CRM setups in our sales funnel builds!) There is also very little by way of sales pipeline, and they're difficult for phone sales. If you're selling something that is more complicated, then you're not able to get what you need out of the Class 2 CRM software.  Infusionsoft and Ontraport are two examples of those kinds of apps.

Then you have you Class 3 CRM software tools, which can do everything. They have great sales pipelines, very visual sales workflow, and very extensive APIs and functionality, meaning you can tie anything in the world into it... But they're expensive, they've got a super high learning curve, and they need implementation. Salesforce and HubSpot would be two examples there.

But the biggest problem with each of these tools is that they focus on and are built around the functionality.  And oftentimes, what you do in your sales funnel remains outside of them.

Email Marketing Automation That's Built Around The Customer

When you look your business, fundamentally, you're selling to one person - your customer...  An end user.  The entire goal of an email marketing automation platform is to move that lead, that prospect, towards being a customer. Once they're a customer, the email marketing automation should support you by increasing the value of that customer over the lifetime they're with you.  It should be able to extend the journey with that person so that they can continue to buy your stuff, consume your services, pay your subscriptions, and generate referrals.

Whatever your business model is - It's moving a lead to a customer and then a customer into the future.

Stop Migrating Your CRM And Customer Data

In looking at the CRM software that's out there, the biggest challenge hits when your business grows... You need to move from one CRM tool through the next, through the next.

As we got to building Axis though, it was so cool because when you take the customer-centric philosophy of what CRM software should look like...  Then you start to realize how a CRM can be extensible and grow with a business through a marketplace, so you never have to migrate, it gets exciting!

If you look at a garage/basement startup business to a 5, 10, 15, 20 million dollar company, you're at least looking at three migrations before you can effectively service your customer base!  It shouldn't be that way!

Adding Functionality To Your CRM Software

What we did in Axis was build around the customer record.  Sure, you can start with just a CRM, just email, and just campaigns.

You still get that great contact record that's extensive and customizable...  You can do everything you need to for your customers by way of email marketing automation.  And this is what your marketing automation agency should be setting up for you.... Then when you're ready to grow, when you're ready to add functionality, you just drop in new apps!  All of a sudden, your CRM software is ready to take you to the next level...  You have a page builder for your sales funnel.  You have email copy.  You have advanced analytics with AI built in it. You have bots. You have all kinds of other additional stuff that ready and waiting for you to add. You don't migrate. You just add the tools, add the software, add the technology.

Then when you do go from the Class 2 CRM software to Class 3, and you pick up a phone sales team who needs comprehensive sales pipelines and workflows...  Just drop in the new apps and all of a sudden, you can move over.

That is why we built Axis the way we did. That is why we built the functionality. That is why we took so long in building our own platform so that it can grow your business so that it can be extensible, and so that it can be easy to use. You don't need some expert certified consultant in order to run it.

Email Marketing Automation That Increases Lifetime Customer Value

In putting together a CRM that works with smaller businesses and also works with larger businesses, we needed complete contact records.

There's a human being on the other side of every email and every text message you sent. There's a human being who is pulling out their wallet to give you money. Our view of a CRM is that it needs to be built around a customer. It needs to be built around that lead, that person. It needs to be scalable so that whether it's one lead or 10,000 leads or 100,000 leads, you're still focusing on that one person 100,000 times. That's really the fundamental piece.

When we started building Axis, we said, "This is what we need to do. We need to build it around the customer."

We need easy-to-use automation. We need something that is extensible through a marketplace so you could functionality to it by just clicking a button as opposed to needing to upend your entire world and then learn another platform.  We needed something that was easy to use that could grow with your business. We had to be able to bolt on whatever functionality that you needed without any middleware.

With that, I'd love to do a one-on-one demo with you and your team.

We'll jump on the phone, work through what your exact business model is, get your account set up so you can get to work.

The post CRM Software: How To Deploy Customer-Centric Email Marketing Automation appeared first on Done For You.

During this live presentation, you'll discover how to save more time, generate more revenue, and dial in your pipeline in a few clicks.

- What marketing automation is all about, and what it’ll do for you.
- 4 key components needed in CRM Stacks and automation software
- Why automation works, and what businesses it’s best used for.
- How to replace all of the marketing systems you currently have with one single piece of software
- Plus much more!

Click here for a free account and 1-on-1 demo!

The post LIVE PRESENTATION: Drag And Drop Marketing Automation appeared first on Done For You.

According to Radicati Group research, over 34% of the world’s population use email, which is approximately 2.5 billion people. By 2020, this figure is likely to reach 2.8 billion daily email users. The research also revealed that 196 billion emails are sent every day,  and 109 billion of these are business emails.

Smart businesses are looking for innovative ways to incorporate influential email marketing strategies into their business. Because email marketing is the incredibly simple and effective way of communicating with your customers, it has a wider reach and higher conversion rate.

Moreover, email marketing is a more personal approach of communicating with your target clients. Email updates wait in the queue along with messages coming from friends and family. That makes this strategy work better than most marketing tactics. You can tailor email content to communicate more effectively, using relevant ad copy and covering your customer’s preferences.

Still wondering if email marketing is good for your business? Here are some secrets to adopting email marketing as your next big online marketing strategy:

• Effective Customer Acquisition: While social media is a popular component in internet marketing, email marketing is the greatest engagement tool to strengthen interaction with your audience and build a personal relationship, which further converts into members, customers, and supporters.
• Cost Effective Strategy: Small businesses should consider email marketing as a cost-effective and economic strategy. It allows your business to reach a larger audience base for a nominal cost. Instead of publishing ads on print media, TV or other channels, email marketing has greater potential and reach.
• Customized Approach: Email marketing allows you to segment your audience, list them, and send customized emails to each list. Such emails resonate with the reader and provide them the right value they are looking for. According to DMA, targeted and segmented emails generate 58% of the entire amount of revenue. Likewise, marketers using segmented campaigns have witnessed 760% revenue growth, as per Campaign Monitor reports. For segmentation, choose Askly to get instant insight into your target audience.
• Transactional: When you receive an email, an instant reaction is to reply, forward, sign up or buy. An email is more action-oriented than any other form of marketing. You can leverage this to get direct traffic to your business and drive potential sales. As you build your startup marketing strategy or small business, using email for marketing can give you instant results.
• Easy to Track: Internet marketing is a dicey game. It is crucial to track every move and action. Using an email marketing software, you can track the response of your emails, see who and how many people opened it, check the links that received clicks, and see how many people subscribed/unsubscribed it. That’s precisely what you want to know – the performance of your email marketing strategy. Make sure you study email marketing mistakes properly to avoid any disaster.

Now that you know how important it is to create an email marketing campaign, let’s dive into how you can do it the right way. Here are the steps to get you started:

Step 1: Write an indomitable preview message

Preview message is as important as the subject line of an email sent out for marketing. People generally do not open emails coming from unknown sources. So, they choose to preview the email before opening it. So, make your preview message a curiosity generator and compelling enough to get an assured click. You can test multiple email providers for your limits before selecting the right words for the mail to entice your target audience.

The key is to use the right amount of words and do it correctly. Using flattery language is fine as long as you don’t overdo it. Likewise, unpredictable subject lines draw instant attention. Ask questions, compel your readers to open the email by reading the subject line, create interest, and see the magic unfold.

Make sure the content of your email marketing campaign is top-notch. Find your target audience and convert them into loyal customers with your perfectly curated content.

Step 2: Choose colors & themes to match your branding

We love colors! But when it comes to your business, be careful and don’t go overboard.

When you are announcing a new offer or presenting something new to your customers in an email, be careful with the choice of colors. The brand shows also has a uniform look with a strong and consistent concept. Color has an entirely different effect on your customers. So, doing it right is crucial for any new campaign.

Colors should be enticing, convincing, bold yet subtle. Steer clear from bright and glaring hues and choose warm, appealing and subtle colors. Ensure the aesthetics of the email layout matches with the design, color, and logo.

Step 3: Smart space management

Emails are not necessarily long. The message is usually short and to-the-point. So, you have to use the space properly, separating texts and images, maintaining layout rules, and not making it messy. Sloppy images, unprofessional layout, unnecessary pictures just to occupy space, and overlapping text are not what you want to show your audience.

Become the audience when you visualize the preview of an email you are going to send. If there’s something you don’t like, change it. Utilize space wisely.

Step 4: Image & font size

High-resolution pictures can be a part of emails but keep both image and font size low. Depending on the screen resolution and browser settings of your recipients, things can go wrong. The idea is to keep it basic, simple, and least messy. Even if you upload 79 dpi sized images, it would still look better than a messy upload. Moreover, people mainly use tablets and smartphones to open emails and large sizes would not fit. However, it would increase your risks of losing a customer.

Similarly, being crazy over fonts is also not advisable. Most customers may not have the non-standard fonts on their mobile devices. Using such Gothic fonts would only lead to a lack of response. So, stick to the conventional fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia or Calibri.

Always test the final email ad copy. Keep the text justified and see how it appears on different devices and browsers.

Step 5: Create a seamless experience

The first and foremost goal of an incredible email marketing campaign is to deliver seamless user experience. Of course! We know that!!

Isn’t that always accepted?

It is, for sure, but seldom appropriately implemented.

When your customers open an email, they should get an experience of receiving something. That counts!

Make them curious to know what you are offering as soon as they receive your email. Offer a promotional discount along with it to exceed their expectations. Personalize the experience, captivate them, and make it relevant so that they open it.

Step 6: Keep it short & simple

KISS!

Your email should pass the message across and not die down. So, use short and relevant phrases, simple words, easy to visualize, and least overwhelming. The digital world is full of ads, sales pitches, and annoying interruptions, which people want to avoid. You may be feeling that your offer or product is unique, but if it does not appeal to your audience, it won’t matter.

You have to focus on direct email marketing to entice your audience. That is only possible when you reach their private inbox.  However, don’t give them a feeling of getting way too much into their privacy and annoying them. Your audience is your guest. Treat them well, and they shall get back to you.

Step 7: Add value to your business

Marketing emails generally hit the junk/spam folder. In order to reach the inbox of your customers, you have to stand out in the crowd and competition. The only way is to utilize your creativity to the maximum and provide value through your emails.

The best way to deliver value is to use curated content. You can choose software that collects relevant information and curates content for a targeted audience. You can offer a real guide, suggestion, or advice to your customers through your email. Set up a bold image to attract more user attention. However, avoid those tacky lines like QUICK Cash, FREEBIES, etc. Such emails never get attention. In fact, you should also avoid shouty capitals in your subject line.

If you are selling something, be innovative in your approach. Instead of using too many graphics, which create confusion, be simple and subtle.

Final word

Email marketing is an incredible method to reach your audience and grab their attention, especially if you are running a small business. Be savvy and place your customer’s needs and demands before anything else. Regardless of what you do, ensure that your customers are always on your mind. Prove to them that you have something valuable and unique to offer, and commit to excellence. Make your business stand out with direct email marketing campaigns.

To learn how to get your email marketing done for you, click here!

The post Secrets To Having A Rewarding Email Marketing Campaign appeared first on Done For You.

The problem is that not every market knows how to use the power of email marketing to good effect. Most simply think of email as a means of communication. In reality, it is the most powerful marketing source that can help your business in generating a huge amount of revenue.

If you are someone looking to leverage the power of email marketing, then we have got plenty of advice for you. Let us begin with that advice step by step.

But before that, let us have a look at a few more statistics.

Want to learn the art of reengagement using email marketing? If yes, then check this out.

You might be shocked to know that most sales emails have a merely a 1% response rate.

In order to get this number to climb, you need to follow these tips.

The structure

Every sales email is divided into three parts:

• The opening
• The body
• The closing

In order to create a successful sales email, it is important to get the right balance among these three. The opening consists of the subject line, which is the most important factor that contributes to the success of your email. In the body, you must present all the information needed to not just entice the customer but also to make him or her aware of the benefits that your business can bring. Lastly, the closing part of the email which must compel the user to take some action!

The right balance among these three could mean that you now have everything in place for a successful email marketing campaign.

The content of sales emails

It’s all in the content. The success of your email marketing campaign depends entirely on the content that you are feeding the customers. Even if you are writing a sales email, it must not sound like one.

Today’s smart customer is aware of the internet and he is simply not convinced by a robotic sounding sales email. He looks for something more personal and less-robotic.

This is the reason that you need to write the content of your email targeting the human side of the customer. Don’t think of yourself as a business owner; think of yourself as a facilitator who is here to solve a problem for the customer.

This will help you choose the right words when writing the email content.

Errors – a big no!

One of the biggest turn-offs in an email marketing campaign are errors, be it grammatical, typos or structural ones.

When you are drafting email content, you must get your grammar, facts, and logic right. You cannot just write anything and expect the user to be attracted. A small mistake, in this regard, could cost your business a lot in terms of loyalty, faithfulness, and seriousness of your customer.

If you don’t want that to happen, then the best idea is to proofread the email copy as many times as possible or get the experts to analyze it and only then send it out to the market.

Leverage the power of social proofs

Another smart way to incorporate your business success into your sales email campaigns is to leverage your social media proofs. Wondering how?

Well, here’s how – use testimonials from your biggest customers in your email marketing. Share any message from a happy customer who has used your service or product and has words of praise to share. Things like these can go a long way to creating a chain of trust, which can prove to be the most positive thing that you can bring to your email marketing campaigns.

Remember, in today’s world it is all about social proofs. People really like what other people say. In fact, numbers show that close to 40% of the customers form an opinion about a business only after reading a review.

Looking at all this, there is no denying that using the positive words from your existing customers can eventually work towards enticing new customers.

The right use of power words

Last, but not the least, a thing that you can do in order to crack the code of successful email marketing is to know how to use what word, and at what place. In technical terms, this is called as word placement.

As someone who is trying to weave magic with words, it becomes imperative to know which power words to use in your email to attract more customers.

Here is a list of the top 500 power words that make an instant impact when used in headlines – https://coschedule.com/headline-power-words. Similarly, there are plenty of other lists available. So, you must know how to use them to good effect when drafting your sales email.

After all, sales emails are all about using the power of words to get your customer to take an action after reading the email. Without those power words, whatever you write is simply not going to make the cut.

So, are you ready?

That was all about tips and tricks to create a powerful email marketing campaign from which your business can benefit. With these simple words of wisdom, you can easily find your way to better traction and more success with your email marketing campaigns.

However, you will need to invest the right amount of time in order to figure out how to use these tricks to good effect.

Are you ready to invest that time in writing sales emails that attract more customers? If yes, then begin now and see how it turns out.

Check out this amazing free tool on how to run a successful email sequence campaign.

The post Do These Things In Your Sales Emails To Attract More Customers appeared first on Done For You.

Anton Eliasson of Shakr  believes that the mobile video era is just beginning.

Earlier, we established how even six-second ads or bumper ads can lead to high-engagement with brands (in the case of Facebook Ads).

The world has also run out of excuses any more since you can create several types of videos with easy to use tools or shoot a video with your smartphone.

What can a video do to your emails as you do your email marketing, you ask? A Wistia report reveals that it leads to a 300% increase in click-through rate (compared to emails without video).

Video is awesome. Email marketing is the true unsung hero of your business.

Together, video in email can change the way you do your marketing.

Here are a few brands that are doing an awesome job by using video within their email campaigns:

Wistia

Wistia obviously practices what it preaches. The email campaign above has a video front and center along with a few other calls to action buttons with video thumbnails.

Wistia is a video hosting solution for businesses (with a few other tools in their arsenal such as Soapbox). Wistia’s video hosting solutions provide you not just hosting for video but also video analytics, email collection tool called Turnstile, a brandable video player, and an entire library of video inspiration along with their blog and learning center.

HelpScout

You have welcome emails, and then you have welcome emails with video.

HelpScout’s welcome email soon after you sign up is simple and yet highly effective. Instead of writing text that you might or might not read, embedding a helpful video that urges you finish what you started just gets the job done.

Did you notice that there’s absolutely nothing else in the email except for the video and a single line that tells you to create your first customer support mailbox in 4 minutes flat?

It’s called Minimalism in marketing, and it works.

Spark

Nothing tells a story better than a video does. You can’t demonstrate better in any other content format than the video itself. If you have a product or service, using videos to show your customers “how it works” is the next best thing to life itself.

Spark is an app that helps you manage or process your inbox, deal with incoming email, and get more efficient with your Inbox. See what Spark does with their email campaign above — the screenshot is only a part of a rather long(ish) email.

A video right at the top (front and center) to demonstrate how Spark works is the fastest way to convince their users to plunge right in and get started with the app. The testimonials, feature boxes, and other information will nudge potential users even further.

SkillShare

Ready for another class in minimalism?

Skillshare is an online learning platform where hundreds of experts teach you everything from technology to filmmaking. Their email campaign above does a lot of things right.

The email has a video to nudge you into your first class already with nothing else there to distract you from taking that one step that you have to take.

The call to action “Start Watching” is more than enough to get you onto your learning path.

5By

Clear, concise, focused, and on the job. This email campaign by 5By does a lot, all within a single email.

Notice the use of words like “magic” (who doesn’t like magic, right?), the compelling call to action, the big orange button, the use of a contrasting background to snap your attention right back to the email, and the thumbnail with Ellen Degeneres (social proof, anyone?).

We bet $10 that you’ll click and take action on this email if you ever got one like this. 5By isn’t complaining.

Ghost

Ghost CMS takes simplicity to another level. Their email campaign is an example of extreme minimalism. Instead of writing 8 paragraphs or noodling with a page of their knowledge base on how to start a blog on the Ghost platform, watching a one-minute video is truly compelling.

With nothing else around to click on, a beautifully placed video right inside the email, we’ll want to see the video even if we might never use Ghost per se.

Are you inspired to use video in email marketing? Have you done it already? If yes, what are the click-through rates or engagement rates like?

Need help with your email marketing strategy, sales funnels, landing pages, or your digital marketing in general? Get on a scheduled call with us.

Want to make your marketing work like a machine? Register for our free Attract. Engage. Profit. Webinar.

The post Video In Email: 6 Examples To Inspire Your Next Campaign appeared first on Done For You.

In this article we are going to discuss

• how you can improve cold email deliverability to reach your prospect’s inbox, and
• how to test your email campaigns before hitting the “send” button.

How you deliver these cold emails determines whether they are successful or otherwise. If you notice failure, for sure, you should take immediate action.

Tips for successful cold email deliverability

1. Your cold email is not SPAM!

Since the recipients of your emails have no idea about your existence, at times they might report those emails as spam. As a result, you will experience instant and radical change in your reputation. However, as time goes by, the same recipients will include your contact on their lists.

Also, you might get replies to your emails. Afterward, your reputation will increase in the quickest time possible. This is how you avoid getting reported as spam.

i) Prospects should unsubscribe easily

Giving links where prospects can unsubscribe can save your cold emails from being reported as spam. If such an incidence happens, take it easy. Never force them to re-feed their details. Just respect their decision instead.

ii) Personalize your email and target your prospects

Sending generic emails to thousands of emails without personalization or without a target is a horrible idea. Rather, include a few personalized details to show your interest in the recipient. Just carry ou online research about them to know what information to include in the emails.

Pay attention to those prospects who might be interested in whatever it is you are selling. Your follow-ups to emails should be friendly. Your time-frame should be flexible. Else sending lots of emails within a short duration could irritate your recipients.

iii) Avoid restricting your activities to cold emailing

If you fail to get feedback from your emails, perhaps the recipient has no interest – even if they do not report you as spam.

Alternatively, if you get feedback, then you will know your credibility is high. In the end, your reputation increases. The best way to use this credibility is to include other activities besides cold emailing. For instance, use email ids to email colleagues or friends. You never know, your reputation might go even higher.

2. Never allow internet/email service providers to flag you

For email service provider to identify your activity as suspicious, they look at factors like entire bounce rate and volume. Therefore, ensure you create a great reputation with these service providers. Here are some guidelines:

i) Start small

Instead of focusing on lots of emails, why don’t you focus on the feedback you get from those emails? You can begin by sending around 40 emails and increase your reputation as time goes by. The trick here is to keep sending a certain volume of emails daily.

This is opposed to sending hundreds of them once a week and none on other days. As you progress, you can increase that number after creating an email id.

ii) Be careful with automation software

Automation software, such as MixMax and Mailshake, can help you with cold emailing. However, you should adjust the settings in such a way that allows you to send emails in intervals and with a daily limit.

iii) Lower bounces

Service providers rate feedback in terms of bounces. Getting fewer bounces can boost your reputation, and vice versa. Therefore, avoid more bounces because they can affect your reputation, which is challenging to get out of it.

To avoid bounces ensure you verify, clean and freshen your cold email list. Use Findthatlead and Briteverify as services to validate those addresses.

iv) Send different templates

Sending similar emails over the same period sends a wrong signal. Instead, use personalized tags such as Company and First name. Luckily, most cold email and sales tools will help you set-up several A/B testing choices. As a result, you will be using different templates each time you send emails.

v) Watch your reputation

Return Path and Sender Score are some of the tools you can use to watch your reputation. You will know if your IP’s/domain reputation is rising or dropping within a given period. Dropping reputation means minimizing the volume of emails and concentrating on how you can enhance email deliverability.

3. Avoid spam filters

As technology advances, spam filters get highly complex. The best thing is to ensure the spam filters for your recipients do not flag your emails. And this is how you go about it.

Get the right email infrastructure

Some people send cold email using their Gmail accounts through software like MixMax, Mailshake or Klenty. In that case, they do not have to worry about spam filters. Otherwise, if using Rackspace or Sendgrid to create an SMTP server on a dedicated IP, then you should be careful.

First, you should include the right DKIM records and SPF records. Second, verify you own that domain. Complying with these two steps will win the trust of your recipients.

Are there other factors that affect cold email deliverability?

Yes, these are:

• Some recipients have advanced spam filters that track links and short URLs. The best thing to do is to do away with images and switch off email-open tracking.
• Attachments also affect the deliverability of your emails. Therefore, avoid attachments especially in your initial emails. If it is a must, you can upload the files to Dropbox/Google docs to send that link.
• Avoid salesy templates. Sending emails with many colors, lots of HTML, CAPS and exclamation points might make it appear as spam. Hence, your emails will be filtered easily.

How can you test your cold email?

Testing email campaigns before sending them is a bet practice that helps to improve inbox placement rate. There are several email testing tools you can use for that matter.

• Mail-tester is a tool that can help you out. This email deliverability tool will enable you to know how likely your emails will be delivered.
• MX toolbox is another online tool  for testing how spammy your email looks.
• Litmus is a premium email deliverability testing tool – it has a free trial.

The bottom line

As you can see, effective cold email deliverability goes down to spam. You should ensure your emails do not appear as spam by following these steps we have discussed.

Other ways you can avoid sending spam emails is to:

• Send well thought and written emails
• Carry out research and contact only those suitable for your product/service
• Simplify and respect prospects rights to unsubscribe
• Use an email deliverability testing tool before sending out a campaign

If you follow these steps, for sure, you will reap all the benefits of cold emailing.

PS.  We’d love to help dial in your marketing automation.  If you head on over to the Done For You Email Marketing page, you’ll get the chance to speak with us one on one about getting your email automation setup!

The post How To Improve Cold Email Deliverability appeared first on Done For You.

In a recent survey , it was found that more than 82% of companies are using email marketing and are able to monetize it.

In fact, you would be surprised to know that 72% of people prefer to receive promotional messages through email than other channels.

Today, there’s a plethora of companies using email marketing. With this level of competition, it has become difficult to reach your customer’s inbox and to make your brand stand out. However, smart marketers always find a way to help their brand engage with its target audience in an effective way.

Drip email campaigns come across as a perfect solution to send personalized and targeted emails to subscribers without making your messages too salesy. Drip email campaigns have emerged as a top choice for businesses to generate sales and build customer loyalty on auto pilot.

What is drip email marketing?

Drip email marketing is a digital marketing tactic. It involves sending automated sequences of emails to prospects (or subscribers) on a predetermined schedule. With drip campaigns, you can set a specific delivery time frame or just tie messages to a trigger. A trigger could be anything from an email subscription to page visit on your website.

Drip email marketing is also known by different names in the digital marketing world such as automated email campaign, autoresponder sequence, lifecycle emails, email marketing automation etc.

Just like a farmer sows a seed which then grows to a sapling, marketers are developing a relationship with users by nurturing them with the relevant information.

How to use a drip email campaign?

Your drip email marketing will be successful if it is executed the right way.

Here are a few ways companies use drip email marketing to achieve more conversions and sales:

• nurturing leads,
• welcoming new subscribers,
• onboarding new customers,
• recovering abandoned carts,
• getting recommendations,
• subscription renewals,
• driving engagement,
• getting confirmations,
• delivering courses,
• and bringing unsubscribed users back.

Important things to take care of in drip email marketing

Timing and scheduling

Smart marketers always know when and how to make the most of email marketing. They are fully aware of the fact that successful email marketing is all about sending pre-written or automated emails to customers on a fixed schedule.

You can’t just bombard your list with emails about your product. You have to understand and figure out the schedule for it as the timing is what is going to make all the difference.

The good news is that there is no fixed way to do it.

As a business, you should take the pain to understand the right balance between making a connection and not annoying your following.

Content

Quality content can have a great impact on your customers. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the content of your drip campaign could actually be the deal-maker or deal-breaker.

Whether you are nurturing leads, welcoming a new customer, or sending a new feature update, make sure it is valuable, engaging, and well-presented.

The key is to provide fresh and error-free content that is providing useful information to customers along with some compelling images. Every detail might push your customers to make a purchase.

Subject line and layout

The first thing that catches the attention of a customer whenever they receive an email is the subject line. After that comes the layout. And mind you, first impressions always last long.

Talking about the subject line, it better be unique and on point, because no matter how great or useful the content is, if you’ve got a dry subject line, your chances are already small.

Your layout is as important as the content and the subject-line, so make sure it is simple, effective, and actionable. Review your graphics and colors. Be mindful of the fact that most the subscribers are using their smartphones to check their emails. Make sure your content is optimized for mobile to give your audience a nice experience.

Analytics

At the end of the day, the success of your email campaigns is all about numbers and results.

It is essential to keep a tab on the numbers and analytics to gauge how well your drip email marketing is doing in reality.

Keep a keen eye on factors such as the number of emails being clicked and opened, actual conversions through email campaigns, the total time spent by customers. These valuable insights will be helpful to determine what is working and what should be improved.

For instance, if analytics indicate that prospects are opening up the email but you aren’t getting any results, it could be an indication to look into the content or design or whether you are bombarding customers with too many emails or not.

Over to you

One can only make way for successful drip email marketing with the right approach and tools. Only then, drip marketing can provide your sales team with a continuous supply of warm leads.

With successful drip email marketing, you can make way for a powerful communication to reach your prospects on auto pilot. Plus, businesses are opting for drip email marketing to build credibility and nurture relationships without human involvement.

It’s time you started gauging the effectiveness of your drip campaign to up your game and to increase your revenue.

That’s how you create a successful drip email marketing campaign.

Now, if you’d rather hand the work over and get it done for you, our Managed CRM program does just that.  We’ll automate your marketing inside your CRM, write your emails, configure your workflows and build the marketing processes for you!

The post A Comprehensive Guide To Successful Drip Email Marketing appeared first on Done For You.

When businesses are looking to up the ante and get results in an instant, you can hear this phrase coming out of the mouth of marketing managers quite often.

The reality, however, is that there cannot be a worse decision than to give up on email marketing.

Did you know that email is more than 40 years old? Still, it continues to be the best way to market a business. There are plenty of reasons to support this fact.

What are those reasons? This post will shed some light on all those reasons. But before we do that, here are some numbers that will let you know the importance of email marketing for businesses –

• Surveys show that email marketing is the greatest driver of customer retention (eMarketer)
• Emails continue to be the third most influential source of business information for the audience (ImaginePub)

As it is quite evident from these numbers, email marketing is still a strong source of getting the best results for your business.

Now, let us take a look at some of the reasons that prove email marketing still rocks for businesses:

1. Email Marketing: The preferred method of communication

According to the Campaign Monitor, there are 124.5 billion business emails sent and received each day (2018). And the numbers are expected to rise even further in the coming year as well.

Now, this makes it quite evident that email still holds the top spot when it comes to professional communication. And, when it comes to building a relationship with customers, communication plays the biggest role.

As a business, if you can master the art of communication, you can eventually win your audience. This is exactly what email marketing can help you achieve.

What’s more, email communication is permission based. Unlike with PPC marketing and social media, subscribers voluntarily opt-in to receive promotional messages from you.

2. Extraordinary ROI

You will be amazed to know that there are businesses which are generating up to 4400% ROI by getting $44 for every dollar they spend on their email marketing campaigns. This is just one odd example; there are thousands of others which are following their footsteps.

Looking at these astonishing numbers, one can say it with confidence that email marketing is truly a smart business investment.

3. Email marketing is bigger than social media marketing

As already evident from the numbers, email marketing is big – so big that it surpasses many social media channels. Don’t believe me? Well here is a small statistic that will help you figure it out.

‘There 3.7 billion unique email users, the number is far more than any other social media channel. Facebook, the biggest of them all has only 1.9 billion unique visitors every month.’

So, you can see it quite clearly that email is without a doubt bigger than any of the social media channels out there.

Want to know the secret behind successful email re-engagement? Wondering how do email campaigns generate great results? Follow this link to know it all – https://doneforyou.com/resources/re-engagement-sequence/.

4. Email is personal

One of the biggest reasons that make email marketing such an impactful medium of getting to know the customer is the fact that it allows you to enter their personal space, where there are no distractions.

This allows the user to have sole attention only on your business. There is no noise around which can distract the user and swipe them away from your business. If planned smartly, this could give you a golden opportunity to win the customer over forever. You cannot ask for anything better.

Also, most email marketing platforms allow you to see detailed stats of user behavior. Unlike with social media marketing and paid advertising, where you can see the total number of clicks, email marketing stats allow you to find out exactly who opened your email. You can also see who clicked and on what link.

Personalized analytics, in turn, allow you to build completely customized campaigns and automated sequences.

5. Email marketing is inexpensive

Another great thing about email marketing is that compared to any other means of business marketing, this is the most inexpensive one. You can easily find plenty of cheap email marketing services that you can leverage for your business and get assured results.

Compare this to other marketing efforts like paid online advertising, print advertising and more, and you will get to see a clear difference. And, this is one of the most important factors that play role in smart marketers still relying on email marketing.

If you’re looking to invest in a high-quality email marketing platform with a simple user interface and advanced automation features, give Convertly a try! You won’t be disappointed by how easy it is to create effective email campaigns that get you opens and clicks every time. Plus, you can put everything on autopilot, with Convertly’s triggered autoresponder sequences. Get started with a free email marketing trial.

6. The one source for all

The most important factor that works in favor of email as a great marketing tool lies in the fact that it is equally impactful across different generations of customers.

According to Kelsey Bernius, “Across generations, there is a clear preference to receive communications from companies by email.”

Email allows businesses to build long-term relationships with their audience, and get their message across more effectively.

When we talk about other marketing channels, age plays a vital role in the success of the campaign. And as a business, you have to devise different campaigns and generate different content for different age groups. However, with email, you don’t really have to worry about that. You can reach anyone and everyone with it.

Email marketing is a cross-generational phenomenon!

Email marketing still rocks!

All these points paint a clear picture as to why email marketing still rocks!

If you are a business owner who is looking to get the best results from your marketing efforts, then it is time to get back to the basics. And, the basics is email marketing.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and sit with your marketing team to plan your next email campaign. It’s a waste of time to wait for the perfect timing while the competition is growing bigger and stronger with every passing day. You would not want to be the one who is left behind the competition. Would you?

Are you looking to step into the smarter creed of email marketers? If the answer is a yes, then our email marketing handbook can prove to be your guiding light.

The post The Real Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Rocks appeared first on Done For You.

There are plenty of ways in which businesses have managed to decrease their effort and reap great results using marketing automation software. Email automation, sales automation, process automation are only few of the changes that have occurred.

Here is a graph that reflects how things have changed over the past few years when it comes to marketing automation:

Source: EmailMonday

The graph demonstrates that the US marketing automation software industry was a $3.3B market in 2017, growing 30%+ annually.

Businesses today have adapted to the fact that marketing automation helps to win the battle over competition. That’s why more and more businesses are looking forward to automating their marketing and sales processes.

If you are still wondering how automation is going to help your business dominate the world, then here are some of the possible reasons.

Before we dive into those reasons, we’d like to stress that we’re in the business of creating completely DFY automated sales funnels that drive business growth via paid traffic and high-conversion sales tactics. Learn exactly how we do that by downloading our Funnel Factor report.

Improved customer targeting

One of the most important ways in which automation software can help a business is by helping it better target the audience.

It is virtually impossible to interact with every customer every time they come to you online. This is where marketing automation software can come to your rescue.

By serving as the initial point of interaction, such software can eventually suffice the initial need of information for the customer, moving them one step into the sales funnel.

So, you can easily target the customer better.

Want to try something new that can help you boost your business sales? If yes then you need to check out this freebie right away!

Efficient prospect identification

Knowing that a large number of customers are visiting your business is one thing but identifying the prospects out of those visitors requires a lot of effort.

But wait – all this was a thing of the past.

Thanks to the rise of technology and automation software, it has now become easier than ever to not just identify the prospects but also target them in the most efficient possible manner.

Such software provides all the required data, along with the customer behavior statistics that you can use to create winning strategies.

Better conversions

The best thing about marketing automation technology is that it eliminates the chances of any human errors in the data. Automation software will perform the basic function of identifying the prospective clients, which are ready to make an investment.

In simpler words, it will make sure that you get only the most interested clients moved down the sales funnel. This is easily going to increase the chances of conversion as the client is already interested in the product.

By sufficing the needs of the client at the first step, as mentioned above when the client comes to your website, you are actually creating a bond of trust which is further going to help you in conversion. And, that’s what matters in the end!

Isn’t it so?

All the numbers and insights

Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed.

– Dan Zorella

Data is the basis of success in today’s breakneck competition. Businesses that leverage data to good effect are the only ones that manage to climb the ladder of success and beat the competition.

This is where again automation software can come to the rescue.

Automation software will supplement all the numbers related to customer behavior and all the insights on how the customer reacts when interacting with your business. All this can prove to be vital in creating future strategies.

As they say, failing to plan is like planning to fail. You need to have a marketing strategy in order to succeed in your business. Therefore, having the much-needed data and using it to good effect becomes a must.

Automation automation software can suffice these needs for you!

Build a successful business

Building a successful business is all about effective utilization of money.

Rather than focusing on getting your employees to run the mill from 9am to 6pm, you must automate processes so that they can bring their creativity out and get things done the smartest way.

Thanks to marketing automation, employees can shift their focus from gathering the numbers to making use of those numbers to creating marketing strategies that can work like magic for the business.

This is where lies the beauty of automation software.

Not only does it help you speed up the processes, but it also makes sure that employees don’t have to face the burden of getting buried under the numbers and analyses. Rather, all they need to do now i get meaningful data coming from the software and strategizing how they are going to use this data for the benefit of the business.

For the smarter creed of businesses

To sum it up, all we have to say is that marketing automation has taken the industry by storm. As per the figures mentioned at the beginning of this post, businesses have realized how important it is to streamline their processes in order to get better results.

Marketing automation works perfectly to help businesses not only streamline their processes, but also to get to know their customers, as well. With the help of software, you can eventually take advantage of building never-ending relationships with your customers.

And, this is one of the major reasons why there has been such an immense rise in the popularity of automation software lately.

If you, as a business owner, have been struggling to find a way to connect with your audience and getting results from your marketing efforts, then it is the right time to give marketing automation a try. You can easily find plenty of great options out there in the market.

Give them a try for a while, and see how effectively they transform your business!

Want to improve your marketing results? Try this amazing set of tools.

The post How Marketing Automation Can Make Your Business Smarter (And Richer) appeared first on Done For You.

By concentrating on your engagement metrics, such as opens and clicks, and reputation stats, such as spam complaints and spam traps, you’ll arrive at a better understanding of how your email messages are being received by your list members.

If you’re looking for an online tool to verify your email sending reputation, we’ll give you a handful of resources you can check out right now.

Before we discuss the 5 sites that will help you check and verify your email sending reputation, let’s look at the distinction between domain reputation and IP reputation.

Domain reputation

Ok, let’s begin with the basics, many of which you may be already familiar with. The domain you choose for sending your email messages, like doneforyou.com in name@doneforyou.com, has its track record. The reputation depends on a lot of aspects.

It’s important how old is the domain. For the initial 5 days or so after a domain is registered, it is by default marked as suspicious. Online reputation is a thing you can only earn over time. It’s better to warm up all the emails on such a fresh domain by sending just a few emails per day during the first 4 weeks after the registration.

Another crucial determinant of domain reputation is in which industry it belongs to. Is it business, finance, education, government, gambling or dating?

See the full list of Cisco Web Usage Control Filtering Categories 

If you’re looking to minimize the risk of being marked as a spammer, you’d want to register a separate domain for outgoing campaigns to have a better control over your domain’s reputation. You have to keep in mind, however, that a brand-new domain needs about 1-2 months to earn a good reputation. That’s why you should warm up all the email addresses on the new domain before you start sending email marketing campaigns on a regular basis.

How to warm up an email address on a new domain?

To warm up an email within a new domain, you send just a few email messages a day. You should also receive some emails, so it’s good to respond to some of the emails you send.

Start sending very slow. Send around 10, then ten more, and then 30 emails a day. Ideally, send them manually. Avoid email blasts before you’re done warming up your new email. Start sending the actual email blasts no sooner than after a full week.

Then make sure you don’t go from 20 or 30 emails a day straight to 1,000 messages a day. Such a behavior will alert your email service provider. Email providers use a filtering system that allows them to automatically track and analyze the volume of email going out from every mailbox. An extreme increase in the sending volume is something that alarms their anti-spam filters.

Your campaigns shouldn’t include thousands of recipients. Keep your email blasts but more precise and small by segmenting your list and personalizing your emails. Remember that your follow-ups are also sent from the same email address. That’s why up the smaller the number of emails you send a day the smoother your outreach campaigns will run.

Server IP reputation

Except for the domain reputation, there’s also the reputation of your email server IP. That relies significantly on your email solution provider.

You will be assigned an IP from Google if you send your messages using an email supplied by Google. If you use a mailbox created on your host server (you don’t use Google, but have an SMTP and IMAP set up on your server) you will get some IPs from the server host (e.g. GoDaddy).

In some cases, the IPs you get from your email provider or from your service provider have already some reputation– poor or good. That’s why it’s crucial to look at your email server IP prior to you start sending.

Verify your email sending reputation with these 5 tools

Now, here are the 5 tools you can use to check your sender reputation.

1. ReputationAuthority.org

WatchGuard’s ReputationAuthority enables business and government organizations to protect their inboxes from unsolicited email and web website traffic that contain junk mail, malware, spyware, malicious code, and phishing attacks. You can look up your IP address or domain name, receive a reputation score from 0-100, and get the proportion of emails that were bad versus good.

2. TalosIntelligence.com (former Senderbase.org)

Talos Intelligence is a service that allows you to search by IP, domain, or network owner for real-time threat data. It provides you with the solutions to check your reputation by rating you as Good, Neutral, or Poor. Good implies there is little or no threat activity. Neutral means your IP address or domain is within reasonable levels, but may still be filtered or shut out. Poor suggests there is a problematic degree of spam activity and you are likely to be filtered or blocked.

3. SenderScore.org

Similar to a credit score, a sender score is a measure of your reputation. Results are calculated from 0 to 100. The higher your score, the better your online reputation and the higher your deliverability rates. Reputation is calculated on a rolling 30-day average and shows where your IP address ranks against other IP addresses. This professional service is offered by Return Path.

4. BarracudaCentral

Barracuda Central has records of IP addresses for both known spammers as well as senders with good email practices. Barracuda Networks offers both an IP and domain reputation search via their Barracuda Reputation System; a real-time database of IP addresses with “poor” or “good” reputations.

5. TrustedSource

McAfee TrustedSource is a site similar to Talos Intelligence but owned by McAfee. It offers an online tool that enables you to check if a domain is categorized within various versions of different spammer databases. It provides details on both your domain’s email and website reputations as well as partnerships, domain name system (DNS), and mail server info. It also provides information on the history, activation, and affiliations of your domain.

Sending reputation wrap-up

Your email reputation is generally in your control. You can verify your email sending reputation by using any or all of the tools found in this article. It is important that you’re being proactive about your email deliverability.

While these reputation monitoring methods and tools are of great help, when you want to verify your email sending reputation, they are not the dominant metric by which you should determine the health of your entire email marketing plan.

They are best if you take them as one source of information and analyze them along with additional metrics of your email campaigns. You can often see email senders with sender scores around 98-99 that are still having a difficulty to reach the inbox. It’s important to know this fact; Jjust because you get a high score on one of these sites, where you verify your email sending reputation, it doesn’t signify you won’t be getting throttled, sent to the spam folder, or blocked straight up.

If you’d like a more comprehensive look at why you’re marketing email isn’t getting to where it should be, make sure to schedule an Action Plan call with us!

The post 5 Methods To Verify Your Email Sending Reputation appeared first on Done For You.

The best-written newspaper columns would not get a second glance without an eye-catching headline. The following examples are famous headlines written years ago:

“Assassin Kills Kennedy”
“Diana Dead”
“VE Day – It’s All Over”
“The First Footstep”
“King Elvis Dead”

Those who remember these events will recall what they were doing at the time. Newspapers and Magazines needed powerful headlines to attract readers to their publication in the light of fierce competition.

Now consider the humble email. Estimates suggest that almost 300 billion emails are sent every day. Yes, that is 300 billion!

Open rates

The open rate for email, depending on the industry, is between 14.92% and 26.52%, according to email marketing stats published by MailChimp. The average for all industries that MailChimp analyzed is 20.81%. That means nearly 80% of marketing emails are never opened!

In such a crowded space, what subject line is required to encourage people to open your email?

Click-through rates

More startling is the click-through rate, the percentage of recipients who take action after opening the email. The top rate for those who click on a link in your email is just 4.78% and might be as low as 1.06%, based on recently updated stats from MailChimp!

So, with this competition, you need confidence in writing great email subject lines to boost your open rates.

These tips will help you write better subject lines:

Keep your subject line short

This is a difficult skill to master. But consider that most emails are now opened on mobile devices. Check this compelling email headline:

5 Effective Copywriting Techniques You Can Use Immediately To Power Up Your Copy! (14 words 85 characters)

Which may display like this:

5 Effective Copywriting Techniques You Can Use Immediately (9 words 63 characters).

The truncation has left the subject line without its emotional charge.

Consider this shorter alternative:

Today Only! A Copywriter’s Dream! (5 words 30 characters)

Urgency

The example above shows a sense of urgency. “Today Only!” The offer won’t be available tomorrow. So fear of missing a good deal may prompt recipients to open.

This fear of missing out (FIMO) is a powerful psychological tool. You can introduce FIMO by creating a sense of urgency or scarcity, for example, “only 5 left” or, “you have 1 day left.”

Curiosity

If the subject line leaves an open-ended question in the air or a cliffhanger, the recipient will need to open it to satisfy their curiosity.

A surprise gift inside (unwrap it now!)

Is this the quickest way to make money today?

But don’t push this to the point of absurdity. “Don’t Open This Email” will provoke a cynical reaction from today’s savvy internet users. They are likely to take you at your word–and not open the email!

Laziness

Many people today seek instant gratification or a quick fix. If you can help someone to get where they are going without hard work or a learning curve, you have a market.

These examples will demonstrate:

Learn Spanish with only 10 minutes a day!

How to build a website in one hour without using code.

Done For You Sales Funnel to make $100 a day

With this approach, you can encourage your subscribers to achieve their goals the easy way by offering a useful tool that saves them time and energy.

Personalize your email headline

The email subject line has an important bearing on the open and click-through rates. It is estimated that a personalized subject line increases the open rate by 17% and the click-through rate by 30%.

You can easily include your subscribers’ names in the subject line or in the content with the features of current auto-responders. Use this sparingly to be effective. If a recipient’s name appears five or six times throughout an email, it could have the opposite effect.

Happy Birthday Alice! There’s a present inside!

Hi, Bob! Here’s a special gift for being my valued subscriber.

If you know your list well, you can adopt a more personal style and be more relaxed and familiar with your headline and content. You can inject your personal humor. But know that humor doesn’t always travel well across language and cultural boundaries. If you have an all-American audience, you will know how far you can go.

Another personalization approach is to mention the recipient’s town or city in the subject heading.

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But if you are not a first-name-type-of-person then use plenty of “you” and “yours” in your copy.

Use numbers in email subject lines

Use numbers in your subject line. You will get a better opening rate. Headlines on emails work like the headlines on blogs. A number can be represented by a percentage, or the size of an audience, or a numerical benefit.

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Increase your mailing list by 50% with These Powerful Tips.

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Make a statement

Sometimes it’s best to take a straightforward approach to engaging your audience. Take a rest from clever headlines and keep it simple:

Facebook Goes For Growth: 10 Things You Should Know.

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Want to take “luck” out of the equation?

Pick up our free guide to the 100 most opened subject lines.

Discover which email subject lines ‘get the open,’ complete with open rates and click-through percentages, so you compare your own results…

Also provided in the report is a spreadsheet of all of the subject lines, so you can sort them as you want… Just click here to download it!

Some practical tips in email marketing

List segmentation

Segment your list and target your emails better. You can group your subscribers by gender, age, state, country, business, lifestyle and many other categories. That way you won’t be making a great offer on football kit to a baseball fan, nor a special on a big meat pack to a vegetarian.

Now that emails are more interactive, targeting your customers with the right offer is now more important. Interactive emails mean that the recipients can buy from within the email with just one click.

A/B split testing

A word can make a significant impact in an email subject line. So always test every batch of emails you send to analyze open rates, click-through rates, and sales. Introduce one small change at a time to see what difference it makes. Perhaps introducing a personal name will make a big impact, or using a particular word like “powerful” in the subject line provides an emotional charge that increases profits.

Get your timing right

Synchronize your email dispatches to get the best returns. A weekday may work better than a weekend. Mornings may work better than afternoons. It is likely to be different for different audiences.

Conclusion

Even though open and click-through rates are low, email still outperforms other marketing platforms like social media in reaching your clients.

Email is the best way to establish lasting relationships with your subscribers. There may be a steep learning curve in perfecting the art of creating a good email and an even better email subject line, but it’s worth the climb!

The post How To Write Email Subject Lines That Will Boost Your Open Rates By 17% appeared first on Done For You.

The global eCommerce growth is stunning. In 2017, it was around $2.3 trillion and is expected to reach $4.5 trillion in 2021, according Statista. In the United States alone, eCommerce accounts for almost 10 percent of retail sales — a number that is increasing by nearly 15% each year.

Which eCommerce trends are set to dominate this year? In this article, we discuss the 6 most powerful eCommerce trends you need to know in order to keep growing and stay ahead of the competition.

1. Amazon Advertising

When you’re selling on Amazon, Amazon Advertising is one of the best ways to get traffic to your product listings.  It’s incredibly high converting traffic and you can narrow down on keywords and categories you want your ads seen in!

… And if you’re not set up yet, we can build an Amazon Store for you!

Here are some ways to do it:

1. Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brands appear above the Amazon search results and help advertisers build brand awareness.  You can also promote multiple products inside the listing and, since Amazon is filled with buyers, these Sponsored Brands listings convert very well.

2. Product-level profitability

With Amazon Advertising, you can dig into your product level profitability.  That means you can track profit magins, gross profits and overall ad spend on each of your products and campaigns.

3. Increased Page-Level Conversion

Traffic, sales, and reviews are conversion drivers in Amazon.  Traffic and a solid organic search position helps your products earn the Amazon’s Choice designation, helping you stand out to buyers.  Then, the more sales, the more traffic…  It turns into a self-feeding frenzy.

4. Category-specific targeting

Sponsored Products are the most popular advertising option, and the one we use most often for your clients.

These ads appear above, below, and alongside the Amazon search results, as well as on product detail pages, and are similar to Google’s product listing ads.

Sponsored Products allow you to use category-specific targeting, which shows your company’s products alongside complementary products, increasing conversion from your competitor’s listings.

Using this functionality allows you to showcase your products right along with established brands and competitors in the Amazon marketplace.

5. Negative keywords

Negative keywords let you exclude specific words or phrases from a larger keyword search, making sure you don’t rank for the wrong search terms.  The quickest way to do this is to see which keywords are getting a lot of clicks but few conversions.  Is there a common word in the phrase that you can pull out?

6. Using Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS)

ACoS is a ratio of your ad spend to revenue. For automatic campaigns, ACoS is at the group level, but for manual campaigns, you get your ACoS on a product level.

Of course, the lower your ACoS is, the better.  However, when you’re liquidating a product, launching a new product, or trying to gain entry into a new market – you’ll want to set your ACoS higher.

2. Influencer marketing

Micro-influencers marketing has been riding on the back of the social media explosion. The marketing channels for this event have been Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. But blogging and Pinterest are also very effective.

The top end of the influencer spectrum is taken by celebrities like Kim Kardashian. Kim has reportedly had companies paying her up to $500,000 to share their brands with her 95 million followers. But you don’t need to be a celebrity to be an influencer.

At the other end of the spectrum, are micro-influencers who build a base of loyal and active followers through a niche interest or a particular passion. The niche could be any subject ranging from babies to business, cats to cars, or face cream to fashion, and anything else you can think of. These micro-influencers may have only 3000 followers or even 100,000 followers.

What is influencer marketing?

At a simple level, it is word-of-mouth marketing on a massive scale. The stay-at-home mom who runs a blog about parenting her pre-schoolers reviews a book about "How to End Temper Tantrums" and her 5000 devoted followers are straight onto Amazon to place an order.

Why is influencer marketing so effective?

Our stay-at-home mom, and the other micro-influencers, are changing how products and brands are perceived. Direct marketing is often impersonal and seen as having a vested interest. And consumers don’t know the product nor do they know the salesperson. Direct marketing often needs a two-step approach to making a sale and then a raft of bonuses and money-back guarantees to win over the customer.

But if a member of your family or a friend recommends a product you are more likely to buy without hesitation. A micro-influencer is seen in the same light. You can relate to them, you feel you know them, and they are trustworthy.

How can you work with micro-influencers?

Micro-influencers are for you if you have a micro-budget! It is easier and cheaper than other traditional forms of online marketing (think Google AdWords!). Check out social media platforms for your niche, and team up with those micro-influencers. It is an effective way to promote your product or service.

3. Email marketing

Email marketing and automation is a very effective way to connect with your customers, and others, who have subscribed to your mailing list.

So, why is email marketing included in current eCommerce trends? The modern consumer has evolved beyond the scope of this older marketing strategy. But when it comes to getting your product or service in front of your customers, email marketing leaves social media standing. Email converts readers to buyers at a higher rate than other marketing platforms.

Email is also evolving. You can target your customers with relevant special offers based on their buying habits. Emails are interactive. Now your customers can make secure purchases directly from within their email with just one click.

Email is an excellent method to establish long-term relationships with your customers. Email marketing allows you to educate your clients, and share tips and tricks related to your niche. In turn, you can receive great feedback from your customers and new product ideas by the creative use of competitions and surveys. Email is an efficient way to drive customers to your website.

4. Mobile marketing

Most of your customers use mobile devices. In 2018, more than 50% of internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets (source: Statista). Therefore, a website that is responsive to mobiles is essential.

It is now more likely that eCommerce customers will reach your website from a smartphone or tablet.
Many people from across the age ranges are becoming more confident with buying products and services through their mobile devices.

Marketing Week reported that 33% of 18—24-year-olds preferred to buy products directly through Facebook. This statistic should encourage businesses to create a marketing budget for social media. Run a Facebook Ads mobile campaign directed at this age group.

Mobile marketing is changing the face of eCommerce, just look at the rise of Uber as an example. There are over a million apps available for smartphones and tablets. PayPal and Apple Pay working with banks and other institutions will affect the way we move our money. So now is the time to consider mobile-first, when creating your eCommerce marketing campaigns.

It's not too late to adopt a mobile mentality. Mobile traffic is the future!

5. Voice search

When voice search came out on Siri, few people had thought to buy products with their voice commands.

Apart from Apple’s Siri, we now have Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Assistant. They have different skill sets. For example, Alexa can tell you what the weather will be tomorrow. Google Assistant can book an appointment for you with your local hairdresser.

We can talk to our smartphone to make a Google Search or instruct our phone to call a friend. Many people who have used these voice search platforms wonder what life was like before they had them.

Why are people taking to voice search in such a big way? Here are the reasons according to one survey:

• It’s quicker than going to a website or using an app.
• I can use it while I’m driving.
• It’s more fun!
• And, it’s easier than going on a website.
• It’s a more exact way of searching.
• I don’t like typing on my mobile phone.

We type at 40 words a minute and speak at 150 words per minute. So we can get our question answered faster with a voice search.

Computers now understand voice commands. Anyone who has used the "voice to text" feature in Google Docs will know how accurate voice recognition technology is.

So, what’s the take on this for eCommerce? It is important to optimize your website and blogs for voice search. Then you can work on your product pages and descriptions for voice search. Start with using search phrases that people use and questions they ask, rather than keywords.

Voice search on your website makes it more accessible for those with physical disabilities. Offering clients an experience they are familiar with, you can expect to increase conversions in your eCommerce store.

6. Chatbots for a better user experience

Keeping your visitors engaged on your website is an essential part of digital marketing. This is often overlooked by eCommerce store operators. Lower your ‘bounce’ rate by letting Chatbots take the strain! If you don’t get that qualified customer, then one of your competitors will!

What are Chatbots?

We mentioned examples of Chatbots (Bots) in an earlier section, Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant. If you thought Bots are just for the big boys, you can think again! Bots as pieces of software are now within the scope of a small business’s budget. So it is important to understand how they can help you succeed.

A Chatbot (a robot that chats!) is software that copies human phases. It works through voice commands, text chats, or both. Your customers can have a ‘virtual’ conversation by asking your Bot a question. And the Bot can give an automated response or carry out a task.

Bots work well with eCommerce. They can engage visitors. They can send newsletters, daily updates, and generate leads.

Using a Bot

A Bot is a virtual assistant that handles your repetitive tasks. This software is a great way to enhance customer relationships.

A customer can visit your website at any time of day or night and your friendly Bot pops up with a greeting. Your visitor asks “Do you sell widgets?” the Chatbot can recognize information and give a reply “We have the best stock of widgets in the county”. The Chatbot can ask your visitor “Can I help you with your order? Your customer might reply “I want information”. To which your Bot asks for name and email address to send information. The customer is added to your mailing list.

Advantages of using Chatbots for you and your customers are:

• Your customers are familiar with this communication.
• Bots offer a good user experience, can be programmed to answer FAQs.
• Customers can find what they are looking for quicker.
• A Bot helps create a personal customer experience.
• A Bot will help to create a higher profile for your business.
• Your customer service can run 24/7

Technology is improving by the day, and that makes personalization a must on customers' eCommerce journeys.

Moreover, there are some Chatbot services, like ManyChat, that allow you to create a Bot without code.

Powerful eCommerce trends — What's more?

Now that you know about the things driving eCommerce companies forward in today's marketplace, it's time to put some of it into action!

We'd love to help you put together a Growth Strategy for building your eCom business online, whether that be in Amazon, Shopify or any of the other eCom platforms.

All you have to do is click the button below, fill out the Action Plan form, and schedule a call with us!

The post 6 eCommerce Trends And Conversion Tools You Need To Know About appeared first on Done For You.

The reason why you’d want to use marketing automation of some sort is because of the way things happen on the web, the way your ad campaigns run, and the fact that you (and your entire team) aren’t going to be around 24 x 7.

Meanwhile, you’ll have continuous visitors, your lead generation is on all the time, and transactions will happen on your website without any of your team members being there.

According to the DMA, email has a median ROI of 122%, which is over 4x higher than other marketing formats, including social media, direct mail and paid search.

Also, email list segmentation and personalized emailing were the most effective email strategies of 2017.

Your email marketing automation is incomplete without segmentation of your subscribers and customers. As such, marketers have witnessed an increase of 760% in email revenue from segmented campaigns, according to Campaign Monitor.

Now, let’s bring it all together.

• Email marketing is a channel you can’t afford to ignore.
• You’ll need marketing automation, even at its most basic level.
• Segmenting your subscribers and customers helps you boost your overall revenue from email marketing.
• Every single email you send out to your subscribers needs to be personalized (and not just for the sake of personalization)

Tip #1: Personalize. Every. Email

“Hey!”
“Hi there!”
“Hi customer # 24356!”

The problem with these salutations is that they are completely non-personalized, and your subscribers are smart enough to know that you just compiled an email that’s being sent to thousands of others. They don’t feel the connection. They aren’t feeling special. There’s nothing in those emails that can get their attention without their name showing.

It’s not hard to add a modifier, merge tag, or some way to ensure that each email goes out with a name (every email service provider today has a feature to allow to you to personalize).

Go back to your email autoresponder sequences and double check to see if you included a way to have your subscribers’ names show up within emails. Building new ones? Ensure that you add names to personalize now.

Don’t send out a single email without this.

Tip #2: Use some spunk

Most emails are boring. They lack character, spunk and style.

Each of your subscribers is a human and we don’t connect that well with each other if we all followed templates or if we talked “down” to others.

You don’t have to get all fancy with your emails trying to show off how well you write or your vocabulary.

Keep your emails simple. Use powerful words that are still easy to understand. Focus on what’s in it for your subscribers or customers. Be sure to write with style and let there be some personality flowing through those emails.

In fact, write that email as if you were writing to family or friends. While you are at it, keep your emails short.

Tip #3: All emails count

There are various types of marketing automation emails that you are likely to use, depending on your business.

You could have a welcome series, an autoresponder series geared for customer onboarding, a pre-set RSS-to-email campaign, reminder emails, verification emails, order confirmation emails, shopping cart abandonment emails, lead delivery emails (straight off of your funnels), and many others.

Each of these email types count. Every email you send is a message from your business to your customers. Your customers will open these emails and create impressions about you, start thinking about your products and services, and make snap decisions about whether or not they should buy, based on how these emails are written.

Make each of those emails count.

Tip #4: Deploy integrations (service provider dependent)

Your email marketing automation isn’t “automation” if you have to manually manage any part of the entire email marketing automation workflow. While you’ll test and manage some parts of your automation manually (firefighting), you’ll essentially build up to a point where your marketing automation works on its own.

To ensure that your email marketing automation works well, deploy necessary integrations with your service provider and other apps that you use for your business.

For instance, MailChimp connects with almost every other app that you might be using, including your website platform and other apps.

Consider these scenarios:

Using WooCommerce as your main ecommerce store platform and Mailchimp for marketing automation? This is how it might look, and they all connect.

Are you using Shopify with Sumo, Wistia, and other apps (with Zapier) connected to Drip Email automation software & ESP?

Regardless of the marketing stack you use, chances are that you have various ways available to integrate your apps. Make good use of the amazing world of technology, SaaS apps, and the unique marketing stack you’ll develop for your campaigns, funnels, and your complete business.

If you are looking for help with your lead generation or customizing sales funnels for your business or if you need help with your marketing strategy, please feel free to get on a strategy call with us.

The post Email Marketing Automation Tips For Profitable Lead Nurturing appeared first on Done For You.

With Gmail’s new makeover, there’s a lot that’s going to change for marketers and businesses and it only makes sense to know how your email marketing is going to be affected.

As we see it, here are a few changes that you have to consider, things you have to do and a little help to plan your email marketing to navigate Gmail better:

Gmail gets smarter

The new Gmail will come equipped with snooze functions, a layer of “intelligence” to help users manage their inboxes, instant access to Google’s tools (such as tasks, keep, and calendar), smart reply integrations; more power to users with managing notifications…and so much more.

In effect, Gmail is getting smarter and consumers are getting bombarded with more and more emails from merchants and brands.

What does that tell you? Be really good with your email marketing or risk getting drowned in the sea of emails that customers will choose to avoid. Or maybe you’ll just be unsubscribed.

Stay authenticated

Email delivery plays a large part in your marketing efforts, and your email won’t be delivered if it seems like it’s not coming from a trusted source. Email authentication helps ISPs verify the identity of the senders so as to ensure that you are always marketed as a trusted sender.

The smarter spammers get about phishing, spamming, and hacking, the more the need for email authentication.

Gmail, even when it launched about a decade ago, raised stakes on email authentication. Kyle Henrick of Marketing land writes:

To reduce the risk of non-delivery to Gmail users, marketers will need to pay close attention to authentication protocols. Specifically, it’s important to know that the forms of email authentication Google recognizes include Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) and Transport Layer Security Encryption (TLS).

Sendgrid has a simple and effective guide on email authentication if you’d like.

The promotion tab

The promotion tab within Gmail has long been the average marketer’s nightmare. Countless days and nights have been spent agonizing over the Promotion Tab and how not to end up there. While this was Google’s way to ensure that users’ Inbox is kept-clutter free, for marketers, it’s a nightmare.

Kevin Lynch of Insfusionsoft suggests “asking” users to “whitelist” your email address. Beyond that, there are a few things you should keep in mind:

• Don’t use images within your emails. They are the first things Gmail is looking for when it’s trying to decide which tab the email should be assigned to.
• Don’t overdo links within an email. Keep it to a maximum of two links, while one link is recommended.
• Make the email look like it’s coming from “you,” a person and not a brand or a company.
• Avoid HTML-based emails.
• Don’t use links to social media (again, more links will trigger Gmail’s guard).

Now that Gmail is getting more intelligent, following the tips above makes sense for you today.

Unsubscribing is now recommended

Gmail’s motive is to ensure that Gmail users have a pleasant experience while using Gmail. Google wants to make it really easy to track shipments, stay on top of your travel plans, allow you to book tickets for events (or for travel) from within Gmail, and make it easy for you to stay on top of tasks, meetings, and more.

Your goal, however, is to nurture your leads, to provide value to them, and to eventually sell. Your mainstay for achieving this has always been email newsletters and messages but the new Gmail’s avatar is going to make it “easy” for subscribers to “unsubscribe”

Goomojis are gone

Gmail is taking away support for Google’s emojis (also called as Goomojis). If you – as a business or as a marketer – enjoyed using emojis into your email subject lines and email body copy, you’ll be in for a rude shock, at worst, and you’ll provide an inconsistent emoji experience, at best, since Gmail will now use the native emojis on Users’ respective operating systems (OS or Windows).

If and when you use emojis now – the emojis will show up all weird. Sure, you can still use emojis – but what’s the ROI given that it’s not going to be what you expected it to be?

Get better at providing value

Want a singular way to ensure that you don’t have to worry about in which tab of Gmail your email lands, or whether or not your emails stand the risk of being unsubscribed?

It’s this: provide value in your emails.

Be sure to send out value in “drips” so that your subscribers can’t stay away from your emails. Your messages have so much value that your subscribers would have happily paid for each of those emails (but it’s just that they are free).

The more valuable your emails are, the higher the likelihood that your emails are not forgotten. Your subscribers will look forward to receiving emails from you.

Aim to teach, educate, and inspire.

How do you think your email marketing efforts are going to be affected by Gmail’s new changes?

Is lead generation and conversion puzzling you? Join the free workshop that will demystify the process of attracting, engaging and profiting from new email subscribers by systematically giving them what they want!

The post How The New Gmail Will Affect Your Email Marketing appeared first on Done For You.

First, people are drowning in a tidal wave of emails. Radicati Group’s study published in February 2017 revealed that a staggering 269 billion emails are sent each day globally. The same study estimated that there are over 3.7 billion email users around the globe.

These findings mean that the average user receives more than 72 emails a day. Also, a previous study reported that an average office employee receives 121 emails a day.

Second, a lot of times marketers send emails to lists that they scrape from the web or otherwise acquire without the consent of the users. This practice will most probably make the majority of the messages land in the spam folder.

Third, open rates are low not only because of spam filters but also for the reason that numerous email marketers compete for attention. And if you add so many other online distractions, like social media, the chance of a person actually noticing your email is pretty low.

According to recent email performance benchmarks published by Mailerlite, open rates could range anywhere from 11.23% to 33.71% depending on the industry.

So, it’s definitely hard work to get your reader’s attention, but when you do get it, you don’t want them to skim through your content without caring; you want to get them do something about it, follow your call to action (CTA) and, eventually, become customers.

How to convert email subscribers into customers

With half the population of earth reading email every day it only makes sense to consider email marketing an opportunity for making money.

Email is the one most important element of a person’s online id. Each email address is unique. You use your email for all things online and particularly to sign up for services and applications.

Email is the connective tissue between the user and any type of online business. Cracking the code of engagement and conversion via email is the way to go if you want to make money online.

Is lead conversion puzzling you? Join the free workshop that will demystify the process of attracting, engaging and profiting from new email subscribers by systematically giving them what they want!

In a previous article, we talked about how to write emails that get clicks. We gave you 6 tips for high-converting email content. We’ve also explained why good email copy is important and how to score well, even if you’re not a copywriter. We also talked about the best alternative to a copywriter, i.e. a tool to write the emails for you – that tool is Scriptly.

Now, in this guide, we’ll look at the best ways you can convert email subscribers into paying customers. Let’s get started!

Tip #1 – Focus on a single niche

You need to be very specific with your target market. You can’t kill two birds with one stone; Heck, you can’t be successful at approaching many target markets with different products at the same time, at least not if you are a small business.

The mix of niche and product you choose can either make you or break you. Health, wealth and relationships are the broader areas that you should consider. Start from any of these and narrow down to define your ideal sub-niche.

Tip #2 – Create an offer

It might sound crazy but a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t know exactly what they’re offering. What we mean by that is they haven’t defined their products and they haven’t created specific types of offers. Let’s assume you are a career coach. It’s not enough to market your career coaching services.

You need to create an irresistible offer by productizing and positioning your offer in the marketplace. Know exactly what your product is, how much it costs and how you will deliver it to the client. Use email to communicate the value of your offer and watch subscribers convert into paying clients.

Tip #3 – Offer subscribers real value

Chances are new people coming onto your list don’t know you. You need to give them time to get to know you, trust you and realize that you can provide real value.

To accomplish that, you need to consider marketing tactics that can convert free email subscribers into paying customers.

• Educate your audience and provide tips and tricks via email.
• Offer subscribers a free trial or a free product, to get to see the real work that you do. Periodically, stress the premium features or benefits they’ll get if they decide to become paying customers.
• Provide free trials, training sessions or customer onboarding sessions which will give you the opportunity to pitch your premium plans and services.
• All in all, a proven route to converting email subscribers into customers is to invite subscribers to a free discovery call, otherwise known as consultation call or strategy session.

The strategy session method

The strategy session method will have you bringing in more high-ticket clients, as well as clients who are more aligned with your style and what you have to offer.

During a strategy session, you can screen out people who aren’t suitable for your program and at the same time pitch your offer. We, at DFY, are using Timeslots to schedule strategy sessions online.

Many entrepreneurs have found the strategy session model to be the best way to sell their high-ticket offers and, at the end of the day, convert email subscribers into customers. That is because it’s easier to sell premium services when you speak directly to a person compared to throwing a sales letter at them.

Tip #4 – Tell a good story

If you want people to listen to you and build a deep connection you need to speak to their hearts not their minds. Purchase decisions rely heavily on emotions, and you need to address that in your email marketing conversion strategy.

Purchase decisions are not only the result of thoughtful evaluation of alternatives through some type of cost-benefit analysis. Purchase decisions can appear as an impulse purchase or be instinctively made satisfy basic human needs, like the sense of security.

The tool you need to utilize as an email marketer is storytelling. People connect emotionally with stories. Stories can contribute to converting free email subscribers to paying customers.

The modern consumer wants to buy without being pushed or sold on directly.

Being able to tell a good story in your email is very important if you want to convert email subscribers into customers.

See this infographic that explains how storytelling affects our brain. At the end of the day, good stories can help you create a thriving email list.

Persuasive storytelling

The keyword for successful stories, ones that convert email subscribers into customers, is “persuasive.” The story should compel subscribers to want to read more, ideally through the end of your message. So what are the basic components of a compelling story? Incorporate some or all of the following elements.

• A relatable character – You should be composing your story as if writing to one recipient – to your ideal customer avatar.
• A problem – Use a story, your own if possible, to paint the picture of a problem that you (your character) went through.
• Empathy – This is the “I’ve been there too“ part of the story. The aim is to make them feel emotional and realize that their situation is one that others could be facing.
• Connect the dots – Relate the story to the problem, so your reader can understand there is a solution to their problem.
• The vision – Create a vision of how the character in your short story finally managed to overcome the predicament and how it transformed their life.
• The solution – It is the part of your email where you introduce your subscriber to your unique product. This is the solution to the character’s problem, the route to transformation.
• Re-iterate – Bring your email subscriber back from “Once upon a time…“ into reality and challenge them to change their situation.
• Call to action – Place a button or link with a strong CTA. This is the action they need to take to solve their problems. That action is to buy your product.

Tip #5 – Convert more with lower price tags

For some companies, the aim might be to first convert a big percentage of free subscribers into low-end customers and then into repeat customers. For example, there might be a front-end offer for $7 that will essentially prove that the subscriber is ready to trust your brand and use their credit card.

Even with $7 only the mission is accomplished; You now you have a confirmed buyer! You may see this type of affordable products referred to as tripwire offers. The tripwire offer is a low-cost, risk-free offer that is easy for your business lead to buy into.

However, other types of businesses might intend to build more sophisticated funnels, like the one we described above that starts with a strategy session. This sort of funnel may convert fewer subscribers into customers but still, generate a higher revenue.

So, that’s it! With the above tips, along with consistency and quality, you should be able to convert more email subscribers into customers.

The post Email Subscribers Not Converting Into Customers? Here’s What You Need To Do… appeared first on Done For You.

If you don’t follow what really works and do things that you absolutely need to, then thinking of sales funnels is like thinking about having a dessert when you can barely get to have dinner.

Most businesses barely get to eat.

Funnels or no funnels, it’s really up to you (and we don’t see why you wouldn’t?) But if it ever came down to it, there are absolute basics that you must be doing with your email marketing:

Don’t forget to send emails

You wouldn’t believe it if we told you, but most businesses are too busy with everything else except “keeping in touch” with their subscribers.

Noah Kagan of AppSumo believes that most businesses barely send any emails, let alone making email marketing work for a positive ROI. Most businesses don’t even do email marketing. Among those that try to grow a list, there’s no communication with subscribers beyond the welcome message or a string of email autoresponders that’ll end abruptly leaving subscribers high and dry.

The absolute minimum you could do with your list of email subscribers (forget selling for now) is to keep them nurtured. Have your subscribers engage with you.

Determine a email sending frequency that works for your business and keep the engine on.

Talking about email sending frequency…

The “Write to a Friend” Strategy

It’s incredibly easy to write emails that just work if you were to stop thinking that you were writing to your email subscribers and think of it as a single email you are writing to a friend. How do you write to friends normally?

There’s personalization, there’s that addressing by first name, and then there’s that easy flowing language that doesn’t sound too corporate like, and you normally keep it short and sweet.

Plus, there’s that tone of “I mean well for you” thing embedded in the email.

What happens if you write emails to your subscribers that way? Think about it

Find Email Sending Frequency, Then Draw a Balance

Marketingsherpa conducted a survey asking email subscribers (industry wide) on how frequently they’d like to hear from brands and businesses they subscribe to.

Take a look at the results below:

Wondering about the 10% of subscribers who don’t want to receive any emails whatsoever, they are called “unsubscribers” and they’ll unsubscribe anyway.

Most subscribers expect businesses to send emails. It’s like, they are waiting to hear from you. Meanwhile, most businesses go incommunicado.

Choose an email frequency, and then get into the habit of communicating regularly. It does wonders for your business (not to mention the high engagement levels that come as a result of frequent communication).

Make it a Habit to Provide Value

You don’t have to do copywriting 101 or a course of consumer behavior. You don’t need high levels of expertise to actually do email marketing that just works. All you have to do is to give more than you ask for.

Strive to provide value within your emails.

While the value you provide in the form of content will be in small portions, and you could “drip” it all the way with well-designed and strategic email campaigns, asking for the big sale without giving anything away first is just not how the modern-day, Instagram-busy customer is conditioned for.

Find Automated (and Smart) Ways to Keep in Touch

With the level of automation that’s available with email marketing today, you don’t have to put in much effort to “keep in touch” with your subscribers.

RSS-to-email campaigns — emails that go out as digests of your previously published blog posts — are the simplest way to set up a “just read this, you can thank me later, and you don’t have to buy a thing” kind of an evergreen campaign for your business. Almost all email service providers you might be using have this feature enabled.

If you have an ecommerce store, then you could set up abandoned cart email campaigns to reach out to everyone who leaves items in their cart.

Feeling adventurous? Create loyalty campaigns and retargeting email campaigns using Adroll to send emails to visitors of a particular page or those who take some sort of action on your website.

What are you going to do with your email marketing? What issues do you normally face when it comes to being in touch with your customers? Tell us about it.

Want to get on a scheduled call to discuss funnels or digital marketing strategy?

The post Email Marketing: Discover 5 Ways To Power Up Your Emails Without Being An Expert appeared first on Done For You.

Intelligent email marketers know that segmenting subscribers can increase their open rates, improve their click-through ratio, and even help with conversions. MailChimp, the email marketing giant, reports a 10.64% increase in open rates and a whopping 100.95% increase in clicks, when segmenting email campaigns.

Even if you didn’t know this, do not fear. By the end of this article you’ll know the power of email segmentation and have all the information you need to be segmenting like a professional.

How to do email segmentation

For those that don’t know, email segmentation is the process of changing your email marketing strategies to best fit your client base, typically by sending different types of emails to customers who aren’t on the same stage of their buyer’s journey.

Now, without further delay, let us go through all the key ways to segment your emails effectively.

Segmentation by signup source

There are many channels from which you may be collecting subscriber emails, from your opt-in page to your sales page, customers that have reached out with questions, and more. It is always best practice to use a different subscription form for each instance, allowing you to keep these customers separated and send them the appropriate emails.

Why, you may ask? Why would you want to segment subscribers coming in from different sources?

If you have a customer’s email because they’ve made a purchase, you don’t want to annoy them with a pre-sales sequence that they don’t need. Instead you would be better off occasionally sending them a coupon to bring them back to your eshop, or perhaps an invitation to join your general subscription list. Knowing why your customer gave you their email allows you to interact with them on a more personal level.

Signup source is the most basic of all types of email list segmentation. It is extremely important because the signup source shows intent. Is the subscriber interested in learning more about a particular product category? Are they almost ready to buy? Are they looking for free content to educate themselves? Knowing that piece of information, will allow you to get better results from your emails.

Location, location, location.

If your subscriber has provided their geographical location, perhaps their mailing address, zip code, or even just a country, you should be using this data to your advantage.

Do you have any physical stores where you sell your product, or will you be visiting any cities promoting your service? If you know your customers relative locations, you can entice them further with emails customized to their location.

Another perk is it allows you to use language that is appropriate, whether that be slang for the region or a completely different language. You are more likely to sell a product to a native French speaker if you approach them in their native language.

Location also allows you to be culture aware and use that to send more relevant content. For instance, when you know that a subscriber lives in Brazil, you’re able to send them an offer just before the Carnival. Also, you’ll be able to stop sending “happy emails” if you hear that a natural disaster has hit the area.

Engage the engaged subscribers

Every marketer is looking to increase subscriber engagement. What would the value of a “dead” list be anyway?

Open rates and click rates are your best friend, and segmenting your email subscribers based on this data is the perfect way to increase your ROI.

If a customer opens all of your emails and clicks through, perfect, reward them with coupons or special deals. If a customer hasn’t purchased in a while, now might be the ideal time to try to rope them back in with an enticing offer or new blog post on a topic they’ve shown interest in.

Now, re-engaging subscribers and customers is very important, given that the cost of acquiring a new lead or customer can be 25 times higher compared to retaining an existing one.

That is why we have tackled the topic of re-engagement emails in more depth in this article (hint: look at workflow #6).

Customizing the email journey

We all love to feel special, right? One easy way to keep a smile on your customers’ faces is by segmenting your email list based on the current phase of their customer journey.

Your loyal customers should feel more rewarded with special content or promotional emails, while customers that are just signing up to your email list might appreciate an entry survey to help them decide how often they’ll receive emails.

Being able to know exactly where your subscriber stands in their buyer’s journey is a powerful weapon in your email marketing arsenal. And current marketing technology enables you to do exactly that. Most email marketing platforms that have automation and website tracking features help you understand user behavior on your site and also track how users interact with your emails.

Cater to their interests

Every time you write a new blog, it can be tempting to immediately send it out to your entire email list and share what you’ve written.

But before you do, think hard about who will actually read and appreciate it. People have limited time and availability, so why not have your subscribers spend their 5 minutes read a piece of content they’re actually interested in, which might also trigger an action, like buy one of your products?

If you’ve done your homework and gathered basic data on customer interests based on their purchase history, article reading history on your website, or previous email campaigns they’ve responded to, then you will be able to segment your email list accordingly. All of this data, should be available in the reporting or analytics section of your email marketing software.

Imagine sending out that shiny new blog post only to the customers who will love it, while at the same time ensuring that you aren’t flooding the inboxes of customers who have no interest in it.

Makes sense, right?

Abandoned form/Abandoned cart

This is an effective way to client prospecting if you have a service-based business, or increasing sales if you have an ecommerce site.

Sometimes people are just about to take an important action online but life gets in the way. In fact, abandoned carts were predicted to account for a dazzling $4 trillion in revenue loss last year. Now, what if you could filter out the cart abandoners and add them to a separate segment or list? Numbers say that you would get a chance to recover almost 30% of these purchases.

Sending specific emails to customers who have visited your site and either filled a shopping cart but never completed the purchase, or perhaps started a form and never submitted it, can give them the extra push they need to commit. If they purposely abandoned the cart of form, then there is no love lost, but if they got distracted and forgot about it, they will be thankful for the reminder.

Mobile vs. desktop

Reading a large clunky email on your phone is a nuisance, and reading a mobile formatted email on a desktop feels empty.

Segmenting customers by preferred device, and customizing the emails appropriately, is also an option you may want to consider. This strategy will not only increase open rates but also lead to overall higher satisfaction. In your desktop versions make sure to utilize the larger space with appropriate high quality images, while on the mobile version keep it simple and provide easy to click links.

Of course, it’s not always possible to segment people on the basis of the device they use to read your emails. That is why a more feasible way to approach this issue is to always send mobile responsive emails. A mobile responsive email would automatically adapt to smaller or bigger screen sizes and make your content readable regardless of the type of device.

Bonus tip

Do not make it difficult or time consuming for customers to unsubscribe, this will only annoy them and drive them further away. Do, however, give them the opportunity to change their subscription preferences before unsubscribing, this can retain customers who might have otherwise left.

Want more tips on how to create a solid email segmentation strategy from the ground up? Here’s an article we published a while ago that will help you get started fast.

Putting it all together…

Remember, these are just a few of the many, many ways you can segment your emails. Don’t be afraid to mix and match them, creating a smart email segmentation strategy that leaves every customer feeling like they are receiving the special attention they deserve.

Sometimes people won’t even know that you’re mass emailing, unless they notice your email footer. And that doesn’t mean they lack perception. Heck, no! It means that you have a done a great job creating personalized emails that just nail your email marketing.

With spam mail being so prevalent, people are often quick to be annoyed when being bombarded with emails. Segmenting your subscription list could help keep your customers reading what you send, instead of sending it right to the spam folder.

The post The Power Of Email Segmentation: 7 Ways To Segment Efficiently appeared first on Done For You.

Now, more than ever, people spend an awful amount of time on their Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, line, and many others.

While they spend all their time on those mobile messenger platforms, it’s also a sign that times are changing.

If all those 3 billion people are spending on time messaging on Whatsapp, staying put on Instagram, and active on Facebook all the time, do chatbots work better than email marketing now?

You can’t rule out the power of email marketing with a whopping (and proven) 3,800% ROI anyway as it has its own role to play.

But as far as engagement, lead generation, lead nurturing, and content distribution go, chatbots are incredibly effective thanks to the sharp dominance of people’s preference to “message each other quickly and easily” over mobile messaging.

Here are six reasons why Chatbots will do better than email marketing (at least in a few ways):

Chatbots have high retention rates

Illker Koksal of Botanalytics wrote on Venture Beat about some of the most important chatbot metrics to track. Of the many metrics available, there’s “Chatbot retention rate” that stands out.

Entertainment bots, for instance, have the highest retention rates ever while the average retention rate of a bot is about 4%.

Email marketing has a retention rate too, with the average retention rate of 85%.

Does it mean that email marketing beats chatbots here? Not exactly. Here’s why:

Chatbot retention rate actually explains how well the chatbot is able to keep, retain, and engage users. Email retention rate isn’t a metric that explains anything of value (not the way the chatbot retention rate does). Emails stay in Inboxes and most people might not even bother if the messages stay in the “Inbox” for ever. They might not read those emails. They also don’t “Unsubscribe” just because they forget or are too lazy (explains the high retention rate, eh?)

Chatbot retention rate, however, is far more accurate in the sense that users either engage with your Chatbot or they don’t.

Chatbots are unbeatable for customer support

Customer support and customer service isn’t just for “support” or “service”. They help drive up revenue and profits too.

Customer support channels also help generate leads, enable opportunities for upsells and cross-sells, and actually close sales.

Each time you raise a support ticket or you send out a message using the regular live chat, it’s still email that helps deliver your questions or queries to the support staff on the other end. All our traditional ways of customer support (on the digital front) have email as the backbone.

Using email as the backbone for your support ticket system is a slow method. By the time you get around to write back to your customers, they are usually gone.

For these use cases, email just won’t work, but chatbots will work like a charm. See how Chatbots rule here?

Customers at their natural habitat

For most people, checking email is work. Getting on a mobile messaging app is not. It’s quite natural for people to fire up their Facebook messenger app to communicate with friends, relatives, and others in their network. You can’t say the same for email — which is mostly used for work, business, and for anything a little more “serious”.

Mobile messaging apps are a natural platform for what we all do as humans: engage with people who matter to us, be a part of a community, etc.

Using chatbots puts you all primed up to engage with your customers where they feel most comfortable. How hard is it to see and respond to an ad on Instagram while you scroll up and down to check out the latest photos of people you follow?

No latency, with quick engagement

Email marketing is effective and it’s a money maker for businesses. There’s no doubt on just how powerful a simple set of autoresponders can be or how well emails work within your sales funnel.

But there’s an issue: there’s a fair bit of latency (in delivery, in the time it takes for your prospects or leads to check emails, in open rates, and in click rates). For all the positives that email marketing has, there are still issues regarding 100% delivery, subscribers opening emails, clicking on links within emails, and actually taking action that matters to you, as a business.

While chatbots don’t guarantee clicks either, they distribute content spontaneously while having no delay in engagement.

Want to respond to your customers immediately, without delay, and be sure that they see your messages? Use chatbots.

Live, spontaneous, and immediate engagement

Consider a scenario: a visitor come through organic Google search. She checks out your website. She reads your blog, and then signs up for something free that you give away as an offer.

If she wants to write back to you, can she?

In most cases, she can’t (some email service providers allow subscribers to write back to your email marketing messages).

Now, consider this: the same visitor comes in, checks out your website, and reads your blog. Only this time, you have a facebook messenger live chat box prompt her to download the freebie. She clicks through, gets to her own Facebook messenger platform, downloads the freebie.

At this point, she can download and read it (as she might). Or she can also chat back with you. Instantly.

Chatbots allow you to have people “subscribe” to something and enable you to “deliver” lead magnets (just like email marketing would). Except that there’s an additional window of opportunity with chatbots to “chat”, “talk”, and spontaneously engage with your visitors, leads, or customers.

Chatbots certainly have the potential to help you respond to your customers faster, to enable better engagement, to let you nurture them with more relevant content, to generate leads, and more.

The post 5 Reasons Why Chatbots Will Do Better Than Email Marketing appeared first on Done For You.

Before you start putting together an effective online marketing strategy, you need to know the following:

• What is an online marketing channel?
• What different marketing channels exist on the Internet?
• What media do most marketers and business owners prefer?
• Which channels will bring in the highest ROI for your online business?
• What is the best way to choose your channels?

We’ll try to answer all of these questions and give you a checklist of the factors you need to consider before you make a strategic decision.

What is an online marketing channel?

For many of you, the word ‘channel’ may bring images of a waterway. You may think of Mark Twain’s lucid portrayal of the ever-changing channel of the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn. Or you might imagine the English Channel—the natural body of water between southern England and northern France.

But what are marketing channels?

A marketing channel is the means or method through which a message is delivered to a specific audience.

Online marketing channel definition

Now, let’s define what an online marketing channel is:

An online marketing channel consists of all elements that are necessary to communicate your brand message (i.e. advertising and promotion) from the point of production (your company) to the point of consumption (your customers).

Online marketing channels may also be called new media or advertising channels. These terms refer to the internet communication vehicles discussed in this article.

Types of marketing channels for your online business

Let’s leave theory aside and talk about specific online marketing channels.

Almost all online marketing channels or media can be classified into Owned, Paid, and Earned Media.

Owned channels

Owned channels or owned media are your property. You have the ownership, and you are in direct control of the medium. Examples of owned online marketing channels are:

• Your website and your blog
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Webinars

You can influence how your business is represented and what goes where on these spaces or accounts.

Paid channels

Paid media are essentially ad placements that you pay for. Again, you control the content your audience will see but don’t own the medium through which it is displayed.

Examples of paid online marketing channels are:

• Paid search or PPC (Pay Per Click)
• Retargeting / Remarketing
• Affiliate marketing

Earned channels

Earned media are free to use. Still, you don’t have complete control over them. It is offered at the sole discretion of a third party.

Some examples of earned advertising channels on the Internet are:

• Word-of-mouth (WOM)
• Reviews and posts about your business on other sites
• Testimonials

Why is the choice of online marketing channels important?

Think of owned, paid, and earned media like a tripod. Each of the three elements is an integral part of the whole. All three contribute to a complete online marketing strategy.

Furthermore, there are several reasons why every online business should use a mixture of these channels to get their message across to their target audience.

First off, every company needs a way to find buyers for their products. The online marketing channels provide the perfect medium to identify, reach, and sell to potential buyers.

Nowadays, marketing through offline funnels is not enough. It might generate a good income for your business, but there’s still so much more potential to reach a wider audience online.

Also, using one online medium only is not enough in most cases. The competition is fierce. Having only a website that presents your team, products, and contact information won’t help you reach your marketing goals. A website with static content is a somewhat passive type of marketing because you put your content out there and expect people to find you. With all the competition, you’ll be too lucky if Google ranks your site on the first page of search results.

What you need to do instead is understand the importance of using the right mix of online marketing channels to grow your business. While all of this sounds good, it’s common to see enterprises marketing their products without a plan. If you dive into online marketing channels without a plan, you will waste resources and leave your business success to luck.

Deep dive into the most effective online marketing channels

Now, let’s dive into the most effective online marketing channels that fall under the three categories, namely owned, paid, and earned media, that we previously discussed.

Website and Blog

Your website and blog form the foundation of your online identity. But it’s not just that. A website with a blog can be your business’s most important online marketing channel. To make the most out of the website, marketers use techniques like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) to attract their ideal customer avatars and optimize the processes of converting them into paying customers.

Optimizing your website for SEO and CRO involves tactics like keyword research, link building, on-page SEO, content marketing, landing page creation, A/B testing, click-through rate (CTR) tracking and improvement, optimization to reduce cart abandonment, etc. These are just a few examples of what website owners and marketers spend their time on to make the best out of their websites.

Email Marketing

Email marketing falls under “owned media” because you have complete control of your brand image, content, and processes when you do email marketing. Most businesses use third-party email marketing platforms to host their accounts and databases. With email marketing, you collect email addresses from prospects and then deliver your messages with the sole aim of converting these prospects into customers.

You might find yourself working on newsletters, autoresponder series, lead nurturing campaigns, launches, and other tasks when using email marketing as an online marketing channel.

Email is arguably the second most crucial marketing channel after your website and blog. It is often said that for every 1$ you spend on email marketing, you get $30 to $40 back —more details further down this article.

Social Media

Social media as a marketing channel refers to your accounts, pages, or profiles on social networks in which you market your business. SMM (Social Media Marketing) is the art and “science” of leveraging social media to earn visibility traffic. Almost every company today that has an online presence utilizes at least one social network to get its message across to a  larger audience.

Some examples of actions you might perform on social media channels are posting in a Facebook group, updating your Facebook pages, publishing an article on LinkedIn, or doing Twitter marketing, and all these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Social media usually comes right after email marketing when marketers are asked what online marketing channel has the highest ROI.

Webinars

Webinars have become a marketing channel in recent years due to an explosion in the need for demand generation via video. It’s now a mature but reliable marketing technology that “just works” when attracting leads, pitching your offer, and increasing sales. These days, some businesses base most of their lead-generation efforts on sales webinars and webinar funnels.

Suppose you decide to use webinars as an online marketing channel. In that case, you might be involved in activities like building a registration page, rehearsing your webinar script, and pitching during the webinar.

All that’s left for you to do is set it up in your autoresponder!  Or, if you’d like it completely done for you, you can tell us about your project here!

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Now, let’s move on to paid channels. In a recent article about the pillars of an online marketing strategy, we explained exactly what falls under PPC, SEM, display advertising, network advertising, and all types of paid advertising. For simplicity and as an example of paid advertising in general, we will only refer to PPC in this post.

PPC is an online marketing channel where advertisers bid for placement at a search engine to earn visibility and traffic when users enter relevant queries into search engines. Advertisers are only charged when users click on their ad, hence the name “pay-per-click.”

When marketers use PPC advertising, they spend their time on tasks like adding relevant keywords to Google Adwords or adding copy to Bing Ads.

Retargeting / Remarketing

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is about displaying ads to people who have recently visited your site but haven’t performed a planned action, like subscribing to your newsletter or adding a product to the cart.

It is a powerful marketing channel that contributes to conversion optimization. It’s a marketing tool that works with other marketing channels as part of your larger digital strategy. Remarketing works best when you are already sending paid traffic to your website via PPC or other paid marketing channels.

Retargeting is effective because retargeted customers are much more likely to click on your ad since they have recently demonstrated interest, compared to internet users who haven’t interacted with your brand before.
When trying to convert random visitors into leads, retargeting can give you a second chance; with retargeting ads, you can bring visitors back to your site and keep your message fresh on top of their minds.

When preparing for retargeting campaigns, you’d create display ads in AdWords or set up your site’s Google tracking.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is another paid channel incentivizing marketers or site owners to promote your product. The incentive is a commission, a percentage of the revenue they drive to your business.

Companies that use affiliate marketing to promote their products use in-house tools to manage their affiliate programs or third-party platforms like ShareASale and Commission Junction.

Word Of Mouth

WOM refers to organic marketing, which doesn’t cost you a penny. It’s all about people talking about your company and your products. Word-of-mouth is one of the most trusted online marketing channels because it involves a direct recommendation from one customer to another.

When WOM goes wild, your brand is the first thing that comes to mind when shopping for similar goods. This can swing either way; while positive WOM is what you’d be looking to achieve, negative WOM can also be as influential on a potential customer’s purchase decision.

We’re talking about viral content when you choose to affect online WOM. In this case, your goal is to generate content worth sharing so that you influence how people spread the word about your brand and ultimately earn more traffic back to your offers. With viral campaigns, you’d look at linkbait production, guerilla marketing, viral video creation, etc.

Posts about you on other sites

Often, good products will receive online reviews. These reviews might appear on specialized product review sites or other blogs. If you have a good product, bloggers, and YouTubers will likely discuss it and share their customer experience with their audience. Sometimes, they might be affiliated with your brand and receive a commission for every customer they refer to your company.

Posts and reviews on other sites make an essential marketing channel because most people look for reviews and feature comparisons before they make a buying decision.

Accordingly, acquiring more reviews should be an integral part of your online PR efforts. And this point takes us to the last earned marketing channel, which is…

Testimonials

When pleased with your product and customer service, your customers will happily give you a testimonial. Customer testimonials should be on your website, landing pages, and sales emails.

When potential buyers evaluate different offers, they usually do all of the following: look for reviews, look at what bloggers and influencers say about you, and finally, examine customer testimonies. The impact of earned media is vast.

Therefore, make it a priority to ask happy customers for a testimonial and publish them in a prominent location on your site and other owned media.

How to choose the right online marketing channel for your business

In our opinion, the right approach is to adopt a multichannel strategy. Relying on one online marketing channel only is not likely to bring the desired business results. Let’s see how you can evaluate the channels and choose the right one for your business.

Target audience

To that end, you must consider who you want to market your business to. In other words, you need to define your target audience.

Type of business

Your choice of suitable online media depends on your business type and who you want to serve. Do you have an e-shop selling consumer goods? Do you sell a B2B digital product to small businesses? Or do you sell a training course that is meant for individuals?

Is your product targeted at fathers, executives, women, or children? Is your product innovative or a commodity? Knowing your industry and customer avatar is imperative to deciding which online marketing channels to invest your resources.

Survey customers

Do you have existing customers? Conduct a short survey using the proper tools to uncover your actual customers. Use quizzes, emails, and surveys to learn more about their needs and challenges.

Where are your customers?

Be aware of where your customers hang out online. This information could help you determine whether to use those online marketing channels to reach potential customers. Are they on Facebook or LinkedIn?

Are they blogging? Are they buying from Amazon? Connect the dots to paint a picture of your online marketing strategy and decide on the vehicles you want to market your products.

Targeting options

Moreover, you may want to look at the different targeting options in paid advertising channels. Can you target your audience using keywords only? Do you have the ability to show your ads to those who are already engaged with your brand?

Can you target specific demographics? Can you upload your lead database and target those people only? Targeting looks different in AdWords, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads. Other platforms offer different options, so keep that in mind.

Stage of your business

Then, it would help if you considered the stage of your business. Are you just starting up? Are you an established business in the growth stage? Have you reached a plateau? Any existing data from previous online marketing campaigns will give you valuable information about how effective each channel is for your business.

Budget

It wouldn’t do you any good to choose an effective online marketing channel when you can’t afford it. Look at your budget and other resources. A common question is, “How much does PPC cost?” There’s no definite answer because you pay a price per click. Still, you can’t estimate the total cost without considering factors like your goal in terms of revenue, the keywords you want to target, the projected CPC for different keywords, and so on.

Also, the advertising platform plays a role when determining your total cost. For instance, as a rule of thumb, CPC for the same keyword is higher in AdWords than Bing Ads.

Other resources

What other non-financial resources do you have? Think of team know-how, talents, and business culture that affect your choice of marketing channels.

For example, do you have the resources to create epic content? Or who from your staff comes to mind when you think of a webinar host? Do you have tech hurdles preventing you from making an efficient email marketing workflow? What would you need to outsource?

Competitor intelligence

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Look around and see how your competitors promote their products. What channels do they use? What seems to be working for others? Competitor intelligence is always an excellent means to generate ideas.

Business goals

Don’t forget to focus on your goals when devising a strategy and making essential marketing decisions. Your choice of the perfect marketing channel will depend on the top priorities you want to achieve for your business.

Is brand awareness your goal? Is it to create a market for a new product? Do you have sales goals you must accomplish by drawing a clear market segment to your site? Your marketing goals will strongly affect your choice of online channels.

But wait… Which marketing channel has the best ROI?

Okay… We’ve discussed several factors you need to consider when putting together a list of online channels that you will use in marketing. But…when you’re on a limited budget, you might want to ask, “Which online marketing channels have the biggest impact on ROI?” Ultimately, if you have to pick one or two channels along with your site or blog, you need to know which channel will most likely produce the highest ROI.

So, is there an objective answer to the question, “Which online marketing channel is most effective?” Let’s see if there’s proof on the web…

What do the famous think?

Andrew Chen of Uber talks about the marketing channels best for a startup company looking to grow. These channels are scalable, and they are:

• Paid acquisition
• Virality
• SEO
• Sales
• Other (rare and situational opportunities for growth, like a partnership with a corporation)

Boris Wertz, the founder of Version One Ventures, narrows it down to two levers that allow high growth:

• Paid acquisition coupled with a high Customer Life Time Value (CLTV) because high CLTV gives you the freedom to spend significant money on customer acquisition.
• Virality, because that lets you amass users cheaply or even without spending any money at all on paid acquisition.

Rand Fishkin of MOZ uses his own opinions and experiences to produce a ranking of different online marketing channels from high to low ROI combined with effort and cost to achieve that ROI

Effective marketing channels for retailers

Brilliant Insights published a benchmark of the most successful acquisition channels for retail.

The data from US e-commerce sites shows that nearly 40% of e-commerce traffic comes from organic search, while paid search and email marketing account for 25% each. Of course, those numbers don’t prove that the above channels have the highest ROI, but they indicate what works best for the top US retailers.

The same source, Smart Insights, examines how e-commerce purchases are attributed to different channels. They conclude that organic (22% of assets), email marketing (20%), and CPC (19%) are the online marketing channels driving most purchases.

Email marketing has a fantastic ROI

In a classic survey (updated in 2017), DMA asked the participants who could calculate the return on email marketing, “How much is the approximate return you get back for every pound spent on email marketing?” The answers revealed that the average ROI is £30.01. Because email works so well, it is probably unsurprising that marketers reported sending over four emails per month.

Website, Email, Social media, and SEO are the channels that stand out

Another survey published by Ascend2 reveals which online marketing channels are worth your attention. Marketers say these are the most lucrative and engaging channels that could give you the best results.

• Website – 63%
• Email marketing – 52%
• Social media – 49%
• SEO – 31%
• Paid search – 29%
• Mobile – 28%
• Display ads – 24%

But what are the most challenging online marketing channels to execute? Here are the responses:

• Website – 40%
• Social media – 40%
• SEO – 39%
• Email marketing – 36%
• Mobile – 34%
• Paid search – 30%
• Display ads – 29%

A Vocus digital marketing survey asked small business owners which digital marketing channel is most effective.

Here’s how the top online marketing channels ranked:

• Website – 33.9%
• Social media – 24.9%
• Email marketing – 19.6%
• SEO – 16.2%

Webinars

Now, how about webinars? We know webinars bring consistent marketing ROI for nearly any business, but let’s look at some stats supporting that claim.

The Content Marketing Institute reported that 64% of marketers consider webinars “very effective” or “effective.”

ReadyTalk, a webinar platform, was conducted with their clients, and they found that between 20% and 40% of webinar attendees turned into qualified leads.

A study from the Content Marketing Institute found that marketers rate webinars in the top 5 in terms of the most effective tactics they use.

But how do you get people to register for your webinar? The answer is to let people know about your webinar via other marketing channels. This source reports that on a scale of 1 to 5, email marketing ranked 4.46 and was the top tool for promotion. Scoring 2.77 out of 5, social media was the second most widely used promotional tool for webinars.

How can you tell which option is best for your business?

As a business owner or marketer, you’re constantly looking for new ways to attract customers, but not everything is black and white regarding effective online marketing channels.

You don’t need to get blinded by those survey answers. Keep an eye on trends and emerging channels that might be an opportunity for your business growth. Listen to your entrepreneurial intuition, and start with what you believe would work best for your business. Choose the online marketing channel that makes more sense, try, evaluate, and revisit.

Here’s a summary of the digital marketing channels we discussed in this article and a checklist of the essential variables you must examine before deciding.

• Owned channels
  • Your website and your blog
  • Email marketing
  • Social media
  • Webinars
• Paid channels
  • Paid search or PPC
  • Retargeting / Remarketing
  • Affiliate marketing
• Earned channels
  • Word-of-mouth
  • Reviews and posts about your business on other sites
  • Testimonials

Conclusion

Now, at this point, and with the help of the digital marketing channel checklist, you should be able to identify some candidates who would make good online marketing channels to put them to the test. Generally, SEO, email marketing, and social media can give you a good start.

If you’re a startup or any new business, these three channels provide the perfect opportunity to establish an awareness of your products and services and gain your first customers.

You don’t need to be everywhere, though, if you don’t have the resources to support an omnichannel strategy. Go with as many different media as you can handle. It’s preferable to focus on two or three media instead of trying to be good at everything.

Start small and focused, then use cross-channel leverage and scale as you see results from your chosen online marketing channels.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right Online Marketing Channels for Your Business (Avoid Costly Mistakes) appeared first on Done For You.

A Lenskold Group report states that about 63% of companies outgrow their competition thanks only to marketing automation.

Marketing automation aims to make your business seem available 24/7. It’d make your customers feel that you are instantly available, quick to respond, and more. On the management and marketing end, automating workflows helps reduce your efforts, automate your funnels, help systemize your operations, and give you more wings to fly.

Given all the benefits that automation can have for your business, there are a few things it won’t do for you. As such, setting your expectations right and understanding the principles of marketing automation give you a good start.

Marketing automation doesn’t mean your business is now bound to get lazier; it only means your business now gets smarter.

Here’s what marketing automation won’t do for you.

Marketing automation doesn’t relieve you of work

Sales funnels need work – even our Done For You Sales Funnels. Automation of any kind needs plenty of work upfront, and continued work in the form of testing, analysis, tweaking, or even redoing from scratch.

Even for workflow setups that are successful, you’ll still have plenty of work to do. Duplicating funnels for new offers, optimizing your existing automation setup, working on integrations, deployment and testing of technology, and a lot more.

Marketing automation isn’t a way to get lazy; it’s only a way to improve efficiency.

It’s not a “set it and forget it” task

Say “marketing automation” and people tend to jump several steps ahead and think “So, I’d never have to do this manually ever again”.

Agreed that there are a lot of things marketing automation can do. For instance, there are CRM systems that eliminate the need for you to fill in gory details about every new customer you’d enter into your CRM.

There are bots powered by artificial intelligence that can chat with your potential customers who visit your website.

But marketing automation isn’t “set it and forget it”. Take the simple case of sending out an email digest with your latest blog posts to your email subscribers.

Normally, RSS-to-email campaigns work on auto-pilot. But you can’t just sit there and let it run.

You’d have to test subject lines, you’d have to stay on top of your open rates, and track whether or not your subscribers are reading your emails at all.

It won’t replace you or your team

You could bring in all the marketing automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and bots across various functions of your business, but we aren’t at the stage where all this technology will replace you or your team.

You could have an artificial intelligence powered bot to man your live chat, but if customers actually need to connect with someone real, you’ll have to show up. You could have machine learning glean insights from data, but you’ll finally have to make decisions based on that data.

Marketing automation simplifies your business, but it won’t replace you (or your team).

Marketing automation is no secret sauce

By the time you read this, almost everyone else would have hard about marketing automation too. They’d be reading all about how to make sales funnels that work by themselves leading to a powerful sales setup or they’d be learning all about building lead funnels that help businesses automate lead generation.

Marketing automation—and any resultant stack of technology used—is no longer secret sauce.

What can work in your favor is your strategy, how you intend to use marketing automation, and how committed you are when it comes to tinkering, experimenting, failing, and learning from implementing your strategy.

It’s unlikely to save you money

I’ll be upfront and honest about the state of affairs with marketing and with marketing automation: most small businesses and individuals don’t get to execute regular digital marketing the right way, let alone getting marketing automation right.

There are a lot of moving parts, testing, experimentation, and implementation when it comes to setting your marketing on auto-pilot. Business owners also have to take a leap of faith and get many things in line (including their thoughts, beliefs, and actions) just to stay on the winning path.

Because of this, workflow automation will only cost you more—in time, efforts, and resources—instead of less (which is the usual premise).

If you do get it right, however, automating your workflows easily saves you money. It’s no accident that about 68% of small businesses are using marketing automation today if it weren’t for all the benefits and significant cost savings.

Done-for-you inbound marketing automation

If you need a done-for-you inbound marketing system that with automate your lead generation, lead nurturing and sales conversion, DoneForYou.com is the place to start. Click here to schedule a call with one of our sales funnel experts to see the true value of having a team do the heavy lifting for you.

The post 5 Things Marketing Automation Won’t Do For You appeared first on Done For You.

If your answer is yes, you are well ahead of a lot of businesses already. Just by choosing to use email marketing the way you should, you are on the winning side. On that note, you’d want your email sequences and sales funnels to be anything but “salesy”.

Sales funnels are named that way but you don’t want to push too hard, sound desperate, and keep bombarding your email subscribers with autoresponders that are all about “making a sale”.

It’s called “nurturing” for a reason: you’d want to “pull”, entice, educate, teach, inspire, and educate some more with your lead nurturing. Occasionally, you’d want to include a soft pitch or two but the focus shouldn’t be on “selling”.

Chase money, and you won’t get it.
Chase sales figures, and you’ll soon alienate your subscribers.
Push too hard, and you’ll lose whatever little you now have with you.

Your funnel blueprint should aim at being holistic, strategic, and planned.

It can nurture and “sell”; it can educate but still bring in “sales”.

Learn all that you need to about funnels from our Funnel Factor Report. If webinars are your thing, check out our sales funnels webinar and get into the groove of building funnels that work.

When your email sequences, email copy and sales funnels add real value (without asking for anything), you’d gain more. Period.

While sales funnels do work as well as they should, most businesses overcomplicate their funnels and end up not doing anything at all. Strategic sales funnels are nice to have but if you don’t have a single email going out to nurture your leads or subscribers, it’s inexcusable.

There are some simple and yet powerful ways to ensure that you can keep your subscribers or leads nurtured at all times, automatically.

Here are some mandatory and yet simple email marketing sequences you should have running:

Email sequences: Pre-populated workflow autoresponders

Digital sales funnels are powerful for a very specific reason: email sequences can be planned, written, and lined up to nurture leads in a way they choose or in a way that’s very relevant to each of them.

Let’s say that you have a report on WordPress Security as a free giveaway on your website (and let’s assume that your entire business revolves around something to do with WordPress security — a plugin, a hosting service?).

When users sign up for your WordPress Security download, they are letting you know that they are keen on keeping their websites secure. Your entire lineup of emails following that download then is going to educate, teach, and inform your subscribers on security insights, tips to keep their WordPress websites secure, and more.

On and off, you could send in a freebie, an offer, or a call to action that points them to purchase your plugin, service, or tool.

If you more than one offer, you’d have dedicated email sequences or workflows for each of those offers (based on what your subscribers signed up for). These sequences are set up inside your email marketing software.

Here’s an example from Drip:

RSS-to-Email Sequences

As you keep publishing on your blog, you’d normally expect visitors to read what you just published.

But they might not. Occasionally, they’ll discover your content on their own or maybe they click-through your social updates to read your recently published content.

Most times, they just miss your recently published blog posts.

RSS-to-email updates automatically fix that problem for your business.

Most email service providers provide you with the features and templates you’d need to launch RSS-to-email sequences. An RSS-to-email sequence is a digest of your published posts in a single timeframe (like a week).

Using your blog’s RSS feed, your blog posts are auto-populated as a digest of your previously published blog posts. The email digest (with your blog posts listed) is sent out the next week on a particular day and time you’ll establish.

When you set it up right, it looks like this (credits: Campaign Monitor):

By sending out RSS-to-updates to your entire list(s) of subscribers, you achieve a few things automatically:

1. Your emails are automated and regular. This lets your subscribers know that they are valued and cared for.
2. You are able to send out email updates that aren’t all about “sales”. You won’t be pushing at all. They are only prompted to read more and gain insights.
3. You get a chance to stay in your subscribers’ inboxes without breaking their trust. By staying in their inboxes, you are able to boost your brand recall.

Regular broadcasts

Most businesses rarely send out broadcast emails.

Your subscribers have given you an opportunity to get in touch with them when you have new updates about your products or services; when you have something important to share with them; when there’s news about something worthy that they should know about; and more.

All email service providers allow you to send out broadcasts. Make good use of these features to write out personalized emails and customized email copy to send to your subscribers, users, leads, or customers.

Here’s what Landbot.io does:

Transactional Emails

By default, any action taken on your website will have a transactional email going to out to subscribers, users, leads, or customers.

Transactional emails are notifications, reminders, and other “service” emails such as registration emails, order confirmation emails, confirmation emails, surveys, reminders, etc.

Based on their actions, you’ll have transactional emails auto-triggered. According to Experian, transactional emails tend to have 8X more opens and clicks. If used well, they can generate 6X more revenue.

Most businesses don’t make use of the power of these transactional emails. You could make them more lively. You could add some personality. You can also upsell using transactional emails.

Here’s a transactional email (shopping cart abandonment email) from Birchbox that’s directly used to make sales happen.

See that? There’s that email which addresses you by first name; it’s relevant and targeted; it’s relatable and personal; and it arrives just in time.

Are you getting these basic, simple, and yet effective email sequences working for your business? If not, what’s stopping you?

If you’d like a hand in getting an email marketing campaign or a sales funnel set up, schedule a call and we can work through it!

The post Simple And Powerful Email Sequences You Can’t Afford Not to Have appeared first on Done For You.

Taking into account all pillars of online marketing can help you reap the benefits of a 360-degree digital strategy.

• Take advantage of all digital channels.
• Reach a wider audience.
• Get to run experiments and optimize for the tactics that serve you best.
• Have more opportunities for revenue and income.
• Take into account the entire customer journey through the sales funnel, from discovery to purchase.
• Communicate a consistent message across all marketing channels.
• Capitalize on your staff’s creativity.

A well-rounded online marketing strategy includes SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media marketing, PPC, online reputation management, influencer marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing and affiliate marketing.

Let’s briefly talk about each of these pillars (in no particular order) so that you get a grasp of what they’re all about and how they contribute to your online marketing strategy.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is an essential part of your online marketing strategy.

Search Engine Land defines SEO as the process of getting web traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines. SEO is basically a set of techniques and tools that help your site get visitors from Google.

It is divided into on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

Simply put, on-page SEO has to do with your site’s structure, content, and code optimization.

Off-page SEO involves techniques that result in building links that point back to your site as well as social signals.

SEO efforts involve keyword-optimized content that gets ranked on Google for particular search queries. When a user performs a search, your webpage will appear in the search results and get clicked.

2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

As HubSpot explains it, SEM is considered internet marketing that increases a site’s visibility through organic search engines results and advertising. SEM includes SEO as well as other search marketing tactics.

Sometimes, marketers separate SEO from SEM, with the latter referring to paid search engine marketing only. The following image demonstrates this approach.

3. Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategic online marketing approach focused on producing and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. (Source: Content Marketing Institute)

Content marketing includes all types of content, such as text, image, video, voice across all channels (blog, social media, YouTube, podcasting etc.)  In your content marketing pieces, you’d have content upgrades to collect leads.

Often content marketing is the most time-consuming online marketing method. With the use of effective content marketing tools, like Curately, you can create fresh content in minutes.

4. Social media marketing

Social media marketing is all about interaction and promotion via various social media networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter (to name just a few). .

With social media, marketing businesses are able to engage with their audience on third-party platforms that they hang out.

Social media marketing helps get the word out about your products and business. But even more important than the exposure, it allows you to grow lasting relationships with your target audience.

The best part is that it’s free. It doesn’t take a huge budget to be present in the most popular online hangouts, like Facebook and Instagram.

5. Paid advertising

When it comes to an online marketing strategy, paid advertising can be distinguished between pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, network adverting, and social media advertising.

WordStream explains that PPC is an online advertising model in which advertisers can display ads for their goods or services when users–people searching for things online–enter relevant queries into search engines. Advertisers are only charged when a user actually clicks on their ad, hence the name “pay-per-click.”

Due to the nature of keywords and the role they play in paid search, pay-per-click advertising can also be referred to as keyword advertising.

If you’re wondering how PPC is different from SEM, let us explain. PPC and SEM are both concerned with promotion via search engines. PPC advertising specifically relates to the ads you see at the top of a search results page, while SEM is a much broader umbrella term covering different sorts of promotion through search engines, including SEO.

Network advertising may refer to other networks that are not related to search engines. For example, an advertising network might place your banner on a publisher’s site and charge you a price per click.

Social media advertising is quite different. Although the pricing model (pay-per-click) can be the same, the advertising channel changes. Facebook ads are the most typical example of paid advertising on social media. There’s also Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads and so on.

6. Online reputation management

Online reputation management includes word-of-mouth marketing over the internet. It is a basic pillar of your online marketing strategy.

Online reputation management is the craft of creating a positive perception of your brand on the internet, one that falls in line with your business goals.

Online reputation management is closely related to some of the other pillars of online marketing, such as content marketing, social media, and SEO.

A bad reputation can stick like glue. Businesses manage online reputation by attracting positive reviews and removing negative search engine results. Online reputation management also involves how you deal with the aftermath when something goes sideways.

7. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of online marketing strategy that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead inspire/ hire/pay influencers to get out the word for you. (Source: TapInfluence)

Utilizing influencer marketing drives brand awareness and cultivates an audience over time. Businesses that do influencer marketing enjoy benefits like improved word-of-mouth advertising, increased number of experts talking about their brand and social proof.

8. Email marketing

Email marketing is a method of reaching leads or customers directly via commercial email. In a typical business case scenario, an organization builds a mailing list to reach established and prospective customers.

An email list may be coupled with a marketing database that allows for personalization, web data integration and precise targeting. (Source: Techopedia)

Most businesses use one of the best email marketing platforms that are managed by email marketing companies, instead of using their own hosted email marketing software.

Email marketing is considered to be one of the most budget-friendly ways to reach your audience. It is reported that for every dollar spent on email marketing, an average of $44 dollar return on investment is realized. (Source: Campaign Monitor, 2016)

9. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching a target audience on their smartphones, tablets, and/or other mobile devices, via websites, email, SMS and MMS, social media, and apps. (Source: Marketo)

As with any online marketing strategy effort, every business needs to develop a unique mobile advertising strategy based on the niche and ideal customer. Mobile marketing is all about customization and personalization of the user experience with the use of the ever-changing technology.

10. Affiliate Marketing

Last but not least and according to Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.

The affiliate marketing model is applicable to any type of business to increase sales and pay commissions to partners who refer sales. Where does affiliate marketing fit into your online marketing strategy? Although either product- or service-based organizations can have affiliates, typically affiliate programs are used by service or software businesses.

Your online marketing strategy demystified

Devising an online marketing strategy is not an easy endeavor. Marketing is a complex discipline and one that demands unique solutions for every organization. It is impossible to explain everything about the 10 pillars of digital marketing in one post. But it’s important to stress the following point.

Since you’ve come thus far in the article, you must have recognized that the 10 pillars of online marketing form a complex web. Each pillar is interconnected to others because it involves utilizing common avenues (e.g. Google search) or the same sort of content (e.g. video).

Just as an example, when doing content marketing as part of your online marketing strategy, you publish content on your blog. The same goes for SEO. With SEO, keyword-optimized content needs to be published on your site. So, the venue is the same AND the type of content is identical (blog post).

The goals though might be quite different. For instance, the goal of an SEO post will probably be to achieve high rankings in Google search results. A post published as part of your content marketing strategy might serve as an entry point for top-of-funnel traffic that is generated from PPC campaigns.

It is important to plan out your online marketing strategy with that complexity in mind. Make sure you

• make a plan on how you are going to use each pillar,
• keep consistency across different channels and
• take actions that are complementary and help you fulfill your online marketing strategy.

Some of these strategies are more leveraged than others, especially early on, and we’d be happy to help you put an Action Plan together on getting launched.  Click here to schedule a call with us!

The post 10 Pillars Of An Online Marketing Strategy appeared first on Done For You.

But first, what is spam? Spam email is irrelevant, unsolicited electronic messages sent in bulk to a list of email addresses.

For example, could you assume you bought an email list from an obscure online business? You want to market your business, and that list of emails provides the right business prospects. You intend to email them an offer they can’t refuse. You feel like you’re giving value, but the truth is that this is 100% spam. Since those people never gave you explicit consent to mail them, sending an email blast to that list is considered spam.

According to the most recent data, spam messages accounted for an impressive 59.56% of the total email traffic around the globe.

In 2016, the US accounted for most unsolicited emails, 12.08% of worldwide spam. The most common spam emails were in the healthcare and dating niches.

But sometimes, you might spam people accidentally. Emails are going to the spam folder without you even knowing about it. You may see a constant or sudden drop in deliverability rates and wonder why this is happening to your business.

In this post, we’ll talk about the top reasons why your marketing email might be classified as spam and show you how you can fix it. So, let’s dive in.

1. Check if your domain name is blocked

If you see a sudden drop in open rates, it could be that your marketing emails are going to spam…

First thing – could you check if your domain is blocked?

Blocklist is a list of domains that are suspected of sending spam. Email servers use blocklists to help decide whether to accept or reject an email. If your domain is blocked, your email will never reach the recipient’s inbox because their server will stop every message you send.

Blocklists identify spammers by the domain name or the IP address they use to send email blasts.

A blocked domain can cause problems for a site owner, from low email deliverability to lost Google index rank. It’s a fast process, though, to tell whether or not your domain name has been blocked.

Suppose you’re on a blocklist; some or most of your email will not be delivered. Use a reputable service like MXToolBox to see whether your domain name is listed in one or more widely-used blocklists. You should also check your email service provider’s range of IPs to ensure they’re not listed either.

If you get a positive, you must remove your domain name from that blocklist. Blocklist removal has to be done manually. Visit the website that has blocked you. Fill out a “remove from blocklist” form or contact the website by email and ask to be removed.

2. Don’t include affiliate links in your emails

Email marketing services typically ban affiliate marketing. Not all email marketing efforts and links are spam. However, major email marketing platforms, like MailChimp, and other smaller ones, like MailerLite, don’t like affiliates. This makes sense because affiliates can sporadically promote spam URLs, harming MailChimp servers and affecting users’ deliverability.

With that in mind, you can still do affiliate marketing slightly differently so that you explicitly disclose affiliate links as required by law.

The safest way to promote affiliate links is to post content on your site. This content can be a review or a use case of the affiliate offer you want to promote. In your marketing email, you can link to your website instead of placing the affiliate link in your email copy.

Let us explain why this tactic works better. Sometimes, your affiliate links might contain URLs that have been blocked. However, if you link back to your website, as with cloaked affiliate links, you rule out the possibility that a blocked domain will harm your open rates. And you don’t want to risk including blocked domains in your email body, not even once. If you do, your email marketing provider will notice, and they might close your account.

3. Avoid using link shorteners

URL shorteners are handy tools that help you convert a long URL into a short link. Such a service is bitly.com. A link shortener is typically used to convert ugly URLs into nice, little ones that fit into a social media post or look nice in an email.

The downside is that, with a URL shortener, you also mask the link’s destination. This way, the user needs to know exactly where they’re headed. A lot of spammers have abused the masking feature. This, in turn, has resulted in mail servers blocking some URL shorteners.

We strongly suggest you stop using link shorteners as part of your email campaigns if you want to stay off the spam folder.

If you need help, you can set up your URL shortener. You can do that by registering a different domain name that is a shortened, witty version of your brand and then connecting that domain to bitly.com or rebrandly.com.

You can likewise use programming tools, like Yourls and Phurl, to create your spam-free URL shortener.

4. Don’t spam people—duh

As an online business owner or marketer, you must accept that spam hurts. It hurts your inbox, it hurts other people’s inboxes, and it hurts your business. This is why strict spam laws are in place, which you must obey.

First, you need to read the requirements for commercial messages. Also, remember that different countries and regions (such as Canada and Europe) have different laws. If your email list includes people from other countries, you’ll need to abide by those different laws.

Don’t buy lists—period. Purchasing a mailing list seems to be a huge time saver. Well, it isn’t.

Buying an email list for several reasons is a good use of money.

First, you cannot trust the source of the emails on the list. Second, the same index has probably been sold to spammers who have bombarded these emails with spam. Third, your email service provider will most likely ban you. Fourth, you might expect a 5% response rate, or hundreds of people will click on your links, but these numbers will be close to zero. If many subscribers complain, your business may face a costly battle with the anti-spam law.

You need to understand that spray-and-pray marketing actions won’t help your business. Spamming can never benefit your business. It can only harm.

5. Set up SPF/DKIM

These less-known settings are crucial to increasing email open rates and avoiding being marked as spam.

Most email service providers have guides on how to set up SPF and DKIM. You must take the proper SPF and DKIM values from your email marketing platform (e.g., MailChimp) and place them in new DNS settings in your domain name registrar (e.g., GoDaddy).

So, in MailChimp, the setting will look like this:

If you need to understand these acronyms better to have them configured correctly, please explain why you need this.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is an email validation system designed to prevent spam by verifying the sender’s IP address. An SPF record allows web administrators to designate which web hosts can send messages from a domain.

Simply put, SPF says you are the domain owner and are allowed to contact people using this domain name.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) indicates ownership of the email message by a particular organization. The organization’s signature is added to the email headers while the news is still in transit to the recipient.

Most email clients will check for a valid DKIM signature on incoming email to identify who sent it. DKIM is a way to increase email deliverability and your sender’s reputation.

With DKIM adequately set, the receiving mail server can identify the origin of the email marketing campaign.

6. Are Marketing emails going to spam? Don’t use words that trigger spam filters

As we explained, if you’re on a blocklist, the spam filters will stop your email from reaching its destination. Additionally, spammy words can trigger spam traps. How does this work?

Spam traps will consider a list of factors before deciding your email looks spammy.

If the spam score passes a certain level, the message will be marked as spam and go directly to the junk folder. One factor that weighs into your spam score is the choice of words in the subject line and the body of the email.

There’s no magic formula to the perfect email score—and spam filters don’t disclose their algorithm—but there are certain words you need to avoid.

You can always find the most engaging subject lines in this collection of the most-opened subject lines.

Here’s an extensive list of common spam words you must avoid.

Email copy and images need to refer to your brand and be balanced. Don’t use all capitals and misleading prefixes in your subject lines, such as RE: or FW:. Avoid using words such as free, money, profit, sex, PayPal, loans, winner, and other spammy-looking words.

Keep your emails out of the spam folder.

Your email service provider will probably have a step in which you test your email against spam filters. If not, use a free service like IsNotSpam. Com if you don’t have the budget for EmailReach or Litmus.

It’s a good practice to check your email before sending it to get a clear picture of your spam score. Often, you will see the real reasons why your email is marked as spam, like errors in SPF and DKIM. If you need help, you can always send the IsNotSpam report to the support desk of your email marketing service or an email marketing expert and ask them for more information.

That’s it! We hope this post gave you insight into why your emails go to spam and, hopefully, gave you ideas on how to avoid the spam folder.

If you’d like a more comprehensive look at why your marketing email isn’t where it should be, schedule an Action Plan call with us!

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The old school of thought was that your email list should be treated like a hotel.  Every day that goes by that you don’t send an email, is wasted revenue.

… Email frequency, how often you send emails, used to be treated like an opportunity that you can’t get back – getting into your subscriber’s inbox.

Now though, there’s a much better way of managing your list that doesn’t alienate your folks, and keeps your engagement and click rates steadily high…

Mailchimp did a study a few years ago, correlating frequency of emails and click rates.  It turns out that the majority of folks in the study had diminishing click rates the more frequently they mailed…

Meaning, even though they were mailing more often, in some case they were actually getting fewer overall clicks!

And really, you wouldn’t believe how many product owners and email list owners I talk to who don’t do any kind of list management whatsoever…

They have a big list, and they mail that big list no matter how old or how dis-engaged their folks are!

These business owners don’t have any idea what their list is into or what they want more of…  It’s been forever since they asked them for insight through a segmentation survey funnel.  All they know is that at some point in the past, these subscribers opted in for something and they are just going to keep mailing.

When it comes to managing your lists, marketing automation and customer segmentation, there are definite best practices that you should put in place, and it’s important to understand that your prospects and customers are different.

Things may work well for your list that don’t work for others.  In turn, you might hear people tell you what you need to do, and it might backfire.

So, know that you need to test this stuff out religiously and understand that your list might be a little different than everyone else’s!

Knowing What Your List Wants

Email List Management can be a pain sometimes. If you’ve got lots of products or websites, you’ve inevitably got quite a few lists that are segmented a million different ways and have lots of autoresponder sequences set up.

Keep in mind, your prospect and customer lists are probably your company’s most valuable asset, so invest some time into understanding what your folks want more of and what they can’t stand!

Now, I know there are countless experts around the web trying to convince you that you need to build your email list. But once you have it, what should you do?

Should you email them once a week? Should you write long emails? Should the content be formal or conversational?  Should you put your logo at the top and make it look pretty?  Should you hire someone to manage the list?

There’s so many variables, and we’ll be getting into them in a minute!

Where Customer Segmentation Starts

How you arrange your list matters.  The person who has the best control over their list wins at the end of the day.

By segmenting your list the right way and creating some marketing automation around those customer segments, you’ll be sending less email on a daily basis while getting better engagement, higher clickthroughs and more revenue!

Buyers vs. Prospects

Think about this.  Who is a better lead – someone who has bought from you in the past or someone who hasn’t?

Someone who has bought from you!  Of course!  They’ve shown you that they value your information or products or services or whatever.  They’re not afraid to buy something online.  Plus, they have the resources to actually purchase something!

That means your buyer list should be your absolute most coveted list!

The folks who’ve never bought anything from you have a lower weight in terms of email list value.  Those folks found you for a variety of reasons…  Maybe you gave away a free lead magnet or they opted in through a content upgrade…  The fact of the matter is, they just signed up to get that something for free.

… Don’t get me wrong, the leads that you generate through free reports and landing pages have their place, but they don’t outweigh real-life customers.

Realistically speaking, just having those two lists is a big deal.  You’ll treat your buyers and prospects differently.  You may even set up marketing automation to work with those two groups differently.  You might send something to your prospects that you don’t send to your buyers and vice-versa.

So, at minimum, you should have a buyers list and prospects list.

Now, let’s break them down even more.

Keeping Affiliates and JV’s Separate

Affiliates and JV’s are your marketing partners – they help you reach the corners of the Internet while making a percentage of the products and services sold.

For this reason, you should keep your affiliates and JV partners on a separate list, making sure to only mail to them when you have something for them!  Think affiliate contests, new products, launches and when you’re moving your company in a new direction.

The ONLY market where your affiliate list might be your prospect list is in the Internet marketing space.  You want your affiliates to be well trained so that they can help you promote better, so it would be advantageous to do some training or link off to good marketing products.

I know quite a few product owners in different niches who have entire courses that they give away for free to their affiliates, all in hopes of making them better marketers who promote their products!

List Interests

Let’s face it, not every person on your list is interested into the same thing!  In the Internet marketing space, some folks are interested in free traffic.  Others in paid traffic.  Still others in list building or product development.  That’s one of the reasons we’ve done so much work perfecting surveys and quizzes that drive marketing automation.

The more control you have over what your list is interested in, the better you can market to them.

There are quite a few ways that you can figure this out…

• Surveying your list
• Monitoring email link click throughs and assigning them to a tag in your email marketing software
• Putting a dropdown list on the optin form
• Tracking what pages someone visits and putting them in different tags
• Creating retargeting audiences around the URL’s that people visit

There are lots of ways to get this data.

If I mail my list of 40,000 business owners, with some clicking through and then some filling out the survey…  I have a very poor picture of what my list is into, simply because there isn’t enough data!

If, however, I track who opened an email based on the subject line, I’ll have a much better idea of what they want more of!

Some email platforms like Ontraport and Infusionsoft make this type of marketing automation and customer segmentation pretty easy…

Active vs. Inactive Leads

With email, on most platforms including Ontraport, you have to pay once you hit a number of emails sent or a number of contacts in your database.

For example, included in Ontraport’s monthly cost is the ability to send 100,000 emails.  Once we hit that 100K cap, we pay $99 for each additional 100K emails sent.

There are months we’ll spend another $1200 on email!  Crazy, huh?

One way to curb both of those things, extra costs and low deliverability rates, is to only send email to your active subscribers.

Let’s face it.  If someone hasn’t opened your email in the last 4 months, they probably aren’t going to.

I know it hurts but just delete them out of your system.  They’re gone.  And if they come back, they’ll sign up for your stuff again.

If you can’t bring yourself to delete them, then set their email status to ‘No’ or unsubscribe them or whatever.

How Did They Find You?

Often times, we’ll do customer segmentation by what promo they signed up for, meaning what lead magnet did they download or what video they watched which make them sign up?

Another way I’ll do it since we work with some affiliates is tag leads according to who sent them.  It’s funny to go through and see how many people are on how many lists!

In fact, when we were doing a lot of webinars a few years ago, less and less people were actually new to me!  It got to the point where we’d run an import of the people who signed up and only about 30% were new leads!!

You wouldn’t believe how many people signed up for the same automated webinar 4 and 5 times through different affiliates!  (maybe you were one of them? – there’s nothing wrong with that by the way!)

Additional List Management Tips…

Here are some additional list management tips that have worked for me.

We’ll be digging into these a little deeper in future articles…

Email Your List Often

The first time I heard this, I almost laughed. If I email my list everyday, people will unsubscribe! They’ll report my emails as spam. I worked so hard to get them on – I don’t want to make them mad!

What I can tell you is that the people who unsubscribe would have done so anyway, sooner or later. There’s no way you can continue to give away content week after week without asking them to take action in some way. Maybe that’s through an affiliate link or by selling your own products.

The point is, you’re in business to make money, right? That’s what keeps the lights on and a roof over your head. Your true prospects, friends and customers will understand that.

Make Use Of Actions And Rules

In some of the more sophisticated email marketing platforms, like Ontraport and Infusionsoft, you can do lots of complex customer segmentation and marketing automation.

Things like:

• If someone goes to this page, add them to this list
• If someone clicks this link, remove them from List 1 and put them on List 2
• If someone chooses this field in this form, add them to this sequence
• If a customer buys X product, put them in the sequence that promotes Y product

The term ‘behavioral segmentation’ seems to be the newest phrase in Internet marketing, and the examples above are what’s fueling that revolution.

My point is, the better you understand what your list is doing and what they’re into, the fewer emails you can send and the greater your engagement will be!

Keep Things Current

If you don’t plan on writing to your list every day or every couple days, set up an autoresponder series that does it for you. That’s why we built Scriptly, the make autoresponders easy.

The worst thing you can do is let people forget who you are.

Actually, just this morning, I got two emails – one from Tony Robbins with a direct link to a video and one from another email marketer with an opt-in which forwarded you to the same video.

Keep in mind, this is the first email I got from the no-name marketer and I was a bit skeptical. I didn’t remember signing up for anything of his. I didn’t recognize his name at first. And I was a bit weirded out because he was making me signup for something I already had a link to. I thought maybe he was trying to grow his list off of Tony’s video.

So, after twenty minutes of checking nameservers and digging, I finally remembered who this guy was (and it’s cool…). I just didn’t remember what I was doing on his list!

Marketing Automation Starts With Customer Segmenation

With the right customer segmentation, even the smallest of lists can outperform giant ones because they’re so specialized.  A list of 1000 subscribers all uniquely interested in on topic will far outperform a list of 100,000 people who signed up for any number of reasons.

It’s your job to cultivate that list – to segment them – into groups that you can nurture through blog posts, lead magnets, videos and so much more.

Sure, it takes some sloshing through data to get started, but you’ll be glad you put the time in pretty quickly!

The post Customer Segmentation: Marketing Automation Based On What Your Audience Does appeared first on Done For You.

You need to know precisely what you want your prospects to do ahead of time, and you also need to chain together enough emails that you can effectively promote your product or offer days in advance through an autoresponder!

You can sit at your desk daily and write one email, but stuff pops up. You’ll be interrupted, and fires will need to be put out… Emails are one of the easiest things to push off if you let them be!  The guys who are building the biggest businesses through email, though – they’re the ones who know that the most essential part of their day is the email that they’re about to send to their list.

If you don’t know what ‘copy’ is (I didn’t 13 years ago when I started…), a copy is simply the words strung together on the page that you use to get your prospect, your reader, to take action.

Email copy is just that – the words used in your emails!

When you hear the terms ‘sales copy,’ ‘sales letters,’ or ‘email copy,’ it’s just the way that you write sales messages or email messages that incite some action from your prospect :0)

That action can be a click, a sale, or watching a video.  That’s how you sell stuff!  If no one clicks, buys, or watches, then your copy is the first place you have to start troubleshooting!

There is an art to writing emails that people open, read, and ultimately click through, and that’s what this article is about.

Before we get to writing emails, though, we need to step back and figure out what exactly we’re trying to get our list to do – in micro-steps…

Our Goal In Writing Email Copy

Email copy is an exciting animal in and of itself.

You see, your emails don’t typically do the selling for you.  Sure, you can link right to an order form, and you’ll get a few sales, but the much more typical way of using email to get buyers is to connect to a sales page or an automated webinar like this:

The flow looks simple enough…

Email your prospect a link to your sales page, and they will click through to the order form and buy!

Here’s the challenge, though…

Not everyone you email will open your email, let alone click the link to the sales page…

This means a specific set of micro-actions associated with your email will make the whole thing work.

(Note: the sooner you understand this idea of ‘micro-actions,’ the quicker you’ll be able to turn your campaigns around!  It took me a long time to figure this out…)

For every person who receives your email, they all must do three things before they hit your sales page:

• They have to open your email
• They must at least start to read your body copy
• They need to click a link in your email

All of that has to happen BEFORE they see your sales page!

So, when breaking down the results you get from your email marketing campaign, take a step back and consider the metrics associated with those micro-actions!

How many people opened the email?

How many people clicked the link to the sales page?

Those are your defining metrics when it comes to email copy…

Here’s the thing, though…  The goal of your email isn’t to sell the product.  The goal is to get the click.  Let the sales page sell the product!

Now, let’s talk about what you can do to get the best results from your email, starting with the idea of ‘reframing.’

Preframing Correctly

Preframing is an NLP technique used by copywriters to get a prospect or user to take action.

You don’t need to get crazy into NLP or anything to understand how to use it, though!

Successfully pre-framing someone is about setting them up to take action on the next page after they click the link in your email.

I’m running a paid traffic campaign in the photography niche where we’re collecting email addresses. Directly after they sign up, they get an email from me with some email copy and a link to a sales page.

Rather than say, “Check out this photography course.  It’s got lots of training on picking the right camera, using Photoshop, and taking expert pictures…”

My email copy says, “Imagine using X technique to sharpen your client’s photos,” or “Y strategy has served as inspiration for a lot of the landscape photos that I’ve been taking…”

The ‘conditions’ are X technique Y strategy.

The ‘experience’ or ‘event’ is their education after purchasing the product!

Make sense?

Preframing is the most significant difference between marketers who make HUGE money and marketers who don’t.  You can use it everywhere, including:

• Email messages you send out in your autoresponder
• Landing pages that come before the actual product, like download pages, reviews, and advertorials
• Sales copy you write, either as video sales letters or long-form sales messages
• Webinars that you do with your audience, talking about the benefits of a product before the product is revealed.

Unfortunately, it’s not something that you get.  It takes practice.

Now that that’s out, let’s talk about your email copy!

Writing Solid Email Copy Without Being A Copywriter

Writing good, clickable email copy follows a specific formula that can be mastered if you start with a result in mind.

Your entire email (and the autoresponder series you’re writing to promote a product) needs to accomplish one thing…  To get a click to the sales page. You want as many people on your list as possible to click through; sometimes, that takes a few emails!

Step 1: Start With The End In Mind

What do you want your email list to do?

Do you want them to read a blog post?  Or click through to a sales page?  Or sign up for a brand new lead magnet?  Or maybe register for a free workshop that you have coming up.

You’ll rarely email your list without some specific action in mind…

When you send an email, you’re:

• Trying to build a relationship with them
• Wanting to re-engage with them
• Selling them something
• Getting them to sign up for something

Once you figure out what specific action you want your email list to take, it’s time to create a campaign around that action…

Step 2: Write a Strong Subject Line

The subject line is the first thing your prospect sees in their inbox and is the most significant factor in whether or not they’ll read your email.

There are LOTS of different types of subject lines, including:

• The "Ask A Question" subject line
• The "How To" subject line
• The "Scarcity" subject line
• The "Brand New" subject line
• The "Numbers" subject line
• The "Curiosity Gap" subject line
• The "Shock And Awe"subject line
• The "Named" subject line

(We’ll have more on subject lines soon; download the 100 Most Opened Subject Lines PDF here.)

You must appeal to the prospect and interest them to open the email.

The FTC says you must adequately describe what is in the email, although that’s pretty vague.  Something as simple as ‘New Stuff’ technically explains what’s in the email…

Elements of a great subject line include:

• Curiosity – Make them so curious that they have to open the email to find out the rest of the story.  (ie. Bad News)
• Contradiction – Contradict something customarily held to be true (i.e., SEO is dead!)
• Specificity – Specifics help make the subject line more accurate (i.e., THIS is 62% more options!)
• Personal Touch – Make them feel like the email is from a friend… not a business marketing to them.  (ie. Hey!)
• Instant Usability – Make them think there is something they can instantly use to get a desired result (i.e., PDF Download Inside!)

I tend to be along the ‘Instant Usability’ spectrum, but that’s just me.:0)

Did you think this was going to be complicated?  It isn’t!

Nothing beats good A/B testing. In most email marketing platforms, you can split test subject lines to nail down which ones get opened and which don’t.

The more people that open and read the email, the more clicks you’ll get.  The more clicks, the more income!

Step 3: The Email Body

Writing email copy is pretty easy, especially with a great subject line.

The most obvious thing is to talk more about the email, explaining it and fulfilling the promise of what will happen when someone opens the email.

The next thing you want them to do is to take action…

You want them to click something in your email.  That’s the whole reason for emailing them in the first place, right?!

You want your prospect to take action in almost every email, usually clicking on a link.

Keep in mind a person is reading this email.  Too often, when an email marketer knows that 70,000 prospects are reading their emails, they forget to write for one person.  They think they’ll get results if they blast out an image or a banner.

They don’t.

The key to email copy is to be relatable.  To tell stories.  To treat their email like it’s written to their best friend.  It shouldn’t be written differently than if it was an email to a good friend you haven’t talked to in six months.

It’s your preference if you write a long copy or want to write a short document. Short composition tends to get more clicks, but those clicks are less qualified.  Long copy tends to get fewer clicks, but the clicks are highly skilled (they read your whole email!).

Step 4: Getting The Clickthrough

Now for the link, you include in your email…

Your goal in writing an email is to get folks from your list back to your website for some reason.  Sometimes, it’s just to place a retargeting pixel or watch a video.  Other times, it’s because you’re selling something.

The link text you use in your email has a LOT to do with how many people click through…

Here are a few of the strategies we use in our emails occasionally.  We switch it up sometimes, depending on what looks better in the email copy…

Getting The Click

The subject line is the reason that somebody opened up your email.  It makes sense to use the exact text as your link.

For example, if your subject line is ‘7 Fat Burning Foods,’ use it as the link in your email, taking prospects to watch the sales video!

Include A Clickable Image

Putting an image in your email content is a great way to encourage a clickthrough AND helps your deliverability.

For someone to see the image, they have to enable images in some email platforms, which means they’ve taken another step in receiving your email…

That’s a good thing!

Here are some types of images that you can include:

• A graphical button that they can click
• A screenshot of the page that they’ll be going to after they click
• A banner that you plan on using for the page (think banner images like Facebook uses)
• A still image of the video that they’ll be watching

You can take a screenshot or some graphical element of the page you’re linking to to make this work!

The “Double Line Link Trick”

One of my favorites is the “Double Line Link.”

In your body copy, a double-line link is tough to ignore…  So, rather than use something like:

Click here >>

You use something like this:

Click here to download the 100 Most Opened
Subject Lines Report >>

The big block of blue is hard not to notice, so you’ll get a bump in clicks!

“List-Style Link Trick”

Another thing I like to do from time to time is put a series of links in a list, all linking to the same place.

Often, I’ll tie this to a ‘rule‘ that saves the link that someone clicked so I can use it later for a more specialized email copy.

For example, you can do something like this:

In the blog post, you’ll discover:

• How to write subject lines that get the open.
• Crafting email body copy that gets read and clicked!
• Effectively pre-framing your prospect into buying before they ever get to your sales page…

Then, every link links right to the same place!

Spell It Out

This option is the easiest…

Just spell out precisely what you want your prospect to do!  The most obvious example is:

Click here >>

Or…

Download this PDF >>

You don’t have to be fancy…  Just get the click!

… Some Additional Email Copywriting Tips

Here are some additional tips and tricks for writing email copy that’ll make it easier for you to finish…

These tips are all tried and true and have helped me immensely in getting more done in less time!

Write Narrow Email Copy

One little trick is that you never have a line more than 45 or 50 characters. Once the bar reaches 45 or 50 characters, you hold ‘shift’ and ‘enter’ and space the new line down.

It’s just a single space that keeps people reading down the screen, no different than why a newspaper has multiple columns. Scanning a newspaper is straightforward; your email should be the same.

Batch Your Writing

Another tip is to batch copy when writing autoresponders. It helps you consciously open and close loops, sometimes between three or four emails.

Basically, you start telling a story or raise an objection in the first email, then leave it open for a while.  You don’t answer that objection or finish that story until three or four emails later. This process opens a ‘hook’ in the reader’s brain, and they must close it by continuing your emails!

The important thing is that you’re writing all of them in one stream of consciousness, so you’re not getting up and moving around and constantly being interrupted. You write your emails in the same train of thought and keep a consistent flow in your dialogue from email to email.

This ensures that you are consistent in your speech patterns, how you talk, and the stories you’re telling because you’re doing it all in one sitting.

Include Bonding Emails

Another essential thing to realize is that not every email has to be about selling.

I like to do three or four bonding emails when somebody signs up for my list. The bonding sequences contain little promotional stuff, just a little bit, but establish a good common ground between the reader and me.

They’ve all been about bonding lately because we haven’t sold anything inside the marketing niche, but other niches are a different story.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Writing Email Marketing Copy That Gets Results appeared first on Done For You.

Where do they go after they opt-in though?

What do your prospects do immediately after they sign up on your list?

Well, my friends…  Immediately after your folks sign up on your list, you should be making them an offer.  And that offer is presented on the confirmation page.

Your new lead, the lead that you worked tirelessly to get, is never more engaged with you than they are immediately after downloading your lead magnet.

NEVER.

If you miss the opportunity to pitch them something, it’s going to be the last time that you’ll be seeing a lot of those folks.

Think about this.  Open rates for the first week after someone signs up for your list are typically 40% to 55% – give or take depending on the market or niche.  That means, roughly HALF of your new leads sign up for your lead magnet and never open any more emails from you.

So, if you’re paying for traffic, you can legitimately wipe 5 out of every 10 leads away…  You got their email address, but you won’t be getting anything else.

Some of them might unsubscribe.  Some might report you as spam. The rest will be disengaged and will end up unsubscribing from your list over time.  We’ve got an entire list of things that you should never do when you’re marketing through email…

The remaining half, the engaged, active part of your new list…  They’ll open your emails, click your links, and they’ll buy eventually; but that doesn’t do anything for the ad budget that you just spent to get them!

So today, what I want to talk about is making an offer on the Thank You Page, the Confirmation Page, of your list building campaign.  (NOTE: I call these ‘Thank You Funnels’ for future reference!)

Here’s how to do it:

Your confirmation page is the 2nd most important page on your site (following your landing page, of course).

Here, I’m going to show you how to make an offer on your confirmation page that moves a new prospect over into being a fully-fledged buyer pretty quickly…  That way, you can turn that new revenue back into ad spend so you can keep scaling your campaign.

And just so you know, this is preferably done with a video sales letter (VSL), but it can be accomplished in a text-based sales letter too.

Step 1: Thank Your Prospect On The Confirmation Page

The first thing you want to do is thank your new prospect for taking the time to download your lead magnet.

This is easy enough to do with a headline or the opening of the video being:

Thank you so much for downloading (insert Lead Magnet here).

You can even do it in a news bar across the top of the page.

Just make sure there is a confirmation on the page or in the video somewhere where you’re expressing your gratitude for this person opting into your email list.

Step 2: Confirm Arrival Times

Next, you want to tell your prospect what to expect by way of arrival…

Are they downloading the lead magnet from the page they’re on?  Are they going to receive it in their email?  What I generally do is send it as a link through email, and I tell them when to expect it:

Your download link will be in your inbox in 5 to 10 minutes!

Most autoresponders will send your first email instantly, but sometimes it’ll take a few minutes to get to your prospect.  A lot of that depends on network congestion, times of the day, etc.

Ideally, you want your prospect to watch your video or read your entire Confirmation Page before they go check their email though.  Telling them that it’ll be ready in a few minutes serves two purposes – it keeps them there for a few minutes and it gives your email platform a chance to send that first email.

Step 3: Position And Pivot

This step, Position And Pivot is the most important when it comes to your Confirmation Page working or not.

When you put yourself in your prospects shoes, they’ve just downloaded a report that they hope will help them solve a problem or do something better…  They haven’t seen it yet though.

So, it’s important to position the video that they’re watching as a way of achieving their desired result faster!

You can do this by using simple language like:

Now that you’ve downloaded the 100 Most-Opened Subject Lines Report, you’ve got a proven set of plug and play phrases that’ll get you better open rates in your emails…

When you watch this video until the end, you’ll also be able to access the email autoresponder sequences that’ll get your list buying your products and services!

Another way of doing this is by posing a question:

The first question I guess asked by people who download the Lines Report is how to write the body of the email copy…  What to put where…

And when you watch this video until the end, you’ll know what the best way of writing copy is…  In fact, by the time you finish this video, you’ll know all about a piece of software that’ll write your email autoresponders for you!

In this example, the pitch, would be Scriptly’s Autoresponder Engine, but we’re not there yet…

First, we need to deliver some content.

Step 4: Deliver Content & Value

Before we can make the pitch on the confirmation page, we have to deliver some content and value.  This is where your “Video Sales Letter” turns into a full on sales pitch.

The normal story arc in a sales pitch is this:

• Establish that there is a problem
• Introduce yourself (and how you were faced with said problem)
• Relate the problem to yourself in 'story form.'
• Describe your journey in solving the problem for yourself
• Introduce the product or service that contains the soluion (with full-on features and benefits)

Now, I realize that your product or service might not lend itself to this sort of a sales scenario.  If you’re selling software, you might want to put a demo video here.  If you’re selling a video course or a membership, it might be beneficial to dig right into the benefits of what you’re selling.

It’ll take some creativity and split-testing to pull this off, but it’ll be well worth your time.  We can take a look at doing it for you here too.

Step 5: Make The Pitch

Now that we’ve positioned our video and pivoted away from the lead magnet, it’s time to ask for the sale.

Ideally, pricing for this Confirmation Page offer is below $50, and serves as the first product that your prospects can buy from you.  If they go through the order process, they’ll they hit a few one-click upsells ranging from $50 to $300.

Depending on your market, products below $10 work very well for the first offer.  These markets include business, marketing, survival, dating and health.  This is also known as a “Tripwire.”

In some markets though, you want to be closer to the $50 range.  Examples for the higher tier pricing include investment information and photography.

In the photography market, your buyers are used to spending $1000 for a camera, $200 for a tripod, $40 for text book style education… So, the higher end pricing is justified.

In other markets where there is information everywhere, in every form (like business), you’ll need to stay below $10 for your front end sale.

At the end of the day, you want to turn your leads into revenue as quickly as possible, and this Thank You Funnel does that.  It turns your most engaged prospects into customers, and marches them through an upsell funnel without betraying them or shoving products down their throat.

That way, you can take your newly generated revenue and drive more traffic with it!

Inside Scriptly, there are autoresponder sequences that’ll help automate the backend of this process for you as well, with the Product Sales Sequence and the Ascension Sequence being the ones you’ll use :0)

The Product Sales Sequence is the set of emails that you send out following the download link…  And the Ascension Sequence are the emails that you queue up for anyone who buys your front end product!

If you’d like to take a look at getting this kind of sales funnel built for you, schedule a call with us and we’ll take a look at it!

The post Confirmation Pages: How To Transition From A Lead To A Sale appeared first on Done For You.

Figuring out how to write emails that convert can be a challenge.  It doesn't have to be, though.

You use different kinds of email sequences at different times and other points in your autoresponder sequence, like onboarding, re-engagement, product launch sequences, and so on...  The marketing issue, though, is writing emails that convert.

Regardless of the kind of email sequence you’re creating and its goal, you are essentially writing emails. And they ought to be well-written if you want them to serve their purpose.

How To Write Emails That Convert: Simple Formula

Let's go back to the basics and discuss the six rules of compelling email copy.

1. Use structure

No matter what type of copy you're writing, it needs some basic structure. You must stay on topic to topic.

Your email body needs to be structured logically to help readers understand and guide them through the action you want them to take.

For example, your email might present a story in a BAB-like way. BAB is an acronym that Derek Halpern of Social Triggers created to describe the Before-After-Bridge story-telling approach.

BAB means that, when using a story to convince your audience, you start from the before situation, move on to the after case, i.e., the transformation, and wrap up with the bridge, i.e., your product, which facilitates that kind of transformation.

You can learn more about the BAB approach in this video: https://socialtriggers.com/500000-from-one-blog-post/

2. Write in your voice

You may often get writer's block, but our best advice is not to overthink it; write emails like you would talk to a trusted partner or a friend. You don’t get writer’s block when you want to email a friend, do you? Why should it be different in your business?

If you have a natural voice like that, your emails will stand out from other marketing emails. You will most likely get a response or a click when your emails seem personal, not part of a blast.

(Image source)

We all receive a lot of marketing emails. But please, don’t play copycat!

It doesn't mean that what you see other marketers doing is the best practice for your own business. Could you think of the purpose of each email and try to be yourself?

Go to Swipe-worthy to see a swipe archive put together to inspire you.

3. Plan out your email sequence upfront

Email sequences are like a chain; each email is like a chain link.

Like chain links are tightly connected, the most high-converting email sequences are the ones that are congruent throughout the whole process.

Use curiosity to tease what’s coming, or refer to the lesson learned in your last email. You can build anticipation for a product launch too, too. Or have inactive customers re-engage with a proper set of follow-up messages.

So, remember that you need to outline your message sequence in advance. Start with the end goal and work your way backward.

Here's an example from CrazyEgg. They're using a simple Excel sheet to map new subscriber sequence:

(Image source)

You want to build a workflow to welcome new SaaS users. You know you’ll need 3 or 4 essential emails, right? Outline the basic structure and purpose of those four emails. After you're done, sit down and do the actual writing.

To give you a perfect example, here's a copy-and-paste "Flash sale email sequence template"  to give you a head start. Plug this 3-day, 4-email series into your next autoresponder campaign and boost sales fast!

4. Have a clear call to action

It might sound harsh, but it's human nature: You must tell your listeners what you want them to do! Could you ask, and you'll receive?

If you want to figure out how to write emails that convert, you must explicitly ask the reader to click your link or button. It would help if you showed your authority so that your audience achieves their goals and you achieve yours.

Take control of your list! Be precise on what you want your subscribers to do, and ask them to do it.

You might think of yourself as a benevolent dictator of your people. Always keep their best interests in mind, but be very open with what you need them to do and why it'll do good for them.

To make it work, you must have one clickable call to action in every email you send.

Why send an email to your list that doesn’t tell them to take action? You shouldn’t send content that educates people; leave it at that. Even when you aim to provide value, you want them to take the next step.

A call to action can be as simple as "reply to this message" or "download your PDF.

Think about everyday life. Communication needs to have a purpose. I think the drive needs to be precise. And every piece of communication takes you a step closer to the goal. Given that your audience has a limited attention span, pointless emails are not likely to be read. Communication is only bad when it's very unclear and aimless.

Here's an excellent list of email marketing campaign examples to help you put together effective calls to action.

5. Use one call to action per email

Generally speaking, if you give people too many options, they’ll frequently be indecisive and respond by doing nothing. So, our best tip is that your most effective campaigns are going to be the ones that have a single call to action.

The same principle applies to most types of copy. Take landing pages, for example. As we explained in a previous post, many calls to action will probably result in users leaving the page doing nothing.

Of course, give them the same link more than once. That’s usually a good idea.

Most marketers place the link three times in the body of the email: toward the top, halfway down, and then again at the bottom. But each time, it's the same link.

The best way, however, is to test your emails to find what resonates best with your audience. Because, for instance, a newsletter, e-zine, or content roundup might link back to several posts on your blog. An email presenting new arrivals at an online store will probably have more than one link. That’s all fine because these emails serve a different purpose. We would insist, though, that you don't use only that type of email to communicate with your list of subscribers.

What you should do instead, as explained above, is create sequences that show users their way through the buyer's journey.

Here's a comprehensive guide to crafting creative and effective email calls to action.

6. Write well-thought email subject lines

Why bother to write clickable email copy when people don't even open your emails? I think your priority should be to put together a good subject line that will get your subscribers to want to read more. That’s it.

How to do that? Different psychological triggers will give you high open rates. One of these is curiosity. Spark curiosity with your email subject line and see available rates rise.

Download this handy collection of 100 subject lines. Use it to discover which subject lines work best to formulate your strategy and get better results.

And remember, the only thing that matters is getting people to open your email. None of the words you crafted matter if they don't open it.

Writing Emails That Get Clicks

When you send a wrong email, you tell a potential customer that this is the best you can do.

Write a witty subject line. Craft a good story. Write in your voice. Use compelling copy to show them how your product can change their current (bad) condition. Make it easy for them to take action towards a win-win experience.

Follow these email writing tips and see your business grow exponentially.

The post Skyrocket Your Email Conversion Rates with These Proven Writing Tips! appeared first on Done For You.

If you struggle to build an email list with classic exit popups and optin forms, here’s a better way to do it. No matter if you’re just starting with list building or you already have a list of thousands, this post can help you get higher list growth rates.

What are content upgrades

So, a better way to build your list is using content upgrades on your blog. In fact, this method is one of the best ways to grow your email list.

Content upgrades are like lead magnets but far more targeted. A lead magnet is basically a juicy freebie that you offer readers as an incentive to sign up to your mailing list.

Content upgrades tweak the lead-magnet formula by offering post-specific incentives instead of one general PDF for your entire site.

Why use content upgrades for rapid list growth?

Content upgrades are more effective because they are topical. So, someone who reads a blog post through, especially when they have found the blog from the search engines, is interested in that topic. And they have a good chance of entering their email to get a PDF that is closely linked to the post topic. If you show them the added value and spark curiosity, the person will want access.

Brian Dean, famous blogger and SEO expert, saw a 785% increase in opt-in rates, when he started implementing content upgrades on his Backlinko blog posts.

Brian Harris of VideoFruit reports high conversion rates of 20-30%, after he added content upgrades to popular posts.

It sounds like this strategy is worth trying, right? But what would you use as a content upgrade?

Anything closely related to the topic can be a content upgrade and help you grow your email list faster than ever. A checklist, a cheatsheet, some advanced tips, additional resources or even the blog post as a PDF. Some people also add registration forms for evergreen webinars.

Here’s a list of ideas for content upgrades to get your creative juices flowing.

Because content upgrades are post-specific, you need to have the right tools to promote and deliver the PDF. A simple optin form with an autoresponder won’t do the trick. You need a tool that allows you to create different offers, place them on different blog pages, and deliver the different PDFs to people who sign up.

Before we dive into the best tools you can use to grow your list with the power of content upgrades, here’s a free guide to 12 lead-getting plugins that convert cold traffic.

So, these are the tools your can use to set up content upgrades on your blog.

1. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a complete list-building plugin from Thrive Themes. Thrive themes and plugins are built for WordPress websites.

This paid plugin can give your email list a boost in a whole lot of helpful ways. But since this post is about content upgrade tools, we’ll skip some of the more general features and focus on how Thrive Leads helps you deliver content upgrades.

First, you can create a variety of different optin forms to entice the readers of different topics.

You can place a call to action within the post content and at the bottom of the post. You can also use popups that are specific to that post. For your forms, you can use a template or create a new design from scratch using the new Thrive Architect builder.

Then, Thrive Leads will automatically deliver the content upgrade via your email service provider. Rest assured that the right content will reach the right inbox.

Here’s more about the process: Thrive Leads offers a large number of templates to help you build the right form fast.

Once you decide on a template, you can edit it with Thrive Architect, a WordPress page builder, the successor to Thrive Content Builder.

As soon as you finish up the form setup, Thrive Leads makes it simple to display the content upgrade form on the page you choose.

The plugin also offers a detailed targeting feature, with which you can target your content upgrades to blog categories or posts. Additionally, with smart links you are able to display a different call to action to people who are already on your list.

What about a way to manage your digital assets that will serve as content upgrades, and actually send them to your readers?

That’s what Thrive Leads Asset Delivery can do for you; It lets you use a third-party email marketing service to send the content upgrade to your new subscriber. The files are stored in your WordPress media library.

2. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a cloud-based tool – it’s not a WordPress plugin like Thrive Leads.  Although it’s a standalone app, OptinMonster has a WordPress plugin that makes it easy for you to enable the list- building features on your site.

To use OptinMonster’s you need a monthly subscription. The web app lets you add content upgrades to existing or new forms that you create in various ways.

The downloadable PDF can be hosted anywhere you want, and the visitors will get a direct download link. Once you have the content upgrade hosted somewhere, e.g. Google Drive or your site’s media library, you can set up the forms on your blog using OptinMonster. There you also choose what happens after the user opts in.

You might want to show a subscription success message that gives the person a download link. Also, you can redirect the new subscriber to a page where they can download the content upgrade. Finally, you can send the content upgrade via email. In that case, you need to set up email delivery in your email marketing software.

Other helpful features that you get access to with OptinMonster include:

• Drag and drop form builder
• 2-step optin forms
• Detailed page-level targeting so you can laser target your content upgrades to specific posts
• Exit intent targeting, to show forms to users just before they abandon your site.

3. Sumo

Sumo is another way that marketers and bloggers can use to boost their email list building.

Sumo is a set of freemium tools for WordPress that focuses on list growth. Within the Sumo suite, there is the List Builder tool, the solution you need to create content upgrades for your blog. Sumo gives you three different options when it comes to delivering content upgrades:

• Click Actions – Trigger a PDF request when a user clicks a download button. For example, you could have users enter their email and then click “Download” to subscribe and receive the content upgrade
• Automatic Email Responder – Automatically send the content upgrade PDF as part of an autoresponder sequence
• Subscribe Success Redirect – Redirect your new subscriber to a download page that lets them instantly get their content upgrade

All three ways have the same end result – your subscriber gets the PDF they requested. Content upgrades don’t need to be in a PDF format; Sumo lets you upload any type of file to deliver as a content upgrade, as long as it doesn’t exceeds 100 MB.

With Sumo List Builder, you can also take advantage different features that will help you build an email list fast. For instance, you can employ multiple form types, such as popups, full-screen welcome mats, in-content forms, notification bars, and more.

You can also use exit intent targeting, which means, as mentioned before, that the form will be triggered by the user’s intention to leave your site.

All in all, if you’re on a small budget, Sumo gives you a flexible tool for content upgrades which you can start using at no cost. If you want to remove the Sumo branding you will have to invest in a premium plan.

Read Sumo’s guide to creating content upgrades in 10 minutes and increasing your optin rates by up to 785%.

Which content upgrade and list building tool is right for you?

Well, it depends on your need and budget.

Thrive Leads will serve you best, if you can afford it (one-time payment for one year) and as long as you want to work entirely inside WordPress. With Thrive Leads you get built-in list growth tools and a way to deliver your content upgrades, all from within your WordPress dashboard.

On the other hand, if you prefer the flexibility of working in the cloud and possibly manage multiple sites, then OptinMonster might be the best fit for you. For a low monthly subscription, you can get access to OptinMonster’s content upgrade features – just remember that it won’t host your PDFs for you.

And finally, if you looking to work with a free option, which will be branded, Sumo is very popular and a reliable choice for rapid list growth. If you want to remove the Sumo branding you must opt for one of the paid plans – and their plans are more pricey, compared to OptinMonster.

The post 3 Content Upgrade Tools To Build Your List Faster Than Ever appeared first on Done For You.

Aggressive marketing — what with multiple pop-ups on your website and all those widgets sliding in and out — is annoying.

We get it. It’s alright not to hustle too much. It’s ok to slow down a bit. In fact, why even bother with so many pop-ups and opt-in boxes showing up when you can do with less?

Let’s explore a few smart and less annoying ways to build your email list instead:

Follow the “SDSB (Slow Down & Step Back)” Strategy

No one likes being hustled, pushed around, and cornered. When you push too hard (applies to most things), you’d lose your visitors. Finding the right balance between showing up enough to make things happen and stepping back enough to let visitors get more of you is an art.

Most marketers and business owners don’t get it. You, however, can do better with what we call as the Slow Down & Step Back strategy.

First, embrace simplicity and minimalism. Instead of “doing more”, do less. Instead of filling every corner of your website, blog — and other pages with opt-in forms –remove most of them.

Simplicity and minimalism can help you go a long way but minimalism is hard to achieve. To get minimalistic, you’d have to shed your own preconceived notions of what you normally think would work.

One opt-in form instead of 4. Ask only once per visit per user instead of showing up every time.

Less For More

Instead of having a pop-up show each time someone arrives or scrolls down 70% of the page, or after a time delay, choose to show pop-ups only once with exit-intent.

Instead of embedding lead generation opt-in boxes two to three times within a single post, use only one opt-in box at the end of the post.

Get rid of the sidebar completely and use a large welcome mat or a full-screen pop-up that entices your visitors to part with their email address for something valuable.

Or you could do an a/b test and find the right kind of strategy for your pop-ups to surface with one of the many list building plugins and tools available.

Give More & Ask For Little

Marketers and business owners need leads. That’s understandable, except that your customers aren’t under any sort of obligation or under pressure to sign up just because you showed up.

The way to do business sustainably, over long-term, and with relatively less friction is to always give more than you ask for.

You need a sale. You need your customers to buy once and then buy from you again and again. You have a need to meet sales targets and pull in revenues.

Your customers want to solve a problem they have; they hope you can do it for them with your products and services.

Give more than your competition can. Have your potential subscribers sign up for free trials if it’s possible, give them access to free video or email courses,

Use Content Upgrades

It’s annoying when you visit a website and a pop-up is on your face every 5 minutes. However, if you take a passive approach and just let visitors click a link to download something, it’s welcome.

Content upgrades are pieces of informational material packaged as PDF documents, for instance, provided at the end of a regular blog post in case your readers want to learn more.

Content Upgrades are a fantastic way to grow your leads.

For you, as a business, content upgrades are also easy to create. Using Curately, for instance, you can create or curate content quickly and package your content in any format. Give it away as a content upgrade.

If you are looking for some great content upgrades examples, Mary Fernandez of OptinMonster has a huge list of 30 Content Upgrade Ideas you can get inspiration from. Also, be sure to bookmark this sumo-sized list of 28 ideas for content upgrades by David Khim. 

With the right kind of autoresponder setup, you can have a perfectly working marketing automation and lead generation machine working 24 x 7.

Use Interactive Elements

Today, there’s an increased risk of lead capture form blindness and a complete lack of personalization. If you feel like your lead generation efforts are paying off as much as they should, you should try using Interactive marketing elements such as bots, quizzes, and more for lead generation.

To start with, you could pour some life into traditional marketing elements such as your landing pages, marketing pages, and others. For instance, you could create video sales letters instead of a typical, long-form sales letter.

But there’s more. Using Quizzes, you can completely change the way you generate leads. GothRider — an e-commerce site that sells Jewelry — generated about 75,813 leads just by using quizzes.

Dan Scalco of Inc writes that well-created marketing quizzes can generate 50% or higher opt-in rates and an average marketing quiz is shared around 1900 times on social media.

Further, the open rates are 150% higher for the follow-up emails after prospects leave their email addresses for quizzes than normal open rates for emails.

Profit From Webinars

There’s something to be said about putting your face and voice out there in the front, for the whole world to see. This also precisely the reason why social platforms like Instagram grew in popularity and how many Youtubers make a killing.

But how do you bring the power of authenticity, being true to yourself, and go about actually showing your face while letting the world hear your voice?

The answer: Webinars

Webinars are awesome, personalized, and an engaging way to generate leads. It’s reported that the average viewing time for Webinars is a staggering 56 minutes. How is that for some sticky engagement?

Not only do you generate leads but you’d also get the opportunity to influence your audiences by educating, teaching, solving problems, and adding some real value that makes a difference for your webinar attendees.

Doing webinars doesn’t even have to make you feel like you have to get started from scratch. Our webinar creation wizard helps you get started with Webinars in no time.

How subtle or aggressive are you with your email marketing? Tell us all about it.

The post Email List Building: Smart & Less Annoying Ways to Build Your Audience appeared first on Done For You.

No other marketing channel comes close. Nothing can beat email.

But email marketing only works as well as you should when you do it right. It certainly won’t work if you thought that it was “like any other medium”.

Emails are personal. Subscribers’ email inboxes are like their homes — not everyone is invited.

When you are invited, however, it helps if you make that invite work for you. Here are a few things that you should never ever do.

Don’t Send Worthless Emails

No one subscribes to email pitches and sales pitches.

Your subscribers signed up because they want to hear from you — news about your business, new products, new updates for existing products, tips, insights, and information that they normally won’t get even if they looked.

It’s alright to send in emails with an occasional pitch or so but don’t overdo it. If every email you send out is a pitch for your subscribers to buy, no one will end up buying. See some sales coming in?

It’s “luck” and that’s not a sustainable marketing strategy.

You wouldn’t send a good friend sales pitches with your gmail account all day long, would you? Why do it from your email marketing software?

Treat your subscribers as friends.

Don’t send emails when you are not welcome

In 2018, this might be rather too obvious to even write about, when it comes to email marketing. But we will since we happen to know just how many businesses still think that it’s their right to send emails to people without their consent.

Some countries have strict laws about businesses flouting laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act. While other countries don’t, sending blast emails to purchased lists doesn’t even make any sense.

With email marketing, you build and nurture captured audiences — the kind of people who know, trust, and like you.

These are the people who are likely to buy from you sooner or later. You don’t want to send emails to the entire world; you’d only have to send emails to people who’ve shown interest in what you have to offer.

So, why break the rules or upset people by spamming their inboxes?

Stop mocking your visitors

Check out the example from The Cosmopolitan Magazine. Giving away the secret list of 17 life-changing hacks is cool and they know what they are doing with their Call to action button.

They could have just let the exit option be something simple like “No thanks” or “I am not interested”.

Instead, they’d mock you.

They’d state something like “No thanks, I am hot enough as it is” — and that’s not meant to be a compliment.

Pop-ups help you build email lists fast. Pop-ups are one those things that are instrumental to help generate leads for your business.

Despite the hatred for pop-ups, you know that they are still effective. They just. You can use them to generate leads for your business. But there are good ways to use pop-ups and then there are bad ways.

When you do pop-ups right, you can win. Here’s an ecommerce company that generated 1.1 million dollars in revenue, all thanks to pop-ups.

Pop-ups work anyway, if you do it right.

Whatever you do, just stop mocking people and making them feel lazy, stupid, or something that they are not.
If and when you are ready to do your list building, check out our massive list of list building plugins that you could put to use right now to generate leads, build your email marketing lists, and to grow your business

Don’t Use Deceptive Subject lines

Chad White of Litmus App points out above just how many email subscribers (over 1361 American adults, aged 18+) felt cheated, tricked, or deceived into opening an email.

Deceptive subject lines will boost your open rates but will kill your business eventually.

When you get a subscriber’s permission to send emails, don’t take it for granted. Don’t even assume that it’s alright to send them whatever you want.

They gave you permission to email. Honor it.
They trusted you. Keep that trust.
They love you. Love them back.

They want to hear from you because they think you know something they don’t. You don’t have to be deceptive, misleading, quirky, and clever about “letting them know”.

Don’t Hide Unsubscribe Buttons Or Links

Your relationship with your subscribers is just like it is with any two humans — you can’t force people against their will. Even if you did, you won’t get what you really want from that relationship.

While you are doing everything you can to opt-in, give them an option to opt-out too. Cleaning up your email lists, purging inactive subscribers, and making sure only those who are interested stay on your list also makes sense for your business.

Apart from keeping email list hygiene, you’d not want to spend more money to nurture leads who are disinterested, fallen out of favor, and those who don’t want to hear from you anymore. It costs a lot of money to maintain databases, to send emails, to craft well-written emails, and to do digital marketing in general.

Companies like Hubspot and many others actively weed out inactive subscribers and they even have dedicated campaigns to clean their lists.

We think you should do it too.

To learn how to get your email marketing done for you, click here!

The post Email Marketing: Don’t Do This If You Want To Succeed appeared first on Done For You.

What comes as a big surprise or rather shock is the fact that more than half of the emails you send to customers go unread. What this means is that almost half of your efforts invested in email marketing go waste. If a 50% open rate can bring such great ROIs just imagine the results you would obtain if somehow you could get the open rate to go a bit higher.

But, how can you do it? Well, in this post we are going talk about a few simple ways that can help you achieve the same. So, let us take a look at what those ways are –

Keep them hooked up from the word go

‘December Newsletter’, ‘January Updates’ etc., such generic subject lines are not going to cut it. You need to put time and effort in crafting a compelling headline that can keep the customers hooked up from the word go. The best way to do it – be direct with the audience. Here are some simple tricks you can use to make the headline more appealing –

• Ask a question
• Use the teaser tactic
• Demonstrate your points

Make it personal

Once you have a subject line in mind, in comes the most important part – the content of the email. A big mistake marketers do while crafting emails is to think that all recipients are the same. The harsh reality – no they are not! A personal email always makes a lasting impression. Therefore, when sending marketing emails try to focus on keeping them personal.

Write a compelling copy

The third most important step you need to take in order to make your email marketing campaign a hit is to create beautifully written content. Informative, yet engaging. Easy to read, yet beautiful. Put in your best efforts to create a masterpiece every time you have to send an email. Remember, sending an email just for the heck of it is never going to bring results. You have to make sure that every word being put in the email fits in place, so that it portraits exactly the message you are trying to send.

Figure out the right time to send your email

The time at which you send an email plays a massive role in deciding the success or failure of an email marketing campaign. You can take help of testing to figure out which is the best time to send the email. Experiment by sending emails to your list at different times of the day, and see which campaign brings the best open rates. And, you can keep that

Test it multiple times

Before you hit the send button and the email is out to decide the fate of your campaign, don’t forget to test it rigorously. You don’t want the final email to have a wrong link attached somewhere, or a broken link or perhaps the signup button that you added at the end does not work in a particular browser. These are some of the common mistakes that even the most experienced marketers continue to make. You don’t want this to happen, if you want to put a good impression.

Stay away from spam filters

Millions of emails are flagged as spam daily. You would not want your email to be part of this list – would you? A great to ensure that is to make it a point that the email does not contain words that are typically linked to spam. Some of the most common choices include – ‘free money’, ‘big bucks, and ‘no credit check’ to name a few.

Keep updating your email list

Another simple trick that works quite well to improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns to update your email list from time to time. remove inactive subscribers, correct the misspelled names and similar other things to make sure that bounce rate of the campaign is minimized.

And, of course, to add more people to your email list you can use one of these Email List Building Plugins…

Make it mobile friendly

Gone are the days when computers and laptops were the only devices for which you had to test your email campaigns. Considering the rapid rise in smartphones, it has become imperative to have an email campaign that is mobile friendly as well. In fact, statistics show that more than half of the emails are read on mobile. So making your email mobile friendly becomes utmost important.

Make it actionable

The best performing email campaigns are the ones that prompt the users to take some action. So, you need to end up the email prompting the users to take an action. It could be anything – asking them to sign up or buying your product / service or whatever you want them to do via the email.

Don’t forget – you are dealing with humans

Keeping the voice and tone of the email consistent and human is one of the most important things for an email campaign. After all you are not dealing with machines here. So, try to incorporate a touch of emotional connect and trigger words so that people get emotionally enticed by the email.

Send as a person not as a company

Last, but not the least, thing that you need to remember is the people feel more connected when they know they are interacting with a human. Therefore, rather than keeping your company name as ‘From’, fix a persona. You can use either an alias name or someone from a team members name.

Keep it simple – no non-sense

On a parting note, remember that in today’s busy schedule no one has the time to go through emails that are too long that they seem to never end. Keeping your email short, concise and to-the-point, therefore becomes imperative. Stick to it – and the results will start to follow in subsequent campaigns!

For more tips…

For more tips on improving your open rate and email marketing effectiveness, make sure to download a copy of the Email Marketing Handbook, here…  It’s become one of the go-to resources for digital marketers around the globe!

The post 12 Ways To Increase Your Open Rates In Email Marketing appeared first on Done For You.

1. You have a lot of inner pages ranking on Google for long-tail keywords
2. You run paid ads to drive traffic to specific landing pages.

Either way, ranked pages or landing pages will be the most popular ones compared to your homepage.

A landing page is a standalone page designed for one specific objective. To attract interest to an offer. You should consider such a page as your online storefront. This means that the first impression is so important that it will determine whether the visitor will leave or stay and convert into a lead.

In reality, most landing pages are not optimized for conversions. They’re “pretty,” but they don’t work that well…  That’s why we built Scriptly’s Page Builder.  Conversion rate optimization (CRO) should be your top concern, after you’ve finished building a page.

Now, if you’re not satisfied with the number of leads you are converting you might be victim of one or more of the following “CRO crimes.” Here are the top 7 reasons why your landing page does not convert well.

Let’s take a look at them.

1) Content clutter

Business owners are usually so excited about their business or product that want to include everything on one page. Well, that’s a major mistake.

You need to keep your focus on your visitor, their needs, and their situation.

Avoid using too much text because not only does it require a lot of time to read but it also distracts the visitor from the action you want them to take.

For optimal results, you’ll want to remove irrelevant elements, like navigation and additional offers. For each element on your page, think: does this add to the result I want to achieve?” If not, remove that element without second thoughts. Keep your visitor’s focus on the offer at hand.

Your landing page should have one simple purpose: Get someone excited enough about your offer so that they’re willing to hand over their information.
If you’re wondering what exactly you should include on a page and what’s the best layout to place elements, Scriptly’s page builder will make building landing pages a piece of cake. With its pre-built templates and drag-and-drop functionality, you can create landing pages layouts in two seconds flat.

2) There’s no congruence between the ad and the landing page

When visitors read the ad copy and click, they immediately establish some expectations of what they would like to see on the page that follows the click. If your landing page headline is NOT a continuation of the ad, the user experience is disrupted and the visitor is more likely to abandon the page.

The more consistent an ad is with your headline the less likely you are to shoot yourself in the foot! The only way you can gain your customers’ attention is to be relevant. See the landing page as the continuation of the visitors’ journey to becoming a business lead.

Let’s see an example:

The ad intends to attract people looking for bluetooth earbuds. If you look at the two landing page screenshots, only the first one is optimized to match the customers’ expectations, thus have the potential to convert well. The second one has a product title that will most probably be confusing to the potential buyer.

Take the next step an learn how to turn cold traffic into leads and buyers with the Proven Lead Generation Template which an editable Photoshop Ad Template. It’s free to download here. A special bonus is also included. When you get access, you’ll also receive a video presentation walking you through the entire system!

3) Headline

The headline is the most important part of your landing page. It is the first piece of text that will attract your visitors’ attention. If you must do one thing right, that is your headline.

Psychologists have known all along that first impressions count. Headlines and a good sales message are no exceptions.

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” ~ David Ogilvy

Put simply, a headline is the most important part of a sales message. It’s so important that newspaper outlets often have a different person, other than the writer, construct the headlines.

A frequently used headline formula that is proven to be effective in converting cold traffic to lead is like this:

The Only [Product or Freebie Name] Made Exclusively to [Highly Desirable Outcome or Benefit] [Short Time Frame]

E.g. The Only SEO Guide Made Exclusively To Increase Your Sales In 30 Days Or Less

Try it out on your pages to see the results it can bring to your business.

4) Unclear offer and benefit

Here’s what you need to keep in mind: A landing page that doesn’t clearly communicate its purpose is a poor-performing landing page.

All of the following are crucial to conversions: Visual elements, like images or videos, headline, body copy and the order in which you place the elements—each of these must support one another to tell a persuasive story about your offer.

Within less than four seconds, a first-time visitor should be able to understand what this page is about and why they would care.

Converting cold traffic to leads or prospects requires a clear message on your page that will entice the reader to opt in. You should always speak the language of the customers to address their most important issues and how your offer will change their current experience.

Of course, we can assume that different page copy works for different goals. However, there are some fundamental guidelines that you must follow on your landing pages:

Be specific – Focus on communicating your message
Be clear – Write exactly what you mean
Be brief – Remove unneeded words
Focus on the one thing that your prospects desire (that you provide)
Match the expectations of the visitors

5) You get too greedy on your landing page forms

Lead capture forms are the page element that is most likely to create the most friction on your landers. This is simply because no one is thrilled about giving up their contact information on the internet, particularly if it’s to somebody they don’t know yet.

Now, you can be your own worst enemy if you also put up a long optin form. A lot of business owners commit the mistake to ask all the information they want in one single form, which of course won’t work.

Your optin form length should be proportional to the value of the offer that you’re presenting to your visitors. So, if you’re giving away a short pdf report, asking just an email address or a first name and email address would do.

After you capture the lead, you can use additional tactics, like email marketing, to get the person’s full name, telephone number, country, gender or whatever makes sense to your business strategy.

In conclusion, it’s when you get too greedy that you misjudge, so don’t go asking people too much while you are offering too little.

6) Many calls to actions

One landing page should serve one purpose. Period.

That means one goal for you, and one goal for the people that land on your page. Most frequently your goal will be to convert them into leads (get their email), and their goal will be to solve their problem (grab your offer).

Between your goal and theirs, there is a lead magnet, i.e. some kind of a freebie. The only call to action (CTA) you need is the one that will make people give their email to download the freebie.

When designing a landing page you want to avoid giving people a lot of options. If your goal is to get their email address by giving them a free report as an ethical bribe, then you must just ask for their email.

Ask visitors to do a lot of things, and what happens instead is that users leave doing nothing.

7) CTA is in the wrong place

Another frequent problem that lowers conversion rates is the CTA button placement.

Your CTA, e.g. the button that writes “Download the ebook”, shouldn’t be hidden somewhere at the bottom of the page. It should be placed right there where the users can see it.

You might have heard marketers say “Place the CTA above the fold.” “Above the fold” is a way to describe the part of the page that you see without having to scroll down. While most people do scroll below the fold, it makes sense that the first thing they see will catch their attention.

Additionally, your CTA button should be just below the optin form–or right next to it if it’s a horizontal form.

You might be wondering how will that work on a mobile device where the screen size is much smaller. In that case, you should also try to place the headline, form, and CTA within the visible area of the screen.

Here’s a good example that Neil Patel presented on his blog:

And another example from Jeff Bullas’s site:

In both cases, all the important elements of the landing page are in the visible part of the screen.

Top reasons why your landing page does not convert

So, those were the top ways you can undermine your landing page conversion rates. Increasing conversions is both an art and a science—and you are in control of both.  Colors, typefaces, layout, copy all of them play a role. The science part comes when you acquire the right mindset and put systems in place to run tests.

You can, of course, jump into Scriptly’s Page Builder for free and start working with pages that you already know convert!

Even if you follow the best practices and take care of all of the CRO issues that were addressed in this article, it is when you actually run a campaign that you will see whether your landing page converts as expected. No matter what the results are, using variations of the page will help you test out each element and optimize for even higher conversion rates.

The post 7 Reasons Why Your Landing Page Does Not Convert appeared first on Done For You.

Your industry doesn’t matter nearly as much as your online presence does…

What that means is, whether you’re a chiropractor, a contractor, an accountant or a landscaper, there are certain things that you MUST have in place in order to capture clients and customers online, and drive them into your business.

With that said, this checklist includes levels, or steps, of engagement.

The first level is made up of things that you MUST have in place if you want to build out a successful, thriving digital presence that will bolster your revenue and get you clients online.

Those are your foundational elements.  Your prerequisites.

The second and third steps are just that, secondary and tertiary action items.

They represent varying levels of customer acquisition and engagement, and ONLY work when you have your foundation in place…

With that, let’s get started!

Creating Your Digital Presence

There are a few things that you absolutely need in order to capture customers online…  And a lot of other stuff that you don’t.

What you will find here are the absolute essentials, after years of working with both local and digital businesses online.  You can add to the list below but, at bare minimum, you need to have these few things set up.

An Updated Website:

Most likely, you have a website of some sort already.  Maybe you paid your niece of nephew a few hundred bucks or went all out and got a custom website from a local web designer.

The fact of the matter, you need something online.  You need to be able to point people in a direction and say, “Here’s what we do.”

At the bare minimum, your website must be appealing, and contain the following information:

• Home page - the page that frames your business, your target marketing and succinctly describes what you do and who you do it for.
• Lead Generation page - somewhere that people can fill out a form and get more information about you.
• Contact page - including your phone and address
• About page - Who you are. What you do. Why you do it…
• Services and/or Products page - What do you sell?  What are some of the features and benefits of it?  How can someone buy online?

Of those 5 pages, the most important is the lead generation page.

The lead generation page is where people can sign up to learn more about you, get coupons and discount codes, whatever…  They’re opting in for your email list and requesting further engagement and marketing from you.  Getting someone signed up to your email list is as good as money in the bank if you’re marketing to them correctly.

Once your landing page is set up, you can employ what’s known as an email autoresponder so the whole thing just works on it’s own.

If you’re wondering how to get these pages set up in your business, make sure to watch this video on the Scriptly Page Builder.  With that software, you can create your landing pages without touching a line of code or hiring an expensive developer to redo your entire website.

Click here to learn more >>

Now, you are probably asking yourself, “Why would people enter their email for my business?  I run an ice cream shop!”

And my answer to you is this: “It’s all about staying in touch.”

You see, you want to be top of mind for your customers before their first purchase, during their first transaction, and after their first transaction.

You want them coming back!

And that leads me to the second thing you need to have in place…

Email Marketing List:

The biggest thing that business owners miss is the importance of having an email marketing list.

With an email list, you achieve two things:

• You have a list of customers that you can mail to whenever you’re doing anything new and exciting, including events, having a sale, or running a promotion.
• You can communicate to people who haven’t yet done business with you, and are still interested in your products or services.

That means, you can reach out whenever you want and get in touch with them!

Talk about a relief right?  Not having to worry about your company not doing enough business to keep the doors open!

We’re just getting ready to open up our email marketing tool, Convertly, to the public.  From the small client group that we’ve been working with, the results have been incredible!

Not only is it easy to use and intuitive, but you can automate your marketing like never before with a few clicks of your mouse!

Click here to learn more about Convertly >>

Facebook Page:

The third part of the foundational treatment your local business needs is a solid Facebook Page.

1 in 8 people online have a Facebook account. 25% of those people log in at least daily.  That means that your customers are there, in Facebook, looking for you!

It doesn’t matter whether you have a restaurant, a landscaping business, or a chiropractic office…  You’re prospects are online.

The thing about having a successful Facebook Page is that you need to post on it frequently, and not just about your business.

• Comment on trending topics in your profession
• Post pictures of work you’ve done or projects that you’ve completed
• Include testimonials of buyers and clients
• Post the new, extraordinary items you’ve gotten in your inventory
• Post pictures that have to do with the niche your business is in
• Link to news stories about things that are happening in your space

A good rule of thumb is that for every direct, promotional ‘thing’ you post, have 4 ‘non-promotional’ posts go up as well.

So, roughly 20% of the time can be about you.  The other 80% of the time, make it about your prospects and clients.

Getting Customers & Clients

Now that you’ve got you prerequisites dialed in, it’s time to look at your client or customer acquisition process.

For this, we’re going to need to start getting traffic.

As a local business, there are a few options that, once you set them up, will start bringing you local customers and patrons, ready and willing to buy from you!

That’s the benefit of being local, as opposed to entirely digital.  A website is easily lost in the noise and clutter of the Internet.

A local business – not so much.

Here are your action steps for engaging with local customers:

Google Places

Google Places or Google’s Business Pages are brilliant for local businesses because they tie in 100% to local searches.

Meaning, when someone types in ‘mexican restaurant san diego,’ what pops up is targeted listings of all the Mexican places in San Diego!

Plus, each of those restaurants can have reviews attached to them, making your customers and prospects increasingly well informed.

Because Google owns the Android mobile operating system, they’ve made it a priority to focus a LOT of time and effort on local businesses and delivering the best mobile experience to its users as possible.

The same goes for every other local, bricks and mortar type of business around.

Do a Google search for your company, in your area.  See what comes up?!

Are the reviews good.  Are they bad?

The first step is setting up your ‘Google My Business’ listing here:

Click here to set up your Google Business Listing

Local SEO

The next thing to take a look at is local SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is how well your business is placed in Google.  The BEST place for it to be, obviously, is on the first page of Google.

The MORE times you can get on the first page, the better.

If you can rank their organically, that’s awesome!

If you’re Google My Business listing goes there, that’s awesome!

The more times you can get there, the better…

Here’s a screenshot of Google’s first page, with an explanation of what each of the sections are…

1. This is the search phrase that your customers are looking for
2. Here, you’ll find how many competing web pages are out there for your search phrase (AKA competitors online)
3. Paid ads, placed through Google Adwords, for the keyword phrase typed into the search box
4. Organic listings in Google.  These pages are ranked so well that they DON’T pay to be there…  This is the results of good Local SEO
5. Google My Business listings.  This is the area that you will occupy once you get a Google My Business listing.
6. The local map, with pins in it, representing all of the establishments like yours in the local area.
7. Paid ads, placed through Google Adwords.

That’s the anatomy of the first page of Google.

The more listings you can get on that page, the more traffic you’ll get, the more clients and customers you’ll receive and the better off you’ll be.

Facebook Ads

The last thing you’re going to need to do to ensure your digital client-getting success is to start getting familiar with the Facebook Advertising platform.

Now, this short article isn’t long enough to get into a full blown tutorial (we’ll save that for a webinar a little later!), but there are something you should be aware of.

First, you can send traffic anywhere you want…  Your Facebook Page.  A page on your website.  A landing page or a booking form.  Where ever.

All you have to do is put your website in here:

From there, you can write up your ad:

Thirdly, you can target anyone you want (and this is where the TRUE power of Facebook lies.

You see, Facebook has been collecting data on it’s members for years, and they’ve gone out and partnered with some of the largest data collection companies in the world…

Which means, you get unparalleled access to the likes, interests, behaviors and demographics of your target market.

Let’s take a look real quick at the ad placement screen, so I can point out a few things.

Let’s run these down one by one:

1. Custom Audiences: This is where you use data that you already have to target your ads, such as phone numbers or email addresses.  You can also use this field to do Facebook retargeting.
2. Locations are where you drill down into the country, state or city you want.  This means that if you serve a hyper-local market, you can just advertise directly to those people.
3. Age/Gender/Language: This field is pretty self explanatory.  You should know exactly who you’re targeting in this category!
4. The More Demographics tab is all about drilling down traditional demographics.  Age.  Income.  Kids.  House size.  Job.  All the things you would normally expect to be able to target.
5. Interests:  This is where you target people based on what they like, such as magazines, television shows, industry publications, and associations.
6. Behaviors: In this field, you’re going to include stuff they do or are doing, such as shopping for a new car, buying stuff online, playing mobile games…  Stuff like that.

You see, you can target as narrow or as wide as you like!

Make sure to keep you ad budget small at first, and then scale.

Secondary Action Items

Now, let’s get real.  You probably feel like you’re doing a LOT online, and not getting any results.

Most likely, what you’re doing is going to fall into this ‘secondary action items’ category.  You see, this stuff is usually pretty time consuming, and never really yields the client and customer-type results that you’re looking for.

These items include:

• Newspaper advertising
• Telephone book advertising
• Posting in local forums or trying to get local news write-ups
• Any text message marketing (otherwise known as SMS)
• Just posting Facebook status updates on your Page
• Posting Youtube videos
• Spending a bunch of time in LinkedIn (or doing LinkedIn ads which are expensive!)
• Going to networking groups or Chamber of Commerce events

The bottom line is, you need to be actively building your business online by concentrating on the few, high-yield activities.

I’d love to help you figure out how to market your business more effectively online. To set up a free Action Plan call with me, click here. We’ll jump on and chat about your business and how to get a lot more clients and customers converted for you!

Click here to schedule your Action Plan Call!

The post The Simple Framework For Advertising Your Local Business Online appeared first on Done For You.

Creating and selling digital products can be challenging, but not if you've got the proper digital product sales funnel!

This post will serve as your roadmap through our Done With You Accelerator!

You don't have an email list to mail to and get a quick hit in revenue…  You don't have affiliates you can call to mail your offer out…  Nor do you usually have any data that will help you determine that your thing will sell.

If you've been in your space for a while or creating a product because you found a solution to a problem you faced, you've got a much better chance of knowing it's viable, but you still have to get the sales funnel structure right.

I'll walk you through the basics of setting up and selling digital products in this mini-tutorial. You might already be halfway down this list, and that's awesome…  Good for you!

After working with hundreds of clients and launching hundreds of offers into the marketplace, this is our process for getting it done…

Step 1: The Product

The first step to selling anything online is to figure out what you should be selling. Sometimes, that's gut instinct. Sometimes, you see a need in the market that you know needs to be filled. Other times, you see a way to put your unique spin on something to make it more effective or solve a related challenge.

You need to ask yourself, "How can I best help my customers solve a problem in their lives…" Is that through a digital product, a service-related offer, or a consulting experience?

The other question you need to ask yourself is, "How do I want my business

There are plenty of things you can sell and various formats you can package them in.

You can put together the following:

• eBooks delivered as a PDF or through a Kindle/iBooks
• Video Courses fulfilled on your website or through a Learning Management System (LMS)
• Audio Courses fulfilled on your website or through an LMS
• Digital newsletter delivered regularly through email
• Membership is where members receive access to any of the formats mentioned above

Step 2: The Offer

And you'll need to create the product, too :0)

Unfortunately, most people new to building a business online think that once their product is complete, they're all done…  When really, they're just getting started. The next step is selling digital products online (or offline!)

Next, you need to figure out your "offer." In simpler terms, you present an offer for acceptance or rejection.

You might offer your membership for $67 a month, your ebook for $37, or your "assisted coaching program," which gives members access to a digital course for $1,500 a month.

Your offer is where you can get creative. You can do the following:

• Single, one-time payment
• Multiple payments spread out over a payment plan
• Monthly payments for as long as your subscriber remains in your program
• Front-end downpayment with smaller monthly payments as they remain a member
• Free trials with memberships after so many days or weeks

There are lots of ways you can make your offer…  You might want to bake that into your request if you wish to subscription revenue. If you'd rather have upfront cash, that's fine, too.

Step 3: The Sales Funnel

When selling digital products online, you will need a sales funnel.

A sales funnel isn't a standalone page that gets an email optin… That's called a landing page.

It is also not a standalone page with some sales copy asking for the sale—that's a sales page.

A "sales funnel" is a series of pages, sales copy, and email copy that quickly moves a prospect through the buying process and automates as much of it as possible.

Your sales funnel needs to be built for your offer. We discuss this extensively in the Convert book.

If it's a higher ticket, you'll need a webinar. You can get away with a sales video if it's the lower ticket. In both cases, you will want to have a lead magnet set up to get people converted into your email list so you can market to them in the future.

Here's an example layout of our Webinar Sales Funnel:

And here's the design of our Video Sales Letter Funnel:

Each funnel starts with a landing page giving away a free 'something' like a report or ebook.

Then, there's either a sales page with a sales video:

Or, a webinar registration page:

And, each of those sales pieces is backed up by some solid email marketing automation…

Your conversions will be better if you ask for the sale earlier. If you wait too long, your prospects won't be as engaged as they should be…

So, we create done-for-you sales funnels with our clients that capitalize on buyers ready to take action immediately AND buyers who still need some warming up!

That way, you get the fast revenue you need to re-invest in growing your business while also growing a tribe and loyal base of customers that will buy from you for months and years…

Step 4: Getting Traffic

Now, there are lots of ways to get traffic…  You can write blog posts, wait for Google to index the content, and hopefully rank you somewhere favorable.

You can try to wrangle affiliates to mail for you, but you need to put up with their schedules and suffer a lot of rejection if you don't have a personal relationship with them.

You can write press releases or sit on forums answering questions and hopefully directing enough people back to your site to make a dent.

Our favorite way of getting traffic is to pay for it! This is from a guy who used to say he was allergic to paid traffic and lived for SEO'ing websites…

Now, there are many places where you can get traffic, but only a few will make sense for your offer. You can get traffic from:

• Facebook - the one most people start with because it's generally easy to set up
• Google Adwords is arguably one of the best sources of traffic on YouTube, but it is more challenging to figure out.
• YouTube Ads - solid when you're using video in your marketing
• Pinterest - very niche-specific but low cost when you use it correctly
• Native ads - works well with offers embedded in blog posts and advertorials