Embracing the “New Normal” of Remote Work

An Upwork study suggests that 22% of the American workforce will work remotely by 2025 and approximately 14% of employed Americans (aged 18 and over) work from home all of the time, according to Pew Research Center. While 41% of employees work remotely on a hybrid basis.

In 2021, 70 percent of those who worked from home during the pandemic report virtual meetings are less stressful, and 64 percent now prefer hybrid meetings according to a report by Owl Labs

The pandemic has shown that remote work is not just possible, but often preferable for many employees. As agencies adjust to this new reality, it’s important to embrace the cultural shifts that come with it. According to Census.gov, the average one-way commuting time among those who travel to a workplace increased by almost 1 minute from 25.6 minutes in 2021 to 26.4 minutes in 2022. While this isn’t the highest this statistic has ever been, it certainly shows a trend towards people living farther away from where they work. Remote/hybrid work has been the response to this cultural shift.

Cultural Change: Remote work has democratized the workplace, offering employees greater flexibility and autonomy. This shift requires agencies to adopt a results-oriented approach, where the focus is on outcomes rather than hours worked. This is a very complicated place to work from considering tracking hours (from either a billing standpoint or capacity management for production) is essential to how agencies still run. We aren’t saying to abandon the hourly model entirely. You simply have to be more flexible and trusting in how it’s managed and tracked. 

Tip: Implement policies that support flexible working hours and allow team members to choose their own schedules, as long as they meet deadlines and deliver results. In their book “REWORK,” Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson (the founders of Basecamp), remind us that, “Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.” While this might sound reductionistic (or dumb), the fact is, productivity in our world (agencies) might be billed by the hour, but hours worked don’t equate to productivity. There has to be some nuance and context applied to the concept of working – be it time or other measures of performance. 

Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in a Remote Setting

With teams dispersed across the country (sometimes the world), effective communication and collaboration have become more critical than ever. The key is to create an environment where remote employees feel connected and engaged and not penalized for being in a different time zone. This can be managed by level-setting expectations and fostering a collaborative remote culture.

Asynchronous Communication: In a global team, synchronous communication isn’t always feasible. Asynchronous communication—where team members respond to messages and tasks at their own pace—has become the norm. There are certainly moments where the team needs to align at the same time – and this is possible either via a late-day/early morning weekly alignment meeting or flying team members in quarterly to connect in person as a sort of “cultural recalibration” session. But generally and in the day-to-day, you need to have a healthy communication cadence and – with that – a plan for escalation as needed.

Tip: Encourage the use of project management tools like Basecamp or Monday.com, which allow team members to collaborate on tasks without needing to be online simultaneously. Use Loom for video updates and tutorials that can be watched at any time. Also, have a hierarchy of communication” that goes something like this:

– Email: Respond within 24 business hours

– Slack: Respond within the next working hour

– Phone call/text: respond immediately (within reason)

Virtual Team Building: Building relationships within your remote team is essential to fostering collaboration. Virtual team-building activities (non-business critical topics for calls) can help bridge the gap and create a sense of community. Learn more about your team and schedule time to do so collectively. Everyone’s favorite topic is themselves. So schedule times to cover everyone’s favorite topic – this will grow loyalty and open communication that in other ways wouldn’t be possible.

Tip: Organize regular virtual meetups, such as coffee chats or online games, to help your team members connect on a personal level. Ask deeper questions to get to know your team and ensure everyone engages! You can even mail people swag or things to display on these calls. 

Leveraging Technology to Manage a Global Workforce

Technology is the lifeblood of remote team management. The right tools can streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and ensure that everyone stays aligned, no matter where they are. But the wrong tools will kill productivity, damage your brand, and even cost you clients!

Remote Work Tools: Equip your team with the best tools for remote work, including communication platforms, project management software, and cloud-based collaboration tools. Having SOPs and shared documents and clearly communicating how to work remotely will maximize productivity and set you apart from your competitors.

Tip: Using tools like Slack for communication, Notion for team documentation, Drive for shared folders, and Figma for collaborative design work will all help keep everyone on the same page remotely. Ensure that all tools are integrated, allowing for seamless workflows across different platforms. If integrations aren’t available, use tools like Zapier to help create those connections and automate as much of your processes as possible!

Cybersecurity: As remote work becomes the norm, cybersecurity is a growing concern. Protecting your agency’s data and your clients’ information is paramount. 2FA and limited access to certain documents not only help your agency remain compliant, but they’ll eliminate a lot of Rework as well – locking down an annual shared content calendar for example to only-owner editability will help protect your business as well as your and your client’s privacy.

Tip: Implement strong cybersecurity measures, such as VPNs, multi-factor authentication, and regular security training for your team. Use tools like LastPass for secure password management or lock certain folders or documents to keep information secure.

Navigating Time Zones and Cultural Differences

Managing a global team means navigating time zone differences and cultural diversity. Some of this was touched on above, but it certainly warrants it’s own consideration. While these differences can be challenging, they also offer unique opportunities for your agency. One such example is our agency is based in Pennsylvania (EST). The director of our Agency Accelerator product lives in Arkansas (CST) and our lead Ad Specialist is in Wisconsin (also CST). They both start their days an hour earlier than the rest of our agency – giving us a head start on reporting and baking in an extra hour of work across our workdays. Some companies have international teams that allow their company to work 24 hours a day!

Time Zone Management: Use time zone differences to your advantage by organizing work in shifts, ensuring that progress on projects continues around the clock. If you manage this well, schedule meetings at appropriate times and communicate expectations for productive hours then you can literally add hours to your day! Take this to a global scale and your team could work 24 hours in a day without anyone losing sleep. 

Tip: Use scheduling tools like Doodle or share calendars in Google Workspace to find the best meeting times for team members in different time zones. Create a shared calendar that displays everyone’s working hours and ask team members to block their “non-working” hours. This will display appropriately across time zones for the one scheduling any calls or virtual meetings.

Cultural Sensitivity: Understanding and respecting cultural differences is crucial for building a cohesive global team. This includes communication styles, work habits, and holidays. This is especially important for international agencies. Some communication styles or assumptions are made state-side that require thorough communication and unpacking for, say, an Indian development team. It’s not extra work to be thorough and speak appropriately to different cultures. In fact, it can enhance your productivity, positively impact your bottom line, and even help you be relatable to prospective clients who are navigating the same sort of challenges.

Tip: Provide cultural sensitivity training for your team and create a cultural calendar that includes holidays and important events from each team member’s country and have an open line of communication with your team that allows them to bring to you any and all questions or challenges they may have encountering cultural differences for the first time. 

Maintaining Productivity and Accountability in a Remote Environment

Here’s where most companies get it wrong. Truly, one of (if not THE) biggest challenges of remote work is maintaining productivity and ensuring accountability. Without the physical presence of an office, agencies must find new ways to keep their teams motivated and on track. We mentioned above the tracking of hours for client billing or capacity reporting is one way to manage this challenge, but there are other factors to consider in tracking productivity from remote associates. 

Several studies over the past few years show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive and work one more day a week. These same remote workers are up to 47% more productive than office workers according to a Stanford study.

Performance Tracking: Use data-driven methods to track performance and ensure that your team is meeting their goals. This includes setting clear KPIs and regularly reviewing progress.

Tip: Implement task management reports or performance management tools like ClickUp, 15Five, or BambooHR, which allow for continuous feedback and goal tracking.

Employee Well-being: In the discussion around productivity, it’s import to not neglect the fact that remote work can blur the lines between personal and professional life, leading to burnout. It’s important to prioritize your team’s well-being to maintain productivity in the long term.

Tip: Encourage regular breaks and time off. Use tools like Calm or Headspace to offer mindfulness and relaxation resources to your team.

Adapting to the Future of Work

The post-Covid workforce culture is still evolving, and agencies must remain agile and open to change. This means continuously assessing and adapting your remote work strategies to meet the needs of your team and clients and being flexible in fostering quality communication, delivering results for clients, and making your company a preferred working environment – even remote!

Continuous Learning: The remote work landscape is constantly changing, with new tools and best practices emerging regularly. Stay ahead of the curve by encouraging continuous learning and development and inviting ideas or feedback from your team around best practices or new software to consider making your remote work more productive and efficient.

Tip: Offer online courses and resources to help your team stay updated on the latest trends and technologies in remote work and marketing and encourage certification programs either via LinkedIn or Google Academy to help folks not only stay sharp in their roles, but report back on any adjustments in the market they may have gathered in their continuing education.

Conclusion: Thriving in a Remote Work Environment

Managing a global workforce in a post-Covid world requires more than just adapting to remote work—it requires embracing it. By focusing on communication, leveraging technology, respecting cultural differences, and maintaining a results-oriented approach, your agency can thrive in this new era of work.

As the future of work continues to evolve, agencies that master remote team management will be better positioned to deliver exceptional marketing services to clients around the world and open themselves to a global (instead of regionally locked) talent pool!

Read more about how to better your agency at doneforyou.com/category/agencies

The post Remote Team Management: Navigating Post-Covid Workforce Culture with a Global Team appeared first on Done For You.

However, what if there was a way to get those high-quality leads without exhausting your internal resources? 

Back when we first started in this agency world, it was mostly postcards and networking events…

Then things moved online…

And we changed our techniques…

Let’s explore some proven strategies and introduce you to a more efficient solution.

Leverage Content Marketing

Content marketing is a powerful tool for attracting prospects, but it requires a consistent effort to produce valuable, targeted content. Your agency needs to create blog posts, eBooks, webinars, and case studies that address your target audience’s pain points.

All of the that takes time, resources, manpower, and know how.

Think about the cost associated with having a person create content that doesn’t feel like it’s driven by AI?

Your average content marketer is going to require $X,XXX per month…  They need to be an expert, to some degree. And now they need to know how to produce video content, edit video, and all of the other things that social media and content marketing entail!

Imagine that job description:

• Write Blog Posts: Craft well-researched and engaging blog posts that resonate with the target audience, drive traffic, and support SEO efforts.
• Write Social Media Posts: Develop compelling and shareable social media content across platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, tailored to each platform’s audience and format.
• Write White Papers: Produce in-depth, authoritative white papers that demonstrate thought leadership and provide value to potential clients and industry peers.
• Create Video Content: Plan, script, and produce high-quality video content, including explainer videos, customer testimonials, product demos, and educational webinars.
• Edit Video Content: Edit raw video footage into polished final products using video editing software, ensuring alignment with brand guidelines and messaging.
• Create eBooks and Guides: Develop comprehensive eBooks and guides that offer in-depth insights, best practices, and actionable advice on industry-specific topics.
• Develop Infographics: Create visually appealing infographics that simplify complex information and enhance the storytelling aspect of content.
• SEO Optimization: Apply SEO best practices in content creation to enhance visibility and ranking on search engines.
• Content Repurposing: Repurpose existing content into different formats (e.g., turning a blog post into a video or a webinar into an eBook) to maximize reach and engagement.
• Content Management Systems: Manage and maintain content within CMS platforms (e.g., WordPress), ensuring content is up-to-date and properly categorized for easy navigation and searchability.

What if you could bypass this lengthy process and still get top-tier leads? That’s where our partner program comes in. Done For You (DFY) provides you with pre-qualified leads, so you don’t have to build content from scratch or wait for results.

Utilize LinkedIn for B2B Lead Generation

LinkedIn is a goldmine for generating leads for your agency—if you know how to leverage its full potential. Here’s how I use it to drive real results:

1. LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn Ads are a powerful tool for reaching a highly targeted audience. With options like Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, and Text Ads, I can tailor campaigns to specific industries, job titles, and even company sizes. By focusing on the decision-makers who need our services, I ensure our ads land in front of the right people at the right time.

2. LinkedIn Messages

One of the most direct ways to generate leads is through LinkedIn messaging. I use personalized, thoughtful messages to reach out to potential clients. Instead of a hard sell, I focus on building relationships and offering value—like sharing a relevant article or case study. This approach helps establish trust and opens the door to further conversations.

3. LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are an underrated resource. By joining and participating in groups relevant to my industry or target market, I can engage with potential clients in a more casual setting. Sharing insights, answering questions, and even starting discussions allows me to showcase expertise and position my agency as a go-to resource.

4. Posting Regularly

Consistent posting is key to staying top-of-mind with your network. I share a mix of content, from blog posts and case studies to industry news and thought leadership articles. The goal is to provide value and keep my audience engaged. Over time, this consistent presence builds credibility and attracts inbound leads.

5. Becoming a LinkedIn Influencer

Positioning yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn can significantly boost lead generation. I share my expertise through long-form posts, articles, and even video content. By consistently providing valuable insights, I’ve been able to grow my following, increase engagement, and attract leads who are already primed to work with us.

LinkedIn is more than just a professional networking site; it’s a versatile tool for lead generation. Whether it’s through targeted ads, personalized messages, active group participation, regular posting, or establishing yourself as a LinkedIn influencer, there are countless ways to use the platform to grow your agency. The key is to be strategic, consistent, and always focused on adding value.

Instead of dedicating a team to cold outreach, consider a more streamlined approach with DFY’s lead program. Our system delivers leads that are already interested in services like yours, freeing you up to focus on closing deals rather than chasing prospects.

Implement an Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is a classic lead generation strategy, but it involves careful segmentation, content creation, and regular follow-ups to be effective.

It’s the thing that has helped us bridge the gap for almost 10 years of being in business.  No matter what happened in the economy, we had a way of falling back because we had an email list.

As an agency, here are a few things to keep in mind with email marketing campaigns:

1. Segment Your Audience for Personalized Messaging

One of the most effective ways to generate leads is by sending personalized content that resonates with your audience. Start by segmenting your email list based on factors like industry, company size, or where they are in the buyer’s journey. Tailor your messaging to address the specific pain points and needs of each segment. Personalized emails have higher open rates and engagement, making them more likely to convert recipients into leads.

We use a lot of surveys to get this level of customization.

2. Craft Compelling and Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Your email content should naturally lead to a clear and compelling call-to-action. Whether you’re asking recipients to download a free resource, book a consultation, or sign up for a webinar, the CTA should be easy to find and understand. 

Make sure it’s relevant to the email’s content and offers something of value to the reader. A strong, well-placed CTA can significantly increase the chances of turning a reader into a lead…  And every email needs a CTA in it!

3. Use Automated Follow-Up Sequences

Leads rarely convert on the first touchpoint, so it’s essential to have an automated follow-up sequence in place. Set up a series of emails that nurture leads by providing additional value, such as educational content, case studies, or special offers. 

Automated follow-ups keep your agency top-of-mind and gradually build trust, making it more likely that the lead will eventually convert. The key is to strike the right balance between being persistent and providing value without overwhelming the recipient.

Optimize Your Website for Lead Capture

1. Exit-Intent Popups

Exit-intent popups are a powerful tool to capture potential leads just as they’re about to leave your website. These pop-ups can offer a compelling reason to stay engaged, such as a discount on services, a free eBook, or a consultation. 

By detecting when a visitor is about to exit, you can present an irresistible offer that encourages them to provide their contact information before they go.

2. Webinar Signups

Hosting webinars on topics relevant to your target audience is a great way to generate leads. Promote the webinar prominently on your website with a clear and enticing signup form. Webinars allow you to showcase your expertise, provide valuable insights, and engage directly with potential clients. The signup process collects valuable lead information, which can be used for follow-up marketing and nurturing.

3. Lead Magnet Signup

A lead magnet is a valuable resource you offer in exchange for a visitor’s contact information. This could be a free eBook, white paper, checklist, or industry report. By featuring a lead magnet signup form on your website, you encourage visitors to provide their email address in exchange for the resource. Make sure the lead magnet is highly relevant to your target audience’s needs, though!

With DFY’s partner program, you don’t have to worry about constantly tweaking your site to generate leads. We deliver high-quality leads directly to you, allowing your team to focus on closing rather than capturing.

Invest in Paid Advertising

Investing in your own advertising is always a good move as an agency – starting with your warmest traffic and moving to the least warm…

1. Retargeting Ads (warm traffic)

Retargeting ads allow you to re-engage visitors who have previously interacted with your website but didn’t convert. By placing a tracking pixel on your site, you can serve targeted ads to these visitors as they browse other websites or social media platforms. Retargeting is highly effective because it targets warm leads who are already familiar with your brand, increasing the chances of conversion.

2. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) Ads

Meta ads, which include both Facebook and Instagram, offer robust targeting options to reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. Agencies can create visually appealing ads, including carousel ads, video ads, and stories, to engage potential clients where they spend time. Meta ads are versatile and can be used for brand awareness, lead generation, or driving traffic to your website.

3. Google Ads

Google Ads allows agencies to target potential clients actively searching for services like theirs. By bidding on relevant keywords, your agency’s ads can appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), driving highly targeted traffic to your website. Google Ads also offer display and video ad options, allowing you to reach audiences across the Google Display Network and YouTube.

4. Podcast Ads

Investing in podcast ads is a great way to reach a niche, engaged audience. Many people listen to podcasts during their commute or downtime, making them a captive audience. Agencies can sponsor episodes, have a host read, or produce their own podcast content to position themselves as thought leaders in their industry. This method is particularly effective for reaching decision-makers and professionals in specific sectors.

5. LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads are ideal for B2B agencies looking to connect with professionals and decision-makers. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities allow you to reach users based on their job title, industry, company size, and more. You can use Sponsored Content, InMail, and Text Ads to promote your agency’s services, drive traffic to your site, or generate leads directly through LinkedIn’s lead gen forms.

6. YouTube Ads

YouTube Ads allow you to tap into the massive audience that consumes video content daily. You can create skippable ads, non-skippable ads, or bumper ads to promote your agency’s services. YouTube’s targeting options let you reach specific demographics, and interests, and even retarget viewers who have engaged with your content before. Video ads are a powerful way to showcase your agency’s expertise and creativity.

Instead of pouring money into ads, though, partner with DFY. It’s highly likely that you’ll spend well into 4 and 5 figures before you start getting a lead process down…

We provide cost-effective lead generation that doesn’t require you to constantly adjust your strategies or spend on expensive ad campaigns.

Conclusion

While these strategies can help you generate high-quality leads, they require significant resources and time. Why not simplify your lead generation process by partnering with DFY? Our program delivers pre-qualified leads directly to your agency, allowing you to focus on what you do best—serving your clients.

Are you ready to take your lead generation to the next level without the hassle? Become a partner at Done For You today and start receiving high-quality leads with ease. Learn more at doneforyou.com/partners.

The post Proven Strategies to Generate High-Quality Leads for Your Agency [Without the Hassle] appeared first on Done For You.

The basic concept of sales funnels

Traffic, i.e. website visitors, coming in from social media? From organic search? From paid ads? From direct traffic or referral traffic?

Sales funnels help channel all the relevant, incoming traffic to pre-designed and strategic funnels to help guide them through your buying process.

Your digital sales funnel could start with a free giveaway or a free trial. Either is intended to entice a first-time visitor to give up their email so you can contact them again in the future. With lead nurturing autoresponders smartly laid out, your funnel gets to work automatically with every lead who signs up. Eventually, sales happen.

If you’ve setup your funnel right, this should work like a charm. Sales come in and pipeline fills up automatically.

But wait. Why funnels?

You need a digital sales funnel because 73% of leads don’t even want to be sold to. What they want is to buy what they need to buy when they need to. Until then, your job as a business is to nurture those leads.

Do it right and your sales figures will fly like a bat out of hell. But then, why doesn’t it always work? Why do businesses still struggle to construct sales funnels that work like a charm? If it were that easy, anyone would do it.

How to build sales funnels that convert

It isn’t easy to build sales funnels that work. There’s a lot that goes under the hood. There are best practices you should be aware of when it comes to sales funnels. Here are some of them:

Funnels aren’t silos

Digital sales funnels are much like Lego blocks – you’d have to bring various elements together to make it work.

Usually, funnels start with landing pages where people opt-in for your mailing list. In some cases, you might have multi-step landing pages.

Then, you’d have a thank you page (or a confirmation page). Some marketers and businesses also use intermittent pages for upselling or to make a one-time or special offer.

Once people sign up at the top of the funnel (at the landing page level), you’d have an automatic sequence of emails that go out to every new subscriber. A different email sequence can be sent to subscribers segments, like qualified leads or users. Each of these email sequences is laid out with a dual purpose – to nurture, and to sell.

Your subscribers are led to sales pages or product pages from within your emails to bring about sales. Of course, you could extend that to all sorts of use cases such as using affiliate links to make sales or to have subscribers sign up for something else altogether.

While that’s the basic structure of sales funnels, each of those moving parts has to work together. Connect and integrate to win.

Be wise to use the right mix of tools, applications, products, and services to ensure smooth working for your sales funnels.

One offer per page

One funnel can’t service multiple offers. If you are making multiple offers like “Sign up for the newsletter”, “Download this ebook”, “join our facebook community”, and “Buy Now” – all on the same page, it’s not going to work.

Too many funnels don’t work as well as they should due to these multiple offers for a single funnel. When you add so many offers, visitors normally freeze due to indecisiveness.

Ads, for instance, are made for a specific audience with a single offer per ad. The same ad can’t have two offers, can it?

Similarly, your funnels have to be singularly focused on exactly what you want your potential audience to do.

For every offer, you are making and for every marketing objective, launch a dedicated funnel with the proper series of autoresponders and workflows for that funnel.

Copy, message and design do more than you think

The integrations and the initial setup is relatively easy. The design and copy used on your landing pages, your email subject lines, the email copy, and even the call to action button copy – that’s even more important.

Business owners don’t have the time or patience to think through the minutest of details when it comes to sales funnels. Meanwhile, marketers and entrepreneurs are in too much of a rush to launch campaigns.

As a result, sales funnel design and the copy used across the elements of the funnel aren’t given the importance they deserve. While it’s the combination of design and copy that actually brings in the money, most funnels today suffer from design and copy afterthought.

Copy literally sells. Like trillions and more in sales each year, for the last several decades. Writing sales letters should be one of your favorite tasks!

Fortunes have been made just thanks to copy. Align powerful and yet simple copy with design and that’s when you have a winning funnel.

If you depend on an average developer to help build landing pages, you’ll probably get an average result in terms of design and copy. Developers are not necessarily the best people to create beautiful designs or write high-converting sales letters. On the flip side, if you try to create the landing page yourself using popular tools, you’ll like face problems with design customizations, like aligning elements, and your landing page won’t look professional.

If you’d like an audit or to discuss your marketing strategy or how you can use landing pages and funnels to grow your business, book a call with us.

Data wins. Theories die.

Funnels… All fine and dandy but the fact that you could gather, make decisions, and glean insights from several data points on your funnel is what gives you real power.

When you use data, the decisions you make are not just based on conjecture, whims, fancies, or opinions.

Combined data sets result from regular funnel use, testing, hypotheses, and more. Top marketers and businesses have already caught on with the power of using data to run smart campaigns and smarter businesses. About 90% of top companies are already using and sharing data between departments.

In the case of funnels, most of the data you’ll work with lies in metrics that accumulate at the landing page level and then for your email marketing sequences.

Beyond that, most of the data from the hypothesis you’ll work with comes from the various (and continuous) A/B testing that you’ll do to test out various elements of your funnels such as ads, landing pages, email subject lines, call-to-action buttons, and others.

If you want to find out more about the ingredients in funnels that just work extremely well, download our Funnel Factor Report.

If you’d like to skip the download (or have already downloaded the report!) and want more help, click here to book an Action Plan call!  Or, click the button below…

The post Do You Know These Fundamental Rules Of Digital Sales Funnels? appeared first on Done For You.

In this piece, we'll delve into the significance of your ecommerce marketing automation stack, emphasizing email and SMS lists tailored for e-commerce platforms in the coaching and consulting sectors. The data you gather from these lists is invaluable, and collecting this information is surprisingly straightforward in the realm of physical product brands. Let’s explore the strategies and techniques that can amplify the effectiveness of email and SMS marketing in your e-commerce venture.

The Strategy Playbook: Digital vs. Physical Products

Building an email list for digital products usually entails offering a lead magnet like a free report or checklist to secure someone’s email. Email marketing aims to deliver immediate value and cultivate the relationship. However, with physical products, acquiring email addresses is even more straightforward. Customers often provide their email willingly for a simple discount code, eliminating the need for a lead magnet. This ease of lead collection is a game-changer for ecommerce marketing automation.

Harnessing the Power of Email in E-commerce

Email marketing is an indispensable element in the ecommerce marketing automation toolkit. Establishing an email list gives you an unmediated communication channel with your potential and existing customers. E-commerce marketing expert Jason Drohn underscores the potency of email marketing in augmenting customer value:

"In the context of physical products, you barely need to offer any incentive. A discount code for first-time buyers is often enough to start accumulating emails, and you don’t even require a lead magnet. That’s incredibly impactful."

Maximizing SMS Marketing for E-commerce Excellence

Alongside email, SMS marketing is a compelling way to engage with your audience and fuel sales. Jason Drohn discusses the integration of SMS marketing within their ecommerce marketing strategy:

"Around half of the customers also opt for text messages. The fact that many willingly give their email just for a discount code, whether they use it or not, was a revelation to me when we first implemented this."

Offering the SMS option allows for a multi-channel strategy that maximizes reach and customer engagement, providing multiple touchpoints to connect with your customers.

Optimizing Your Ecommerce Marketing Automation Stack

To manage your email and SMS lists effectively, it's crucial to have a robust ecommerce marketing automation stack. Jason Drohn recommends Clavio, especially for Shopify sites:

"Most of our clients and partners opt for Clavio. It’s pretty much the default email provider for Shopify and offers powerful functionalities for automating your email marketing efforts.

Clavio provides advanced features that help you automate, segment, and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, freeing you to focus on adding value to your customer experience.

The No-Fuss Opt-In Approach

Jason Drohn describes a simple yet effective opt-in process for gathering subscribers:

"The process is simple—‘Take 15% off your first order, enter your email, get the code.’ The second step offers the code with a copy button for ease of use, and you can also opt-in for text messages."

The straightforward method minimizes friction, encouraging customers to sign up and engage further with your brand.

Implications and Potential Payoff

The ease with which you can build email and SMS lists holds profound implications for your ecommerce marketing automation strategy. It enables you to cultivate customer relationships, enhance lifetime value, and drive recurring sales.

Conclusion: The Road Ahead in E-commerce Marketing

To sum up, building and optimizing your ecommerce marketing automation stack is essential for long-term success. The ease of gathering email and SMS subscribers offers unique advantages to e-commerce businesses. You can amass a valuable list of engaged customers and prospects using practical tools and employing intelligent opt-in procedures.

The future of ecommerce marketing is personalized, data-driven campaigns. You can gain a competitive edge by continuously tweaking your ecommerce marketing automation efforts and keeping abreast of emerging trends.

For further queries or assistance with your e-commerce platform, don't hesitate to comment below or visit our website at [website URL]. Your success is our ultimate goal!

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The post Email Marketing Automation: The Secret Weapon for E-commerce Success appeared first on Done For You.

Drip marketing automation is the same thing as an autoresponder, it has just been renamed and is the current terminology used in the marketing industry today. This is going to date me a little bit, when I first got into internet marketing 14 years ago, I remember listening to a tape. A tape? Yeah, maybe a CD, an audio program, a tape from this guy named Eben Pagan, and Frank Kern, and they were talking about the miracle of email marketing and building your email list and this thing called an “autoresponder.” This autoresponder, basically, somebody will go to a landing page, they’d fill in an opt-in form for a lead magnet or a freebie of some kind, a bribe, and this autoresponder would send them email after email after email. Day one, it would send an email, day two, it would send an email, until day three.

The autoresponder and the big company back then was a company called AWeber. They’re actually great software and is also here in Pennsylvania. Aweber created an autoresponder who acts as an assistant, or you, or whoever wouldn’t have to actually email your list every single day based on when somebody signed up. The email goes out and everybody’s happy. This is the beauty and the magic of technology.

Drip Marketing

Today, the autoresponder has been renamed a “drip email sequence” or “drip marketing”. Email one goes out and then email two drips out the next day, email three drips out the next day, email four drips out the next day. Your membership content is dripped out week after week after week, so this drip is now basically what the terminology is calling “automation” or “autoresponders.”

Now, when we get to drip marketing automation, really, the automation just adds another layer on top of it, so the automation piece adds a trigger. The drip marketing sequence that is set to go out emails one, two, three, four. The automation piece adds in a trigger and the trigger might be a tag that is added to a contact record. This person visited a landing page, this form was filled out, this webinar was attended, this survey result was submitted. There are lots of triggers that will fire that drip marketing automation, and that’s where the magic all comes together – it’s the trigger.

Drip Marketing Automation Campaigns

1. Lead Magnet Fulfillment Sequence

We build sales funnels for our clients, go in and we will set up a bunch of drip marketing. We already know how people are going to be moving through the sales funnel, so the most common examples are we will set up a lead magnet fulfillment sequence. When somebody downloads a lead magnet, they go into this fulfillment sequence.

The fulfillment sequence drips out, day one, drips out the link, the download link that they can get the report. On day two, maybe it drips out the social media profiles for our client. On day three, we’re trying to bond them which is called an “indoctrination sequence“. Day two might be social media profiles, day three, “Hey, this is what we do today,” day four might be the about page, day five is “This is why we do what we do,” so it’s basically telling the story of our client.

2. Webinar Promo Campaign

Webinar Promo Campaign is one of the drip marketing automation campaign that we put together for our clients. It’s a four-email sequence that promotes a webinar or a webinar replay sequence. A six-email sequence that we use to promote the webinar replay or a strategy session promo sequence. The emails were loaded up inside our client’s CRM. We’re going to be driving paid traffic to a sales funnel.

Now, we have to figure out what triggers: What is the automation piece of drip marketing automation, what triggers are going to fire, what forms are going to be figured out, what pages are going to be visited, and what webinars are going to be attended?

If that person signs up for the webinar and doesn’t attend, what happens? All of those triggers put people in different drip marketing campaigns which layers all of that complexity on top of itself.

The post The Essence Of Drip Marketing appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we’re going to talk about targeted website traffic. Now, targeted website traffic, as we said in a lot of other videos, there are two different kinds. There’s a free traffic and paid traffic. I usually start with the free traffic, but today I’m going to start with the paid traffic, and here’s why. Paid traffic gets you results faster. Duh. So, paid traffic gives you away … First of all, I built a lot of businesses and did a lot of stuff, built a lot of websites for clients, for myself in the 13 years that I’ve been doing this thus far. And the thing about free traffic is free traffic can go away. People can pull your plug. People can pull the plug on free traffic. And it is no more. I’ve had websites that have been making 5,000, 10,000, 20, $25,000 a month.

Free Traffic vs Paid Traffic

And all of a sudden that traffic is gone just like that. Just no more. Because Google had an algorithm update. And every six months, every once a year you will find, and if you keep your ear to the pavement, you will hear when this happens, when website owners are going crazy because Google just pulled all their traffic. That’s why I don’t like free traffic, even social media traffic. Sure, social media is a little bit better because it’s referral-based, but it also is not the long term. You might get a share now, but that share doesn’t impact you in a year. The best way to look and think about targeted website traffic is really to have a good mix of all of it. So, what we like to do is we like to start all paid traffic campaigns with paid traffic and with content.

Ideally, if we can do both, we do both. And here’s why. With paid traffic, it’s early, it’s a quick hit. So, you set up a Google AdWords, or Google Ads campaign, or you set up a Facebook campaign, you set up a LinkedIn ad campaign, or YouTube, or whatever. Then you turn traffic on and you’re getting 50, 100 visitors a day or 500, 1000, whatever your budget allows for.

So, you’re immediately able to see how people are moving through the website. You can start running AB tests, you can start testing the ad creative, testing ideas, testing headlines. You can start seeing how people are going to react to the content. Ideally, you’re getting some sales, ideally, some people are moving through your sales funnel, you’re getting some leads. You’re building the foundation of your business through paid traffic, but you don’t want to forget about the free traffic piece.

Using Google To Target Keywords

So, one of our favorite strategies is we’ll actually go to Google and we will target 200, 300 keyword phrases that we’re trying to get traffic for. And we set up conversion tracking on all of those keyword phrases. So we see which keyword phrases are sending us leads or sending us sales. And what the ad text looks like. Who is it speaking to? Who are the demographics and psychographics and who is that ad speaking to? And why is it sending leads and sending sales? So, when we know the keyword phrase and we know the demographic and psychographics of the ad itself, we can create content for that keyword and we can rank for it, and then we don’t have to pay for it anymore. So, it might take two or three or four months to get there.

But what we’re able to do, is systematically pick off like keyword phrases that translate into leads and sales for us, without us necessarily having to pay $8 a lead, $12 a lead, $32 a lead. Sure it’s profitable then, but when we land on the front page of Google, then it’s crazy profitable because we’re not paying anything. So, that’s one of the reasons why we like to do this hybrid integrated digital marketing strategy. We like to combine content. We like to combine paid traffic.

Using Multimedia For Marketing

Multimedia, by and large, there are so many different things you can do with multimedia.

1. Record A Video
You can record a video, that video can then get syndicated to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Apple as a podcast, any of the podcast networks, or Vimeo, lots of places it can go as a video.

2. Audio
Then you strip out the audio, lots of places it goes as an audio podcast, or SoundCloud and all the other audio streaming services.

3. Blog Post
Then you can get that audio transcribed, that gets turned into a blog post. And then all of that stuff lives on your website forever. And you’ve got subscribers and viewers that are racking up in the different channels, YouTube and Apple and all the other places.

So, now those are all your hubs feeding back to your website and that’s all content-based and you can further add fuel to that fire, by running some paid traffic campaigns. So, there’s lots and lots and lots of different ways of putting together traffic campaigns that are targeted for your exact end-user. Here’s my advice though. Make sure you don’t do anything … Make sure you really go after one strategy at a time.

Facebook Campaign

Facebook has its own strategies. Right now we’re doing a lot of videos, a lot of video view campaigns, every campaign that we start, starts with a video, and then we might run a re-targeted campaign that is an image. But it’s got to start with the video. With video, you get cheaper clicks, you get branding, brand awareness. You also get to re-target based on how much of the video somebody watches. There are so many really, really awesome things about video on Facebook and also on YouTube.

If however, it’s a B2B web product or B2B service, Google might be a better place, or LinkedIn might be a better place. With Google, it’s search traffic. So, people are searching for what it is they need. They’re searching for solutions and then you pop up. So, you need to be poised to provide a solution for that thing, for whatever it is they’re searching for. LinkedIn is like Facebook only it’s interruption-based and has very, very high-quality users. It’s also more expensive.

So, there are lots of different dynamics when it comes to paying for traffic and creating content that will bring traffic. But at the end of the day, you have to do something to get targeted traffic, you have to run ads. You have to create content. If you’re doing something free, it’s going to take months for you to start getting some leads through your front door. However, if you start paying, if you have an ad budget, then you’re going to be getting traffic extremely quickly.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all, go to consultingsession.com and sign up for a free strategy session with us. And on that strategy session, we’ll put together an action plan for you, for your business. That includes traffic, free traffic, paid traffic. That includes sales funnel stuff. And if you liked this video, like it, share it, and comment.

The post Getting Targeted Traffic To Your Website appeared first on Done For You.

“It’s sole purpose is to sell something quickly.”

So as you read in the article, when I used to work at Pepsi, which was forever ago like a lifetime ago, we used to run these things called flash sales. A flash sale or fire sale was when we wanted to liquidate, like close dated pop. So like Mountain Dew Code Red, or whatever stupid Pepsi flavor they had come out at the time. There was anything close dated, we had a couple of good sales. Or had a couple of stores that we would just dump it all off at, then they would just fire sell it. So it might be 50 cents a case or something. It was just meant to just blow the doors off. Then the store owner got credit for something, in the future.

So when I started hearing about flash sales, I started thinking about these fire sales and how crazy effective they were. I mean, we would just dump a pallet of pop in front of this mob of people, and they just started filling up a cart. Because they could get like a whole shopping cart of some orange, whatever, for $3 bucks, it was kind of crazy. So that was kind of the idea behind the fire sale.

Now, four or five years ago, when I got into email marketing, we started seeing a lot, lot, lot, lot of flash sales. Then these timers came out. The one that we use a lot is Deadline Funnel. But these times came out and they actually would count down how much time is left before a product or price goes up. So we started messing around with these things. The flash sales, just what happens, blue light the world on fire in terms of like running a promotion to your email list. So we continued rocking them.

What do you need to have a flash sale?

Now the logistics of a flight cash sale are really pretty simple. You need to have a product, that product needs to be on sale for 24, 48, or 72 hours. You promote that product through email. Sometimes you can run some retargeting through it. It’s not enough time usually for somebody to learn all the logistics of your course and your brand and everything. But it’s really, really great for an email list for re-targeted ad campaigns and to clean up sales.

Now your front end product is usually the thing that is discounted. So if you have a $97 digital course, you might have a flash sale and that digital course is $7 or $17 or $27, like some ridiculously low price. But if you have a sales funnel up and running, then you have upsells and down sales. So if normally somebody pays $970 for a digital product, and then you send them to a $297 offer, and then a $497 offer. Then you know that your metrics typically, you might sell 20% or 30% might buy upsell number one, Then you might have 10% of people who buy upsell number two.

So when you have a flash sale, you are shoving people into the front side of your offer. So you’re getting 10 times more, $7 sales than you would’ve gotten $97 had this flash sale not happened. This means your true advantage really in doing a flash sale is in monetizing your upsell path. Because your upsell path is still… You’re not changing, you’re not changing those prices. So you’re still charging $297 and $497 for the upsells. So don’t do anything with those. All you’re basically doing is just discounting the initial offer, the front end offer for 24 hours, or 48 hours. Then you’re following that up with email. So that’s one of the things we like the most about flash sales.

Advantages of Flash Sales

1. Drive a Ton of Traffic
2. A load of Sales in the Front Side
3. Monetize through the Upsell

In a way that you can’t do in any other point without running a flash sale because if that product is just sitting there and you’re just emailing traffic, there’s no urgency, you’re not creating any kind of movement. So they’re just like, “Eh okay, it’s still full price.” So when they see the flash sale, though, it gets them to take action. Then taking action puts them in the buyer mentality. Then once they’re in the buyer mentality, they buy all the upsells. So that’s the idea behind a flash sale.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all, go ahead schedule a call with us, go to ConsultingSession.com and book a time on our calendar. We will look through your offers, your product, your business, figure out how a flash sale would work. Write your email copy, sales, copy, all of that stuff. We can take care of all that for you. If you liked this video, make sure to like, share, subscribe, comment.

The post Creating And Running A Flash Sale appeared first on Done For You.

Welcome to today’s episode of GSD Daily. This is episode number 127 and it is the second episode of the Automate Series. In continuing what we were talking about yesterday, we’re going to dig into continuity clients.

The continuity clients are any client, member, the person who’s paying a subscription to your business for something. Might be coaching might, be consulting. It might be a membership site, might be a mastermind. They are receiving value from you over a duration of time. So it isn’t like just a one-off charge.

Today we’re going to talk about an automated way of pulling those clients into your world, into your ecosystem, and basically on autopilot. So what we did was we went through and drew up a little flowchart here. I’m going to walk through it. But before we get there, basically there was this model. So 70% of business leaders right now we’re saying that subscription businesses are the way of the future, especially in COVID. So when you can package your thing, your service, your whatever, into something that somebody pays for monthly or annually, you’re going to end up growing revenue.

Now, the workflow that I’m about to show you, I didn’t invent it. Well, I didn’t invent it and it was one of those things it’s not like the idea I saw it and I was like, “Well, shit, that’s smart.” And then I started seeing it everywhere. And basically what it is is it’s this application workflow. So it is an app funnel and the app funnel is where you’re sending traffic to a place, to a website. You’re doing a three, four-minute video and then that prospect is filling out an application to work with you. And then some automation runs through that.

So I saw this originally from Harmon Brothers. So if you’ve never heard of Harmon Brothers, they do the Squatty Potty or they did the advertising for the Squatty Potty, for Purple mattress, for a bunch of this viral sensation kind of videos. And I went to their website one day, just looking around, seeing how a prospect would sign up to work with them. And it was an application and it was like an overt application like, “Why should we work with you? Are you going to send us free samples.” Blah, blah, blah. They may have changed it since then, I don’t know. But this application was pure genius.

And I expected it because I knew that just from other friends have worked with them, they at the time were charging between half a million and a million dollars for a video. And that was like a $300,000 video plus 500 grand in ad budget. That was what they required to work with a prospect. So I was like, “If everybody has their stuff dialed in, it’s these guys.” Do you know what I mean? So then I adopted the model and then I started using it in all kinds of other verticals like other service businesses and everything from financial planning, to working capital, to agency staff, to even our stuff. Anything you see from us is this app funnel.

So in terms of getting and acquiring continuity client acquisition, that’s what this was made of. And getting into continuity client acquisition you have three different levels if you will, you have your traffic, you have your funnel and then you have your follow-up. So those are the big ones. Those are the main silos when you’re looking at what this automation will do, every level affects the next. Then you have a couple of different forms of traffic usually. So we usually start with Facebook traffic. We tie in Google because if you are a continuity service, most likely you are working … You have some search terms that you can advertise for.

So Google is a good place and now with Facebook and they’re randomly banning accounts, profiles. They’re just finicky at the moment, probably because of the political lockdown or whatever. Google is a nice way to hedge your bets too. So we generally have quite a bit of traffic running on Google too. Facebook, Google from a traffic source, and then you have email. So any email lists that you have, whether it’s 500 people or whether it’s 10,000 or 20 or 30,000 people, email is going to be a good way to run your visitors or run your prospects into this app funnel.

So the app funnel is made up of two essential pieces. It is your video sales letter and it is your application. So the video sales letter is a three, four-minute video that walks through why somebody cares and why somebody should fill the application below this video. Then the application asks six to eight questions and those are meant to learn more about your prospect. So of course you have your big four, you have your first name, last name, email, phone number. Those are your big ones. Then you want to have four or five additional questions that allude to A. What you’re going to cover on the call. And B. You want to learn more about this person. So how big is their business? What are they looking to overcome? What challenges have they seen in the past? Blah, blah, blah like that kind of thing.

Then if somebody successfully fills out the application, they get routed to your scheduling link. So at that point, they go into either sales call or an add to cart and we’ll cover that in a minute. But sometimes there’s a couple of things that we do around this sales page that will add to the conversation. So sometimes it’s a landing page. We’ll put a landing page before the sales page so that when they click on the landing page, they then opt-in to go to the sales page so we have their email address.

Sometimes on the sales page, we also just do an exit pop. So we don’t make them go somewhere. We present them with the VSL offer, we exit pop them into something that collects their email address. That’s actually what we do on Done for You is a sales page, exit pop. Then once they sign up and they go one of two places, they either go to a sales call. If it’s above $1000 to get started, they go to a sales call. If it’s below $1000, they go to and add to the cart. And that’s basically like either a sales bridge page where we recap the offer and then go to the order form, or we go directly to the order form. And then we always follow-up with an email and sometimes SMS.

So that’s the way that we end up automating the continuity client acquisition. Once somebody signs up for a sales call, then it’s sales. So it’s phone sales, you got to follow-up with your client. You’ve got to make sure to email them within 24 hours confirming the call. You have to do the bonding and all of that stuff on the sales call itself. So it’s like sales 101 stuff. Once they get on the phone, then you’re selling them on the package. A lot of different ways to do that. I mean, you can do hard sales, soft sales. You can do a coaching sale. A lot of things and ways to go about that.

I’ve found in our stuff and in a lot of the clients that we teach, the biggest tip, biggest, biggest tip is whenever somebody books a call with you, make sure to reply to them as fast as possible. And it needs to be your reply. It’s not an email follow-up. It’s not something that automatically goes out. Send a personal reply to them and say, “Hey, thanks so much for signing up. I was on your website and checked out, blah, blah, blah, or tell me a little bit more about such and such. I noticed you filled out the application and said blah, blah, blah.”

To send a personal one-on-one human heartfelt email to them when they book a call. Because they’re taking time out of their day to talk to you and you’re taking time out of your day to talk to them. I mean, just from a purely business standpoint, if it isn’t a great fit, then you’re not only are you not going to get the sale from the phone call that you’re on but then you’re also taking up a one hour slot on your calendar that somebody else might want to then purchase something from you. If they’re not a great fit, just don’t take the call or take the call and just try to give a couple of nuggets, a couple of pieces of information, and then try to get off the phone.

So totally up to you how you want to do the sales staff. For many of our clients it’s like once the sales call is booked like our marketing piece, the marketing piece is done. But then we get into like sales 101 stuff, and we don’t necessarily do like phone sales, coaching stuff, but I’ve done enough of it. A lot of tricks and stuff that we end up working through. So all in all, this is the app funnel for continuity client acquisition.

If you have any questions at all, you want to implement this in your business, just go to doneforyou.com/start and put together a little plan, a little program for you, and work on getting it started. And I will talk to you tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about scaling continuity client acquisition. So once you have all this setup, we’re going to talk about the Facebook aspect and using different creative assets to move the needle. So I’ll talk to you soon, all right? Thanks. Bye.

The post Best Ways To Automate Continuity Client Acquisiton appeared first on Done For You.

Welcome to today’s episode of GSDdaily. This is Create number 126, and we’re going to talk about continuity clients. So this entire week is going to be continuity clients. We’re going to talk through creating offers, automating the process, scaling continuity clients, and going from there. It’s also a holiday so happy labor day, which I shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s Monday. I’ve been doing this Monday through Friday forever. We’re just more of the same.

So continuity clients are something that we have been implementing for a lot of clients recently, or a lot of businesses because more and more of what’s going on in the world is business models are structuring around membership and it’s smart, so from a statistical standpoint, the average subscription vendor, so that might be a membership site. It might be a software offer like a SAS offering. It might be a coach or consultant. The average subscription vendor is growing 30 to 50% annually. So they are almost… 50% annually, if you’re going from a hundred to $150,000 in revenue a year or a million to 1.5 million a year in revenue by adding a subscription or by adding a membership site, it’s a, really, really big deal.

1. Make a Membership Site

Wishlist Member Plugin

There are lots and lots of ways to do it. If you look at it from a just kind of like a business landscape standpoint, there’s a guy by the name of Stu McLaren and had to be 10 years ago, Stu McLaren introduced a piece of software called the Wishlist Member. Now Wishlist Member is a WordPress plugin that we use, we still use for all of our membership sites, for a lot of our client membership sites.

Wishlist Member was the first real big piece of software that made kind of an impact on WordPress sites. Before you needed like this weird mix of using aMember plus, Moodle was the education platform. And then there was like three or four different kinds of pieces of software that you meshed together. And then it created this membership.

Stu McLaren came along and his partners, created this WordPress plugin that was just you dropped it in, you added your members, you protected your pages, and that was it. And they’ve had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who have built membership sites from Wishlist Member.

Tribe Platform

Well, Stu McLaren went to create a training platform called TRIBE and TRIBE is it’s an education platform for creating membership sites. They have a very fascinating model. So they launched twice, I think it’s twice a month or twice a year, they do a big multi-video launch in a webinar. And then they open it up for a couple of weeks at a time and just jam a bunch of members through. So it’s an interesting model and their memberships are typical $1000, $2,000 a year.

Every membership has its pricing, but by and large, you have these like a Stu McLaren model, a TRIBE model that is being added to business models all around the world. It might be a coaching business that adds a subscription website. Might be an author who adds a membership for some continuity, might be a software offer that gives some accountability to its members through a Facebook group that they pay for. So there’s a lot of different ways subscription can work, continuity can work in your business.

2. What To Sell

Books or Courses

Now the first thing you need to think about in creating this continuity offer is what are you going to sell? And I think it’s probably important to start with figuring out what you have. So if you know what you have, you might have a book and you’re like, I sell a bunch of this book and I can put together a membership site that might be $49 a month or whatever. And I can put recordings of videos, or I can go through an outline chapter by chapter, and create a little video course that is this membership content. And maybe month one is chapter one and month two is chapter two and month three is chapter three.

So you can go through and just bullet out what are the different pieces of my book. And then you can map out what are some video content that I can pull out based on that. And there you get a membership site. So if you’re putting together an email list, you can sell this membership site to your email list or whatever.

Consultation and Coaching Services

Another way of thinking about continuity is let’s say you have a digital product. And you’re like… Well, some people, they’re sending in emails and support requests and asking, how can they get more me? So another great way of adding continuity to your business is by offering to consult or by offering to coach. And that’s very one-on-one. You’re charging X amount of money for access to you twice a month, or once a week, or once a month, however much time you want to be accountable to your clients.

Maybe it is a hundred percent scheduled, so it’s every other week you jump on a coaching call with them. Maybe it is only when they need you, so they send you a text and say, “Hey, I need you, let’s jump on in the next couple of days.” Okay, cool. So what is the fee associated with that? Some of our clients will charge $1000 a month, other ones will charge $2,500 a month. Some of them will charge $5,000 a month. It just depends on the transformative impact that they have.

Coaching Clients

The coaching clients, in creating the offer, the best fit’s your clients, the best fit’s the people who are coming to you. It is just about figuring out what kind of value you provide, how much is that worth to them? If it’s a business development, coaching let’s say, or business consulting, then that could be worth five or $10,000 a month. For life coaching, maybe it’s 1000 a month or 500 a month. Health and fitness coaching, maybe it’s 500 a month or 200 a month. It just depends on what impact you’re having in their life, how accountable they are to you. If it’s 100%, one-on-one weekly calls, you can’t charge 200 bucks for that. If you have 10, 15, or 20 clients, you are maxed out and you’re not making any money for it. You are on the phone all the time with your clients around clock.

However, if it’s 1000 a month or 2000 or 5,000 a month, you can have two clients or three clients or four clients, and you can be at their beck and call whenever you want. There’s a lot of different ways to kind of cut it up. Now, one thing I’ve talked about in a previous live stream was this idea of assisted, it was assistant coaching or assistant consulting. So that’s where you have a product as a baseline for your coaching. And then you coach on top of it.

They go through this weekly or monthly course where they watch some videos, they download reports, all that stuff. And they learn about what they want to learn about, they learn about the thing you teach and they are… They’re able to put it into practice in their life, then you provide the coaching or consulting element to it.

So they can ask you questions. They can be accountable to you, but you don’t necessarily need to teach them the whole thing right off the bat. It’s assistant coaching or assisted consulting. So it’s another nice offer that helps with that continuity play. Those are just some ways to throw a continuity aspect into your business. Now there’s something I think of whenever I think of like any kind of transformation or any kind of… Because really when somebody buys continuity, they’re buying the transformation, then they understand that the transformation isn’t going to take place right now, all in one shot, they’re buying a subscription, they’re buying a block of time with you generally.

There’s a story that, there’s not a story, but back in my Pepsi days. We used to every Sunday morning, it saves money, but every Sunday morning we’d have to build these huge displays. Whenever you’re walking out into like the vestibule of a grocery store, you see the big Pepsi displays. It is like the super bowl display or whatever.

Every Sunday morning we go in like four o’clock in the morning and we wheel our pallets of pop out into the lobby. And we start ripping apart, whatever was there and started building something back up. As you’re putting together this big super bowl design, with a goalpost in it, it looks like complete shit. You got pop everywhere, you got stacks of everything everywhere, but then a couple of hours later, you can step back from it after having lifted about 18 tons of pop and putting it where it needs to go, you can step back and say, that is a football display.

And then you clean up all your stuff and you wheel it to the back room. But what I mean is whenever you’re going through any kind of transformation or journey, the beginning is always going to be messy. So understanding that and coaching and teaching that and addressing that in the first couple of modules of your course is going to make all the difference between setting the stage for that transformation and not.

So it’s just something you want to think about when working through this continuity relationship with your clients. And if you have any questions at all, just go to dfy.com. There’s a little chat box in the lower right-hand corner. You can schedule a call with us and we’ll talk to you soon.

The post Increase Your Revenue By Creating A Continuity Offer In Your Business appeared first on Done For You.

Welcome to GSDdaily. It’s a Friday. This is episode 125, and in keeping with the new series that we are doing we have created on Monday, automate on Tuesday, scale on Wednesday, expand on Thursday, and Friday is a slash day. Don’t know. So we’re going to do interviews on Friday. We’re also going to be doing this series called five-minute guides. And it’s where I show you something cool, I show you something that will inform your business building journey in five minutes or less. So that’s a tall order and I know that some of my shit gets dense sometimes, so this is supposed to be just a nice, light five-minute podcast that walks through something cool. So today we’re going to talk about Google Trends.

Now, right now, with so many things going on in the world, there is such an upheaval in how things are trending. Some people get really, really into one thing, and then if you’re marketing to that person, if you’re marketing to that group of people and you’re not entering the conversation that’s already going on in their brain, you’re going to lose out because they’re focusing on something different. They’re not focusing where you want them to focus. So us as marketers, we need to know where the majority of our prospects are focusing, what they’re thinking about, and Google Trends is a good way of doing this.

Spot Trends in Any Market

Now, earlier in the year, when COVID first hit, everything was productive. Productivity was super, super … and then we wrote a couple of reports and stuff for clients on productivity, and then the numbers started falling. We ended up doing a little Google Trends analysis and it turned out that people didn’t care about productivity, they cared about clarity, because they were overwhelmed. So all of a sudden it started going back up.

People cared about clarity.

Few Examples:

Now, I have a couple of little examples up here. So first of all, just covering the homepage, on the homepage we have just some trending stuff, world cup, football, whatever. Then we have some recently trending topics. Now, none of this stuff, we care a whole lot about. I mean you might. Move on has 200,000 plus searches, but whatever.

1. Day Trading

Now, in terms of how this affects what you do, let’s say you’re offering something trading, whether it’s an info product, whether it’s a software, whether it’s whatever. So basically what I did was I went through and I searched day trading. And we can even do it here, so we can just start from scratch. So we’re going to look up day trading, we see that in the last 12 months, day trading went from it had moderate exposure, it was moderately interesting. People were into it. Now, check this out. March, COVID hits. All of a sudden day trading just goes … Now, we have ups and downs, and now June 7th to June 13th, it was at an all-time high in the last 12 months.

Results Prior Covid

Now, let’s back this out for even the past five years. Let’s see what this looks like. Holy shit. So we’re at 12, 16. It’s there about. It’s meh. Then all of a sudden, since COVID, it spikes something fierce. People are into day trading right now. My coach was even talking. He’s like, “Yeah, the taxi driver, the restaurant owner, they’re all talking about day trading at the moment, which means it’s time to get out.” Now, let’s look at something … let’s compare it to something. So let’s compare it to real estate investing. Just to play devil’s advocate, let’s see where it ranks. Now, real estate investing is a nice, even trend. Let’s look at swing trading. Okay, another pretty even trend, however, there’s a slight uptick here at the very, very end. Let’s zoom in to a year and see what this looks like. So we’re going past 12 months. All right, so we got a slight uptick right there, marginal maybe. There was another one right here too, and here, for swing trading. Now let’s look at investing, one of the Mac Daddy keyword phrases, the one that you would assume everybody’s looking at it.

So look at this. Investing is pretty solid the whole way. It has a small uptick, but it’s not a huge, great … It’s just kind of flat as compared to day trading, which we experienced this spike here. So what this means is that if you have something that can fit for day trading, then writing a day trading lead magnet or something day trading related would make a lot of sense.

2. Home Workouts

Here’s another one, working out. So working out has a pretty solid trend. It doesn’t go up and down. So let’s compare this with home-based workouts. Home-based workouts or home workouts. See what this does. All right, another spike. So here, you can guess this, but we have a workout, the general workout is flat, and then we have a spike in home workouts or home-based workouts. So if you were in the fitness space, then it probably makes a lot of sense to do home-based workouts.

3. Home School

And then, for the last example, we’ll have homeschool or virtual. And here, we see that we have a similar spike. So here homeschool spiked in March, and then it spiked again July, and it’s falling a little bit, whereas virtual school is continuing on an uptick. So the whole point of this little session is to show you where you can go get some research to glean some insight, macro-level insight, into your audience. And I hope it makes sense, I hope it’s something you can use in the future. Have a fantastic weekend, my five minutes is up, and I’ll talk to you soon, all right.

The post How To Spot Trends In Any Market For Your Website appeared first on Done For You.

In this GSDdaily episode, we’re going to talk about how to get awesome clients. There are lots of definitions of awesome clients. Awesome clients might be high paying clients or might be the kind of clients who leave you alone for the most part.

They might be the ones who are taking massive action on your strategies and recommendations and mentorship and all of that stuff. And they implement quickly and they get results quickly. I mean, everybody has their different definition of what an awesome client is, but all in all, awesome clients are what makes your business go round. If you are selling coaching, consulting services, digital products, all that stuff.

Yesterday, we talked about assisted learning. Or digital courses, digital learning, and how you can maximize your revenue and make good money selling training, and assisted kind of group coaching courses. And what that was, if you remember, we had the diagram of a triangle and we had digital courses across the bottom. And then a level above that we had our assisted learning varieties. So it was assisted in group learning, so there was some group coaching in the middle.

And then above that was assisted one-on-one. So you have a course as a kind of foundational education. Then it was a one-on-one. One-on-one coaching, one-on-one mentorship, or teaching or whatever was the ascension there. Then you have like a done for you service and then you had masterminds. So that was kind of the ascension of that model.

At the very base level, assisted group coaching. What that is, is college. Especially now in this pandemic when people are needing to self-learn. They are taking their courses online.

They have some sort of group office hours where they might get in and be able to talk to the professor and they have a forum where they can go and ask questions and get help from students and whatever. But they are learning through a computer. It’s distance learning, but there’s that group component. That would be like an assisted group.

So really, you, as a product creator or service creator, you’re going to be able to deliver the same type of experience that a university would if you structure it that way. Which is pretty powerful if you think about it.

Landing High-End Clients

Now, today, we’re going to talk about landing high-end clients. We’ve got another little diagram here that we’re going to go through. Basically, the idea of this is, how to get more high paying clients. All in all, everybody wants a great subset of clients.

Now, if you are in business on your own, you want to have eight clients, 10 clients, 12 clients, whatever. The thing about clients is, if you’re doing one-on-one engagement, then you’re going to max out at some ceiling.

Each of them, you’re working with an hour a week. You’re going to need an hour’s downtime for each of them or so to take notes or to think about their projects or whatever.

There’s always that ceiling when you are working from a one-on-one standpoint. Now, yesterday, we talked about digital courses and that’s the beauty of the assisted learning format, which is when you can package your material into a body of work. Might be a digital course. It might be an ebook, it might be a book, whatever.

Then you’re magnifying your capability as an educator or as a business owner. So now you can have a hundred people go through that digital course, and then maybe you’re only offering group coaching to 10 of them and only one-on-one coaching to two of them.

So you’re able to sell a hundred copies of the course. And then you’re able to grab the 10 group coaching students, maybe it’s 2,500 a month for them.

Then you’re able to grab two one-on-one students, and it’s five grand or 10 grand a month for them. It just depends on how you want to structure it. But qualifying those students is where the challenge ends up coming in. And it’s where so much of our work comes into play when we start automating sales processes.

Three Ways to Build Clients

So, how to get more high-paying clients? There are three ways to kind of build the front side of this out.

1. Automated Webinar

You can do an automated webinar, which last week we talked entirely about automated webinars. So an automated webinar that plays at a certain time every day or immediately after somebody else and you can do it through a sales video.

2. Sales Video

The sales video has a form that pops up underneath when the call to action is made. They can fill in the form. Maybe it’s a conditional logic form. So depending on how the questions are answered, it gets routed one way or the other way. One way might be to a sales page. And the other way might be to a consultant or a sales guy or something. You can also do it through the contact form in the blog post, that’s kind of the third way.

3. Blog Post

So you write a 2000 word blog post that talks about some of the core desires or the core fears or whatever that your prospect is going through. Then you close with a call to action and the contact one might be to sign up for, or to apply for your coaching program, to apply for your digital product, whatever. That call to action might go to the sales video, too, where they end up moving into like the matrix, which is your sales funnel. And then they end up applying and getting on a call that way.

Now, no matter how they find … No matter how they approach it, whether it’s a webinar, a sales video, or whatever, the next step is always to sign up for a strategy session. It’s always to sign up for that sales call.

Sometimes this is an application where somebody is going through and answering some questions. And we’ll talk a little bit about that.

Sometimes it is just a straight-up, they pick a call on your calendar and then they fill in the form afterward. But regardless, the next thing is they need to pick a time on your calendar.

So it’s one of the great inventions of technology, is the fact that you can send somebody a link, and then they can pick a time on your calendar. And it’s when you’re available.

And then they can like to slot themselves in. They can get a calendar reminder, they get emails, they get all of that stuff. And then they can answer the questions that you predefined. So, it’s a lovely thing when it works well.

We use them in marketing automation all the time, but I always take … if it’s a referral like if somebody comes in and they’re referred to me, I usually don’t just send them to a calendar link.

I think it’s pretty disrespectful. If you get that one-on-one invite or that one-on-one recommendation or the one-on-one referral, and then you send them to a cold piece of technology, I don’t really like that.

But if it’s like a function of a sales funnel where the link is shown because somebody presses a button, it’s a different story. Because when they press the button, then they’re expecting to see a calendar. So different kinds of scenarios. But they need to be able to pick a time in your calendar.

So some software for it, Calendly is one. Acuity Scheduling is another that works out nicely. We have ours called Time Slots, which is currently being recorded. It’s being put into Access, which we’re excited about. But Calendly and Acuity are both good.

So once they pick a time, then usually they end up being asked questions and then they get a confirmation. And the confirmation is usually, thanks so much for the booking time. Here’s the link to schedule it on your calendar.

That kind of thing. But this is the part that I want to dive in on. So the questions that somebody asks … Let’s see if I can … Can I make this bigger? I can. All right. Can you see this? There we go. So these questions are an important part of this whole process.

So the questions that we ask, or the questions that we ask for them to answer, are application questions. You always want to include the big three, which is their name, their email address, and their phone number. And then the fourth one is, what is their Skype contact?

Or like, if you’re outside of the country, how do I get ahold of you? Because not everybody can dial an external phone number. An international phone number, I should say. So name, email, phone number. And if outside the country, what is your Skype ID?

So those are always the big four. Now, then we get into some questions. Questions important for us to find out if we’re able to facilitate the transaction of the sale or whatever. Basically to make sure that we add as much value to the sales call as possible. And these are just the general things that we ask. So the first of all is the number one challenge. Nobody is signing up for a call with you because they’re bored or because they feel like it.

They’re signing up for a call because they’re challenged by something. And they believe that you have a solution to their challenge. That’s literally what all business revolves around, is this idea of solutions. Even if it’s a widget, a video game, the solution is fun. All business revolves around this idea of solutions.

So by asking somebody what their number one challenge is, then we’re able to bring that to light, bring it to the surface. And we know how to address it before we even get on the call because they fill out these questions as they’re booking the call. We have days or hours to prepare our answers for this.

We also want to ask them any kind of qualification questions. Qualification is our requirement. A qualification might be, how big is your business? How many employees is your business? How much revenue does your business do? Qualification could be, how long have you been at your job?

Qualification could be, what degrees and experience do you have before we place you in a different employment scenario, whatever. But all of your qualification questions should be answered before they jump on the call with you so that you know who you’re dealing with. you know how the call is going to go before you get on the phone.

Then you want to ask anything about aspirational … Aspirations or goals. Examples are what is your number one goal for this strategy session, what is your goal for working together, what is your goal for the next year and what is your goal for the next three years?

We want to know that stuff so that, A, we know if we can serve them, and B we know where they’re headed. Because if we know we can serve them and we know where they’re headed, we know how to work that call. So we’re already putting a plan in our mind for how that call is going to go, what we’re going to be able to offer them, what we’re going to be able to bring to the table in that relationship.

Then we want to do some future pacing. Basically, what does your life look like a year from now, having worked together? Similar to the goals, but what we’re trying to do is to get them to future pace themselves. Future pace their life, their business, their growth, whatever. We’re getting them to answer that question.

We also want to know what kind of help is needed.  What specifically are they looking for help with? If we’re looking at business development services, maybe they have marketing, copywriting, content creation, but they don’t have a designer. I’m looking for a design.

Or if it’s from a personal growth standpoint, they already have a coach. They own a business. What they specifically need is somebody to be accountable … Somebody can be accountable for, like an accountability partner. So trying to get that out of the questions too.

Then the last thing … And I say this is optional, anymore. And that’s money. So for a really long time … And if you look at some applications for some coaches and mentors and high-end digital products, a lot of them ask the money question. And the money question is primarily to qualify whether they’re going to be able to pay for the offer or not. Sometimes with our clients, I’ll add it.

If the brand is big enough, the market is big enough, the offer is big enough, I will add a money question. You know, what is the size of your business? How much revenue do you do? What is solving this problem worth to you, is it worth $25,000? It just depends on the context and the scenario of the business and the offer.

I oftentimes leave it off though, because if you have the right offer, then the money question is irrelevant. We start from a place of serving. So if I’m even able to get on the phone, or if my team is even able to get on the phone for 15 minutes with somebody and point them in the right direction, it is worth it to us, so that it shortcuts their path … It’s a worthwhile contribution and investment on our part.

So I don’t necessarily ask a money question anymore. We used to … And I didn’t see that there was a difference with it on or off. So I would encourage you in your applications to test both. Test the money question.

Or take it off and see what happens. See if you are getting more tire kickers if you are closing more. I’d venture to guess that it probably won’t matter … The strength of your offer is going to dictate how well you’re selling or not. So it’s just something to test, something to think about.

So I think that is that’s about all I got on this one. Let’s see if I have anymore. No … Oh, yeah. So just a little highlight. Do you like these kinds of Daily? Just in the question box, just let me know. That way … I enjoy kind of this mind map, mind share process map kind of thing, it helps me diagram something. And then I think it also has some value for you too.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all, if you would like to jump on the phone and talk to us about your offer, your marketing executing some automation, doing some traffic, whatever, go to doneforyou.com/start. We can put all this in place and work on a plan to get you higher-paying clients, more awesome clients. And if there’s anything you need, just go to doneforyou.com/start and just jump in the chatbox in the lower right-hand corner, and we’ll get that taken care of.

And I’ll be back tomorrow. So we’ll see you soon. All right. Thanks. Bye.

The post 3 Simple Methods For Attracting High Ticket Clients appeared first on Done For You.

Today we’re going to talk about the software that you’re going to use to run your membership site or choosing how to choose the right software to run your membership site.

Last Monday we talked about membership sites and how you can charge for membership sites and you know how to build them and content for them and all that other stuff. Yesterday, we talked about content. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the tech part of it. The setup and just to bring it all home because up until this point, we have brainstormed content for your membership site. We’ve picked a niche or a market. We brainstormed some content if you remember inside that mind map.

Then yesterday we talked about creating that content and how there’s a couple of different modalities for content. There is your text-based stuff, you know, PDF downloads or blog posts. There is a video, and then you can pull the audio out of the video so that you have a video and an audio presentation. We also talked about some different ways that you can deliver content, whether it’s monthly, whether it’s a big block, whether it’s whatever. And we talked some about some pricing stuff too, like how to price, whether you sell monthly or annual, how to use that inside of an upsell sequence or whatever.

Software for Membership Site

Today, we’re going to talk about the software to use. Now a membership site in and of itself is pretty simple. I mean, all it is is a collection of web pages that are protected, and the only way to get to those pages or those files is when you’re logged in.

I mean, almost every website has some sort of a protected membership login. It’s the same thing, you know? The difference is you in having a membership, you’re charging a subscription for access, or maybe you’re charging a gateway, an entry fee for access to your information. But the subscription part is the membership. The membership is just kind of the portal. You log into the membership, you get added into a membership dashboard and the dashboard is where you see your video courses or your audio courses or PDFs or whatever it ends up being. And you can have one course or two courses or four courses or a couple of memberships, or however, it is you decide to kind of split it up.

1. Moodle

There were a lot of different ways to build, functionally to protect that content. If you remember a couple of years ago, or earlier in the week, I talked about a decade ago, there was a course called, Teaching Cells that came out, and Teaching Cells was just incredible software for what it was … or it was a membership course on how to build membership courses, which is a little bit tongue in cheek, but they had some ground material. It was put out by a guy named Brian Clark who started Copyblogger. He went through and walked through this entire model of how to build this membership website software in a piece of software called Moodle. This is a CMS. Also protect it with a piece of software called aMember, which is very, very old now. I’m looking at their website. I don’t think they updated it.

This is how we used to build membership sites. We would take a piece of software like Moodle and Moodle looks like it’s been updated a little bit, but Moodle is what is known as a learning management software, LMS. The LMS software, there are very sophisticated forms of LMS software that are very, very, very expensive. They are what is powering all of these digital learning platforms. Every college is doing distance learning, especially right … I mean right now, and has a membership login and all that other stuff, they are using a form of an LMS, a learning management software. There’s a lot of very expensive software applications out there that they can run. There are corporate versions of Teachable and stuff that people use.

Moodle is a very simple free one. It’s an open-source piece. It’s open-source software that you can download. You can install it on your web server. You can configure it, use it, put your stuff in there. It puts everything behind a membership login. Now the part that controls the payment is usually different. Usually, you have Moodle, which is your software, your LMS software that controls how the content is delivered, that controls the video, that controls the login, all that stuff. And then what you do is you pair it with some sort of money software, like a collection gateway kind of membership site software.

2. aMember

The software called aMember was actually how I learned how to build membership sites. I built a Moodle site and then I wrapped it in aMember here, and aMember had the portal for putting your credit card information in and sending it to a merchant processor, all of that stuff. It was a very time-intensive process. There was a lot of handholding and things because by the time you have an LMS and then a payment software, payment gateways like an aMember tied to a Stripe or authorized.net, you have an email sending software, then you have a couple of other different random integrations and shit starts breaking real quick.

3. Wishlist Member

We found out quickly that this is not the right way to do it. It’s not an advantageous way of doing it. We started looking for other options and we found, the first kind of big membership software that was created for WordPress was this WishList member. I would say it’s probably the industry standard. Here, “Trusted by over 103 active membership sites.” So a lot of membership site software. It’s a lot of people using the software.

It’s very easy and integrates directly with WordPress.  You can have a WordPress site that powers 25% of the internet and add in this WishList Member plugin. Now all of a sudden you have a membership website software so it has members login; member login, pages, widgets, you know, functionality. You can protect any page, any category, any image that is on your site. So even if you want to retroactively protect some of your pages because they’re great content, you can do that with WishList Member. You can also show the first a hundred words of a blog post and then have a read more button. No, go … Go Erie is where I live, it’s the newspaper here. But if you look at any of these online newspaper places where you can only read three or four articles, this payment gateway or Paywall, is what it’s called.

But you read the first a hundred or 200 words, and then to read more, you have to become a subscriber for 99 cents a month or whatever. Then WishList Member has that functionality too. You can protect all your blog posts if they want to read them. There are lots of different things you can do with a membership plugin. A lot of different ways you can make money with that membership plugin. WishList Member is a great, great tool. We use it for a lot of client sites.

4. LearnDash

LearnDash is another one that we have since started using lately. They have some really interesting functionality for content licenses. They have some great dashboards and really … It’s a very pretty software whereas WishList Member is not. WishList Member is not a whole lot to look at. I mean, it’s nice and it’s functional and it works great, but LearnDash has some cool tools that tie in with a lot of other things.

5. Ontraport

If we just want to cut right to the chase, we use Ontraport, which is a CRM, and it has a WordPress plugin, which will create your membership website software for you. It will protect all of your membership content and tie it to the customer record inside your CRM so that when somebody buys, it sends them their username and password, which is nice. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to set up originally but you know that when somebody buys something, they have their login. It isn’t up to them to go give their login and their password and all that other stuff.

Ontraport has worked well for that for more sophisticated membership website software or for more sophisticated … just protecting content in a more sophisticated way. if somebody buys, somebody sets up an email account with you and then they purchase maybe a month down the road, then they get their membership unlocked, Ontraport tracks how many times they’re logging in and all that other stuff. So really, really nice stuff. If you have a WordPress site, that’s how you would end up integrating it.

6. Kajabi

Now, if you want a more robust platform that isn’t WordPress based. Some people do, Kajabi is my favorite. Kajabi is a knowledge commerce platform. They very much, pride themselves in building robust membership website software that helps people learn. Content creators create, sell and help people, build the software and solutions that they want their members to go through. And brilliant software works well. It’s intuitive to use, they have pipelines and all kinds of other crazy stuff. They do email marketing and it’s just a very robust platform anymore. It’s great software.

7. Teachable

A competitor of Kajabi, somebody is like a Teachable. Teachable has also very nice software. If I had to pick one, I would pick Kajabi, just because they have a lot of marketing functionality and a lot of marketing tools like a Teachable, which is just kind of an off-the-shelf LMS uses. Kajabi is very much marketing heavy. Whereas Teachable is just very much course heavy, you know? So it just depends on how much marketing you think you’re going to need to do. And if you’re going to handle it doing something else.

If you have an email marketing platform, if you have a merchant processor, if you have like all of these things kind of in your business, Kajabi is probably the better way to go. Whereas Teachable, they have had some course creation stuff, and it’s nice to use, this drag and drop and all kinds of other stuff, but they both work well. So that is kind of how we ended up structuring how we end up building membership website software from a restriction standpoint.

Now let’s see. All right. Do you have any questions here?

What can you charge for membership?

All right. We went through creating content yesterday. What can you charge for membership? We kind of covered this Monday, but we’re going to run through it again real quick. From a membership standpoint, anything below $10 is an easy membership. People are going to stay typically for years for anything on $10, in terms of membership. They’re great for qualifying buyers and then building a tribe of buyers and building a tribe of people who you can cultivate and nurture and stuff into some of your higher-end programs. It’s really where a lot of the low dollar membership website software come in. Anything between like $20 and a hundred, ends up being kind of that middle of the road membership that people are going to stay for between three and five months for as long as you give value. That becomes a profit center in your business.

When you’re at those levels, if you’re charging $67 a month for your membership, then you can also sell like a year-long, an annual version of that membership and give a lot of value. The annual version might give them three months free, but you collect the nine months. Whereas your normal membership is only five months. That’s what your normal churn is. You’re able to almost double your revenue by selling the annual version. And then you just let them know a little bit beforehand that their annual subscription is almost done. And then you rebuild them into the next month. Above a hundred dollars a month, you can do, but it usually needs to have live elements in it.

A live coaching call, group coaching, maybe a Facebook community, a Facebook group, something that is alive and more dynamic than just the kind of login and consumes material. That’s where those groups work well.

For Questions and Guide

I hope that answers the pricing question and software question. Do you have anything at all, anything at all, just go to DoneForYou.com/start and fill out a little application and book a call on our calendar and we will make sure to put together an action plan for you for your funnels, your traffic, your optimization, whatever. If you have any questions anywhere on the DFY site, there’s a little button in the lower right-hand corner. You can open up a chat and start talking with our team there, and I will talk to you soon, all right.

The post Software To Launch Membership Website appeared first on Done For You.

The average website only converts at a little more than 2%, and that’s a shame considering just how much effort, resources, time, and investments are made just to get relevant people to visit your website.

Most visitors who reach your website, your landing pages, or your funnels don’t take any action. They come in and then they leave.

That hurts.

You might get 2% conversions (on average), but you need more. You’ll want a part of the other 98% and retargeting is the way to get there. It’s a remarkable way for you to reach out to all those visitors who’ve left your site without doing anything.

But wait… Does retargeting really work or is it a fantasy?

The average click through rate of a regular display banner ad is a little shy of 0.07%. Meanwhile, the average click through rate of a retargeting banner ad is 0.7%.

According to Invespcro.com, retargeted customers are three times more likely to click on your ad (and take action) compared to brand new visitors to your website.

Compared to all other digital marketing strategies available, it’s retargeting that gives an average brand lift of over 1046%, according to ComScore.

Convinced?

But wait… Here are a few basic steps you should take before you launch your retargeting campaigns:

Sweeten your original offer

Chances are that you have a regular funnel built to convert fresh, incoming traffic into customers. Your regular funnel is usually your first attempt to get new prospects to sign up as leads or to make sales. It’s likely that you already have an offer to get people to sign up.

But that’s not the offer you’ll make when you do retargeting. You’ll have to consider sweetening the deal a bit.

For instance, let’s say your original offer was X, you’d have to give X + Y away this time around.

Here are a few examples:

Original offer: Get 20% Discount
Retargeting Offer: Get Exclusive 30% Discount

Original Offer: Download eBook
Retargeting Offer: Get the eBook + One-to-one Coaching Call

Original Offer: Get a Free Trial
Retargeting Offer: Get Free Trial + Exclusive White Glove Migration

See what we are doing here? We are enticing visitors who already saw your original offer with an even better deal.

Build dedicated landing pages for retargeting

Most businesses and marketers point their retargeting ads to their original, main campaign funnels.

Big mistake.

You don’t want to send your retargeted traffic to the same funnels and landing pages since there’s no point in doing so. They’ve already seen your offer.

Build dedicated landing pages and funnels specifically designed for your retargeting campaigns in line with the retargeting special offers you are making (as above).

Use countdown timers

One of the reasons why most offers don’t convert (whether they are main campaigns or retargeting campaigns) is because there’s no pressure for your visitors to act. They normally think that the offer you are making is going to be around for awhile so they can come back to it later.

An easy way to apply slight pressure on them to take immediate action is to use a countdown timer for your offer, stating that the offer will end soon (with a countdown timer showing just how much time there’s left before the offer ends).

Countdown timers are known to boost your conversion rates by at least 3 times, as this experiment by ConversionXL proves, thanks to Graham Charlton of SalesCycle.

Duplicate email sequences and tweak

You would already have an email sequence (or a set of autoresponders) that triggers for every lead signing up for your original offer.

Take that autoresponder sequence, and tweak it a little (at least the first few messages to acknowledge the new offers you make with your retargeting campaigns).

Since you have a new offer that you’d be making on your retargeting campaigns, allow the first few email messages (like the welcome email) to reflect the exact offer you made for an overall consistent experience for your prospects or leads.

Test your retargeting funnels

You never know what works and what doesn’t until you start testing your funnel elements. Without A/B testing, you don’t have a way of know winghat works and what doesn’t. Just like you’d normally test your main campaign funnels, you’d have to deploy separate A/B testing workflows for your retargeting funnels too.

You can test out the offers you are making, the ads, the landing pages, the email subject lines, and more.

Yes, it’s another line of testing for an entire funnel (and your work only multiplies) but it’s worth it.

That’s how you launch retargeting campaigns, and yes, they mean more work.

Nothing worth pursuing comes easy, now, does it?

GSDdaily Episode 87

Today, we’re going to continue on the retargeting front. What we’re going to do is we’re going to walk through setting up campaigns from scratch. We’re going to start with a piece of an ad platform called AdRoll. Also, we’re going to walk through the building and creating banner ads, and we’re going to start talking about pixel data.

Now, yesterday, we introduced the following ideas

1. audiences
2. pixels
3. stepping somebody through a marketing or retargeting funnel, based on the action they took or based on the action that they were about to take

Today, we’re going to build on that and dig into AdRoll. We’re going to log into the platform and we’re also going to create some banner ads in Canva, and I’m going to show you a couple of just little tweaks, little things that I do to create the banner ads quickly, because a lot of design sucks and banner ads are expensive too, if you were to go to a designer and have them build a bunch of different banners. There’s a tool that I like to use. It spits them out really quickly. To get started today, though, we’re going to visit this article, Basics of Retargeting You Can’t Afford to Ignore.

The reason retargeting is so powerful is because, by and large, you’re never going to get a better return on ad spend.

Somebody has been to your website, they’ve watched some of your videos, they know you’re around, they’re aware of your brand, they’re aware of your products and your offers and all that other stuff, so retargeting is the quickest path to cash in terms of advertising.

The awareness is already built. They already know what you do. They’ve already investigated you to a small degree, perhaps, or maybe to a large degree, but your brand and your message are consistently being reinforced in their head every time they log in, they get online. Whether they are browsing the internet, they’re seeing little banner ads, if they’re on Facebook, they’re seeing banner ads and they’re seeing videos and stuff.

Your brand is consistently being re-reinforced. They’re being reminded of you if they did business with you and maybe they didn’t do anything or they haven’t done anything with you in a while. You’re always top of mind. You can think of it like if you’ve ever thought about buying a new car. Let’s say you want to buy a Tesla, let’s say. Every time you see a Tesla, it just jumps right out at you because you’re mentally aware of Teslas. You want a Tesla, it’s at the forefront of your brain. Do you know what I mean? You’re constantly looking for Teslas, you’re constantly picking up and spotting Teslas.

Now, retargeting works under the same modality, really. I mean, every time they start browsing online, they see your logo or they see your image or they see your banner, so it is always at the forefront of their mind with retargeting. Whether they do business with you tomorrow or a week from now or a month from now or six months from now, you’re building that awareness. You’re building that brand recognition in their head. The difference is you’re only doing it with 2,000 people or 3,000 people or 5,000 or 10,000 people. You’re doing it with a very small group of people, so you’re able to build that and channel that to a very small group of people.

Here’s just a fun little hack. In Christmas time, when ad costs go apeshit crazy when CPMs are three, four, five times what they are right now because Amazon and Best Buy and all the big box retailers, they’re all buying ads, and then, of course, ads are being purchased on a bidding model. What we do with a lot of clients is we shut off their cold traffic ads like halfway through November or so and we then ramp up their retargeting budget. We’re not attracting new people into the ecosystem of our clients, but we’re able to optimize the ad spend through the holidays.

The prospects of our clients, continue seeing the ads because we’re just doing retargeting. We’re just not welcoming new people into the silo if you know what I mean. We’re not engaging in awareness and branding campaigns through the holidays because that’s like murder, it’s just crazy, wicked expensive, but we are showing up for retargeting. Then in January, when ad prices just go through the floor because all of these big advertisers pulled out, we ramp up hard in January to the cold traffic and then we start expanding on the retargeting campaigns again. That’s just kind of a thing.

Advantages of Retargeting

Retargeting, what we’re going to do, on average, less than 2% of visitors are going to buy. Retargeting is going to let us engage with people who visit the homepage, who look at categories, who look at products, who add to cart, all of that stuff. One of the cool things you can do with retargeting is you can actually sweeten your original offer. If you want to give a 20% discount code or 30% or 50% or whatever, a flash sale, you can do all that with retargeting without having to engage them in any other way.

You can build dedicated landing pages for retargeting too, so the last chance offers a landing page that is only seen for retargeting. We’ve done this quite a bit where somebody will come into our world and then from our retargeting ad we’ll say, “Hey, this is the last chance offer,” or, “We saw you went to such and such page, but you didn’t opt-in. Why was that? What can we do differently?” that kind of thing.

You can use countdown timers, hugely effective, no matter what. I mean, just having a countdown timer on a page increases conversion. You can duplicate email sequences and then tweak those sequences. You can split-test different email sequences for retargeted audiences. It’ll be just a small variation of a cold promo sequence, but it will address the fact that this is the second or third time that somebody has been to a website. Then, you want to test your retargeting funnels.

AdRoll

What we’re going to do is we’re going to kick over first of all into AdRoll. What I want to do is I want to log into AdRoll, and I want to walk you through audiences and how to set up an audience so that you can install your pixel, set up an audience, and then go from there. Let’s go here. Inside, we have our pixel active, which basically means that the pixel is active, it was last received 15 minutes ago. Yesterday, when I told you to set up an AdRoll account and install your pixel if you did that, then you should have a pixel active right now. That way you’re collecting new people.

Audiences

If we go down here to Audiences, the audience is the most important thing that you’re going to set up first. Inside your Audiences, what we want to do is we want to … I have a number of different audiences set up. We have high-intent groups, we have website visitors, like all website visitors, we have a Facebook audience, an Amazon audience, a funnel audience, an email audience, a promoter product audience.

Just to see what this is, what the funnel audience is if somebody has been to the website and the URL that they’ve visited has the word funnel in it, then they get dropped in this audience. Well, what that lets us do is have a very specific silo of people, a very specific group of people who are only seeing funnel creative. The same goes for Facebook, the same goes for email or high-intent audiences or whatever. But how we do that is we would set up a new audience and the new audience that we want to set up, there’s a couple of different ways to do it.

We can do URL Visited, that’s probably the easiest way to do it, is the URL that they’ve visited matches Done For You. If the URL matches doneforyou.com, which is basically anywhere on the website, then it’s going to put them in this one specific audience. But let’s say I wanted to only have an audience for the number of pages viewed.

If somebody viewed five pages, then we put them in a different audience. Now obviously, if somebody went to maybe five pages of your website, they’re pretty engaged. They’re pretty interested in what it is you’re offering. Maybe they go to a sales page, maybe they go to a homepage and then a blog post, then a sales page and then a blog post, then a support page. Whatever that looks like, if they visited five pages, they’re pretty interested. It would make sense to show them a different offer, a different ad, right? Because they’re pretty high-intent.

Now, let’s say we’re looking at URL visited, and then we’re just going to go to Done For You, see what kind of page we got here. We are going to go to Solution, we’re going to go to Automated Profits, it’s just a webinar that we got running right now. Automated Profits, if you would like to register for it, I’m going to drop the link here.

Setting Up Audience

For everybody who hit this webpage, if we wanted to capture them in an AdRoll audience,

1. New Audience
2. URL Visited

You can see right now, we just started this webinar, so you can see that there have been four people. It averages four visitors a day which is nothing, but right now, that’s the number of people that are on this page.

Now, check this out. Let’s say we were to pull this out, so we’re just going to pull this out. On the Resources page, on average we get seven visitors. That’s pretty cool, right? Check this out. If we do doneforyou.com and then we just do a little hotkey, actually, we might need to fix that. We’re going to look at that page, then my audience name is going to be Webinar Registration Visitors. Then this is not a conversion audience. What a conversion audience is, is if the audience is the actual thank you page then the confirmation page, it signals a conversion, then it is a conversion audience. We’re going to keep this pixel for 90 days, we’re just going to go ahead and create this audience. That way it’s done, it’s good.

Conversion Audience

Now what we’re going to do is just to finish, to actually make that conversion audience, we’re going to opt-in here. When we opt-in, then we’re going to see the conversion page, which is right here. This URL is my conversion audience, this is the page that we’re going to be … We’re going to set up a new audience, a second audience. The URL visit is going to be this. Please remove HTTPS, okay. All right. This one is going to be Webinar Conversions, or I’m going to say Webinar Leads just so I know. Then this is a conversion audience. The conversion value is just a free opt-in, so we’re going to do zero, but if they were to convert, we can do 0.01. How long to keep a person in the audience, 90 days. Then we’re going to create this audience.

Including and Excluding Audiences For Your Campaigns

Now we have two audiences. We basically have our webinar registration page visitors and then we have our leads. Yesterday, we talked about including and excluding. When we wanted to create an ad, we would include everybody who landed on that webinar registration page, and then we would exclude all the leads for our campaign. That way, when somebody opts in for the webinar, we aren’t asking them to opt-in for the webinar again, we’re not wasting ad dollars in doing that. Then once the audiences are set up, what we need is we need a banner ad.

Creating Banner Ads

What we’re going to do is we are going to go create banner ads for this automated webinar. For banner ads, my best … Photoshop is one way to build banner ads. It’s an easy way to build banner ads, but the better way, the way that I very much rather building banner ads, is Canva. Especially for retargeted ads, and here is why.

1. Canva

We’re going to go into Canva and we’re going to create a Facebook ad. There are lots and lots of Facebook ads that we can … I’m going to go to Home. There are lots of Facebook ads, lots of different ad sizes and images and graphics, and all kinds of stuff that we can do, but if we start from a Facebook ad then what we’re doing is we’re basically creating a Facebook ad that we can use. Then, we can resize it. If we resize it, then we can create the six different AdRoll banner ad sizes that they recommend. There’s 970 x 250, 468 x 60, 728 x 90. There are different banner ad sizes that they recommend and we can create them on demand.

What we’re going to do, we’re just going to do this. We’ve got some nice images and whatnot around here. That one’s actually a little bit more complicated than what I was thinking. How about we just use this one, just for example’s sake. The ad that we’re going to create, Find Your Footing. All right, it’s running a little bit slow today.

We are going to do Automated Profits and pull the size down a little bit. We’re going to do 42, then Click Here to Register. From there, we’re going to drop in a new image. We’re just going to look at photos and see what they’ve got. Oftentimes, I use Envato Elements for a lot of photos, but sometimes they have decent photos here inside Canva too. If you have a pro account for Canva, then you can just drop in whatever. Let’s just see what this looks like. We’re just going to drop in this laptop. That doesn’t look very good, does it? Let’s see, how about this guy? There we go. Oh, that looks cool. We’re going to remove this one.

We can export this as a Facebook ad right now, it is in the Facebook ad size that we need, but what we want to do is we want to use it for AdRoll. AdRoll, if you Google AdRoll recommended sizes, then we have our recommended sizes right here, Digital Marketing Ad Sizes You Need to Know. For our image ads, there are six, like I said. There’s 300 x 250, 160 x 600, 728 x 90, 300 x 600, 970 x 250, and 320 x 50.

What we’re going to do is I’m going to pull this off over here. This is why I love Canva for these things. We have our base image here and what we can do is we can resize this thing. Our base image is 1,200 x 628. We are going to add a custom size, and this custom size is going to be 300 x 250. We’re going to add another size, I’m just going off of that AdRoll recommended images, 160 x 600. Then we have another one, which is 728 x 90, 90. We can do the same with all six, we’re going to hit copy and resize.

Now it is creating our additional image sizes. Basically, it’s creating those. Now we have a super, super, super short one. All we have to do now is we just click this and then we’re going to want to reposition the font and stuff, make sure the phones work and all that other stuff, but basically, we can drag this over, and then we can make this look a lot better just by dragging stuff around.

If we go to the previous one, here we have a tall one, this is called the skyscraper. This, we can just change the size and then we can put it wherever we want. We’re going to want to mess around with the fonts a little bit. Make sure they’re centered, they have a button or something on the image size. All in all, you can just download these out of Canva and upload them right into AdRoll. Apply the audiences that we just created, and then now you have a retargeted banner ad campaign that is going live, after their approval. Of course, they have to approve it.

All you do is you go into Ad Campaigns, you create a new ad campaign for your audience, and then you are live within a day. You already have your audience. It’s super, super cheap. You can start with like five bucks a day for retargeted pixels. You have your banner set up, you can start split testing banners and creative against each other.

For Questions and Guide

If you would like for us to put together a retargeting campaign like this for you, in Facebook, in AdRoll, where your banners are following people around, your prospects around online, they go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out a little application, schedule a call with my team and I. We’ll walk you through putting together an action plan, putting together something like this. I’ll talk to you soon, all right? Thanks, bye.

The post Retargeting Basics: Starting Your Campaign For Your Website appeared first on Done For You.

Consider this: If you have an e-commerce website, only 2% of all your visitors will shop on their visit. The other 98% are just gone, according to Adroll.

Or maybe you wanted them to sign up for an offer you made on your landing pages or funnels or have your visitors contact you using your contact form.Perhaps you just wanted your visitors to create a free account for the SaaS product you just built.

Only 2% of your entire visitors will ever take action.

All the rest are gone, if you don’t do something about it, that is.

Retargeting helps you get those 98% of visitors back. It helps improve your overall conversion rates while simultaneously bringing your costs down. If you just threw money at a retargeting campaign and expect your users to come back to your site to finish what they started, it’s not going to happen.

Your retargeting campaigns will need the same diligence, attention to detail, creativity, and hustle for them to work for you. Here are some smart ways to make your retargeting work for you.

Build your audiences

Retargeting has everything to do with the kind of audiences you build on platforms. Facebook audiences, Google Ads Audiences, Adroll Audiences, or Retargeter audiences. Each platform allows you to build your audiences as you deem fit.

While we all know that there’s going to be at least one audience that’s a default audience (everyone who visits your website and/or landing pages). For the most part, the onus is on you to build specific audiences based on their browsing patterns, the URL paths you want them to take, or specific pages they visit on your site.

Depending on your website, you might want to develop audiences such as:

• People who visit all pages of your website (this is default)
• People who signed up as leads, downloaded a free document (PDF, eBooks), people who’ve contacted you, or people who signed up for an appointment.
• The complete list of your customers (always updated)
• List of customers who’ve added items to their cart but did not complete a transaction
• Potential customers who’ve initiated checkout but did not complete

Stay relevant

Relevance is big with retargeting and staying relevant (by showing the exact kind of content that your visitors would be interested in) goes a long way to make retargeting more effective.

By working with your audiences and with attention to detail, you could serve more relevant content with your retargeting campaigns.

If you had an e-commerce store, for instance, you could use Adroll’s Dynamic Ads to show your visitors the exact products that they were considering or those that they initially had an intent to purchase.

Here’s an example of an Adroll Liquid Ad:

Rework your creatives for retargeting

If you use specific ads and landing pages for your main paid campaigns, you shouldn’t use the same creatives for your retargeting campaigns.

Change your creatives (ads and landing pages) or tweak your main creatives to make it more relevant for your retargeting campaigns. In fact, if you could, create completely new creative assets for your retargeting campaigns.

Businesses that are serious about their retargeting campaigns generally create a dedicated set of ads and matching landing pages to launch specific retargeting campaigns.

Try retargeting email

The average shopping cart abandonment rate is at a whopping 67%, according to Baymard research.

That just hurts. A personal, engaging, and highly-effective way to try to counter the huge abandonment rate — and also boost revenue and profits — is to use retargeting email.

Email customers are at least 11% more valuable than your regular Twitter followers other social networks (with Facebook being the only exception)

According to Moz, email retargeting can give you 4X the revenue and 18X profits.

Leading retargeting platforms such as Adroll and Retargeter already provide you with features to send retargeting emails.

Include & exclude audiences

Don’t waste your budget by choosing “everyone” as an audience.

As you launch your retargeting campaigns, not everyone who visits your website and leaves is the apt audience. By including and excluding audiences, you get more control on who sees your ads and who doesn’t.

How you manage your audiences determines how effective your retargeting campaigns are going to be. For example, Shioban McGinty of HubSpot advocates that you should ideally exclude anyone who spends less than 10 seconds on your website (testing the time frame helps you identify your unique time frame, however).

By using “include and exclude” features available on every platform that you’d use for retargeting, you can:

• Identify and include high-intent audiences who are most interested in your business, products, or services.
• Include only those people who might have followed a specific path or pattern while on your website (such as people who read your blog, and then checked out your services page, and also landed on your contact page).
• Exclude people who might have already purchased your products or those that don’t need to see your campaign at the moment.
• Exclude people who “bounced”, “didn’t spend enough time on your website”, or those who might have accidentally landed on your website.

How do you manage your retargeting campaigns?

If you’d like help to strategize, launch, and manage your retargeting campaigns, or if you’d like to discuss your paid marketing strategy, our team is on standby and we’d love to talk. Hop on a call now. 

GSDdaily Episode 86

This entire week we’re going to talk about retargeting. It has been such an important part of our business and our clients‘ business because the people who see a retargeted ad, this isn’t the first time that they have seen you, or they’ve seen your videos, or they’ve seen your brand, or they’ve taken part in your message.

The people who see your retargeted ad have already been to your website. They’ve already seen a Facebook video or a live stream. They may have already interacted with you and your business at least once, and that is the power of retargeting. That’s why retargeting turns into such a fantastic marketing medium, especially when you’re just starting up or when you’re trying to scale because your retargeted budget is going to flip into cash a lot faster.

Somebody who has been on your website, they’re going to come back to your website, they’re going to go to your sales page, your offer page, whatever, and they’re going to convert that much more quickly. Because let’s face it, only about half a percent, 1%, 2% of people who are going to buy something from you the first time they see it or the first time they land on a website. Most of your sales though are going to come from your retargeted traffic, people who come back to your website and they purchase after they’ve had some time to think about your offer.

Today, we are going to go through a guide. Retargeting Campaigns: Smart Tips To Get More From Less. This is the article, I’m going to add it here to the chatbox. Here’s the post, and you should see that on Facebook and YouTube and wherever else you’re watching. For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of DoneForYou.com. We specialize in creating offers, building sales funnels, and setting up marketing automation and traffic campaigns, basically everything that you need to have in order to scale a digital business.

Retargeting Campaign

Today, and this week, we’re talking about retargeting. Mostly because it’s super easy to set up. It’s super easy to set up, it’s super easy to build retargeting campaigns from, and the software is really pretty prevalent. It doesn’t take too much to get going and you’re going to be able to get some success from it pretty quickly. We’re over here on the tutorial page here, Smart Tips To Get More For Less, this is the video that you’re watching right now, go ahead and hit that subscribe button right there and subscribe to future videos so that way, even if you miss the email or whatever, you still know the link for our daily live streams.

Now, retargeting helps you get all of the visitors back who come to your website. They don’t do anything or watch a video. They don’t convert. There’s a couple of steps. As you can see here, there’s a couple of scenarios. First of all, you have your prospect. Your prospect doesn’t know who you are just yet. Your prospect hits your website, and then they browse around, they click around. They’re tracked once they get there. There’s a little tiny, what’s called a cookie. That cookie that is installed in their browser, pixel fires is what it is, and now we have the ability to follow them around the rest of the internet.

We use a piece of software called AdRoll to do this, and I’m going to show you how to set it up. In a video this week, we’re going to talk about banners, and then we’re going to talk about setting up AdRoll, and then we’re going to talk about setting up the pixels. We’re going to go through and set all of that stuff up in the rest of the episodes this week. Today, I wanted to lay a good foundation for what retargeting is though.

Pixel Fires

When somebody hits your website, pixel fires and installs a cookie on their browser. Now, what that does is it lets your banner ads override all of the other ads that are on the websites that they’re visiting. If somebody comes to your website and then they go to Woot.com, let’s say. They go to Woot, and they will see your banner override whatever banner is supposed to be there. There are always banners that are circling, but basically what happens is that the retargeting overrides the banner placement, and you pay a little bit more because all of the banner ads are built on a bidding mechanism.

It overrides the banner that is there. You pay a little bit more, but this person is super, super hyperactive because they’ve already been to your website. They already know about you. This is their second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, twelfth impression. At the end of the day, they’re more likely to convert, and they do. Your return on ad spend from retargeted ads is the highest it is going to be in all paid advertising. When a prospect is tracked, then they leave, and then they see your ad on other sites.

Now what happens is when they come back, then it resets that ad. It resets that pixel. One of the things we do on Facebook a lot is we do, if they’ve been to the website in the last five days, show them this ad, if they’ve been to the website in the last 10 days, show them this ad and then exclude the previous five. You can use banner ads almost like an autoresponder, which is kind of cool.

Audiences

Retargeting has everything to do with the kind of audiences you build on platforms – Facebook audiences, Google audiences, AdRoll audiences.

Your audience is the people who visit a specific website or a specific landing page or a specific confirmation page or whatever. That is your audience. And your audience can be just the people who buy X products, or it can be just the people who signed up for Y lead magnet. It can be super, super specific, or it can be everybody who has been to the website in the last 30 days or the last 180 days. It can be very, very broad. You can have audiences of different sizes, and your use of audiences is how the banner network knows what to show and when to show it.

For example, you can have people who visit all the webpages on your website, people who signed up as leads, a complete list of customers, all your buyers. On Facebook, you can upload your buyer’s list and create custom audiences and build lookalike audiences from those. The list of potential customers who have initiated checkout, but did not complete, so will be added to cart or cart abandonment buyers, or cart abandonment prospects. What retargeting does really is let you stay relevant. People will be reminded of your brand whether they buy from you and do business with you or not. They’re reminded of your business and your offers.

There’s a lot of companies that we work with where sometimes their customers forget about them. Even big contract manufacturers and stuff, every once in a while, if the email list isn’t really engaged or the prospects don’t have a reason to come back to the website, they don’t. Then it’s out of sight, out of mind. What banner retargeting lets you do is for a very, very minimal budget, you can continue to show ads to your website visitors for up to six months. Seven if they’ve been to the website, they’re going to think you’re still everywhere. In the next six months, your audiences will continue seeing your ads as long as that cookie is still installed in their browser, which is awesome.

Banner Ad Sizes

What you want to do though, is you want to make sure that your creativity is on point. When you get into banner ads, which is what retargeting mostly is, or AdRoll retargeting, which is what I’m going to show you how to set up, it’s all banner ads. There are six sizes, six specific ad sizes that are the most popular on AdRoll, but they also have video ads, they have some odd sizes for websites that have odd placements. There’s a lot of different ways, but you need to have good creativity.

Designing Banners

We use Canva for a lot of our own projects for the stuff that we do because we test a lot of stuff. We use Canva, we use a lot of Photoshop. Canva and Photoshop are really kind of the big ones. Photoshop tends to be the place where we do a lot of very specific creativity. I have some Done For You ads running right now that are just simple ones done in Canva. It’s really just meant to test a bunch of different creative quickly and see what flies, then we can perfect the images and all the text and all that other stuff.

I try to put new creative up about once every 45 days to 60 days for us. That tends to be when it starts to play out a little bit from a retargeted banner standpoint. But anything less than that, you don’t necessarily reinforce the message. I was actually just kicking through AdRoll this morning, and that’s our project. That’s what we’re going to do is we’re going to create some new creative this week, and then I’m going to show you how to post it and show you how to set AdRoll up. That way you see actual retargeting campaigns going live, and then you’re going to see campaigns while you’re out and about because you’re on the website too. That’s going to be a lot of fun.

Include and Exclude Audiences

Now, one of the important things about AdRoll, is you want to include and exclude audiences. How that works, the exclusion tool is really pretty interesting, because the idea is you have your big whole. Your big whole is all of your website traffic. And then you want to not show your ad to certain buyers, and the buyer’s list is going to be just a smaller segment of the overall whole. You have your big pool, all your website traffic, and then a smaller group of people who bought. We want to exclude this group from our AdRoll, from our banner campaigns.

What ends up happening is, because you include the whole, you have all of your website traffic. You exclude your buyers, none of those people are going to see your ad. Now, all that’s left is everybody who hasn’t purchased. It’s just a math problem, basically. If you have 15,000 people who have been to your website and 2,000 buyers, then you’re going to be marketing to 13,000 people, 13,000 non-buyers. Your main audience, and then your buyers.

Then those 13,000 people are going to be seeing your ad until they buy. Once they buy, they’ve obviously put it into the exclusion list, then they don’t see you. That is how you start building complex kinds of retargeting automated sequences. You start doing things like abandoned cart sequences, and very specific segments where only certain buyers see certain offers. You can really go down a rabbit hole on it. Two segments that you need,

1. prospects
2. buyers

People who paid you money and people who haven’t paid you money yet.

The people who haven’t paid you money yet, you send to an offer. The people who have paid you money, then you can put them in the next offer, you can put them in some sort of onboarding or a webinar, or a customer appreciation, or discount code or whatever. There are lots of things you can do there. But that is really probably the simplest way to start setting up the audiences and the exclusions. That is kind of just a very broad-brush, as I hit my microphone, a very broad-brush explanation of retargeting.

AdRoll – Banner Retargeting Platform

Now, some of the things that we’re going to talk about this week, just to kind of set up the rest of the week is, there are a couple of things we need to do. The first is AdRoll is a fantastic banner retargeting platform. They actually do quite a bit more now, they do email retargeting, they have some cold traffic, they have some email matching stuff, but we’re going to be walking through setting up AdRoll for your business and your website. You can actually just grab an account first, and that way you already have it all set up for when we’re ready to dig into AdRoll throughout the rest of the week.

The setup is free. You can create an account for free. They will give you a pixel, and then you put the pixel on your website. As soon as the pixel is installed on your website, then it’s going to start tracking all of your audience, the people who are coming to your website. And with that, it’s going to track. Everybody who comes to your website, it’s going to pixel them, cookie them, and then it’s going to put them in an audience. It doesn’t charge. I don’t believe it charges any money for just putting together those audiences. It doesn’t start costing something until you start running ads to those audiences.

I am very much a believer in more data is a hell of a lot better than no data. Set up an AdRoll account, install the pixel, and start tracking the people who are coming to your website. We can always work with those audiences. We can always say, “If somebody landed on this webpage, then they are a buyer. If they landed on this webpage, they are a prospect because they signed up for something,” like a confirmation page. Or if they signed up for none of this stuff, then they are still just a prospect. We can always set up those audiences later, I will walk you through the audience set up this week. But you need to have audience data in order to set up those audiences.

Designing Banner Ads on Canva

The banner ads, we’re going to design in Canva. I believe it is also free to set up banner ads. There are paid plans where you can do animated gifs and stuff, which we do a lot of. In Canva, you can set up a banner ad, and we’re going to talk about sizes. There is some very specific kind of sizes. I believe 468 by 60 is the size. We’ll give you the sizes. Basically, how I ended up setting Canva up is I kind of start with one. I clone it and resize it to a bunch of different sizes. Then I drag the text and stuff around that it fulfills the needs I have for AdRoll. That’s how I do the banner ads.

And then we’re going to upload those banner ads into AdRoll. AdRoll also does Facebook, but we set up Facebook retargeting inside Facebook. That is the plan for the week. We’re going to use AdRoll for banner retargeting, we’re going to install the pixel. Well actually, you’re going to install the pixel today. And then tomorrow, we’re going to do some banner ad designs. We’re going to talk about some retargeting more in-depth on a banner creative level. For the rest of the week, we’re going to set up banner retargeting on your website. We’re going to do that by walking you through audiences, exclusions, inclusions, and then, of course, optimizing the ad campaigns.

For Questions and Guide

I hope you liked today’s presentation. If you have any questions at all and you want to go through a little action plan call where we actually book a time in the calendar, talk about your business, talk about your sales follows, your traffic strategies, your offers, your marketing automation, all of that stuff, go to DoneForYou.com/start, fill out the little form, and book a call on our calendar. If there’s anything we can do in the meantime, just go to DoneForYou.com. There’s a little chat box in the lower right-hand corner. Just click the little chat box and then just pick an option here. Fill in what we can help you with, and we’ll be happy to lend a hand.

That’s about it. I will talk to you soon, have a fantastic Monday. I’m looking forward to the rest of this week where we kind of uncovers retargeting.

The post Retargeting Campaigns: Best Tips For Selling More appeared first on Done For You.

The Need for a Marketing Automation Agency

A marketing automation agency can be your secret weapon when seeking to enhance your business’s marketing efforts. Contrary to popular belief, marketing automation isn't only for giant corporations but can be a game-changer for businesses of all sizes. In this guide, we'll focus on how to pick the right marketing automation agency to meet your specific needs and objectives.

Debunking Myths: Marketing Automation is For Everyone

Is Marketing Automation Overwhelming?

The term "marketing automation" might seem daunting, particularly if you're a small business or a creative agency. Rest assured, the right marketing automation agency will make the process seamless, efficient, and highly effective.

Marketing Automation Across the Board

Marketing automation agencies cater to businesses, big and small, spanning various industries. Whether you're a tech startup or a local retail shop, marketing automation is applicable and beneficial.

Critical Advantages of Partnering with a Marketing Automation Agency

Achieve Scalability and Efficiency

Its scalability is one of the most compelling reasons to work with a marketing automation agency. Automation handles repetitive tasks around the clock, freeing up your valuable resources.

A Hands-Off Approach to Lead Generation

Imagine generating qualified leads without lifting a finger. With the right marketing automation agency, you can set up systems that acquire, nurture, and convert leads automatically.

Not Just Set It and Forget It: Ongoing Benefits

Investment and Returns

While implementing automation requires an initial investment in time and capital, the long-term benefits far outweigh the costs. Your selected marketing automation agency will ensure that your systems work tirelessly, growing your business even when you're not actively involved.

Beyond Email: Multi-Channel Capabilities

The Misconception: Email is Everything

A common misconception is that marketing automation only involves email campaigns. In reality, a competent marketing automation agency can do much more.

What Multi-Channel Means for You

From SMS marketing to social media discovery and CRM synchronization, the right agency will allow you to reach your customers at every touchpoint. This ensures a customized and highly effective marketing strategy beyond simple email campaigns.

The Ultimate Advantage: Deep Customer Connections

What Meaningful Connections Can Do

A significant advantage of working with a marketing automation agency is forming more meaningful connections with your customers. Whether through personalized messaging or timing your customer interactions perfectly, automation enables a whole new level of engagement.

Final Thoughts: Simplifying Marketing Automation

Marketing automation may seem complex, but it's straightforward and highly effective with the right agency. If you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, we have a free webinar to watch to learn how easy it is to implement automation for your business.

By choosing a competent marketing automation agency, you’re not just buying a service; you're investing in your business's scalable growth and long-term success.

[Video Transcript]

Today, we will discuss what working with a marketing automation agency should look like. Now, there's a lot of different automation play. There are so many other things about marketing automation, so many different ways to cut it up and so many different ways to generate revenue from it, profit from it, and use it. But at the end of the day, some straightforward tools tend to be plug-and-play. From a marketing automation standpoint, how you combine those tools is just up to your imagination.

For those who don't know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in creating offers, building sales funnels, and doing marketing automation and traffic for clients. Marketing automation tends to be a place we thrive in because it's the glue between many different things. It's the glue that brings a lot of other elements together. It brings the pages together, and it brings the email marketing together, and it brings outbound kind of SMS stuff, and sales, and sales staff, and sales teams and, pipelines, and workflows. It all comes together in this idea of marketing automation.

What should be the goal in setting up a Marketing Automation?

When setting up marketing automation, the big thing you're looking for is making sure that the different pieces talk together. They go through, and you have your marketing. You have your CRM that speaks to your sales pages and your sales page; they talk to your CRM, and then all of that.

What we're going to talk about today is what a marketing automation agency is going to do or should do to help you grow your business online.

First, as marketing artists, we do a lot of marketing automation. We're a marketing automation agency. Although, I don't classify that as what we are. We're more like a growth team that does marketing automation.

Marketing automation is a key fundamental kind of building block of what sales funnels are and what sales funnels do.

Everybody does a small amount of marketing automation. Some agencies specialize in marketing automation, though. I would say that we specialize in marketing automation. We can make the website do things you haven't seen before, even in some of the stuff we do.

DFY website Marketing Automation

It's funny because we have our page visits tracked to Slack every once in a while. If we have somebody's email address or phone number, and they come to our website and hit a specific page, then it will send up kind of a warning flare and say, "This person is on your page." Ding and the whole deal.

When that happens, it also outputs their phone number and email address. If you have been to our website and any of our sales pages, and you get an email from me or one of my staff, it's a personalized email. That is why. It's because we have Slack configured through Zapier. We have our CRM send an alert over to Zapier. Zapier makes connections between software. It's the API hub between a bunch of different, 1000s of other, applications. A CRM sends a Zap to Slack and says, "Show, basically ping, these people on Slack every time this person, or we know who a person is, who hit a sales page.

Every once in a while, if you get a call from somebody on my team or an email from somebody on my team or even me, it's because we're watching that channel. You showed up on that page and ping; we see your email; we see your phone number because you've given it to us in the past. Not because it's weird, and we're spying on the world. But it's because it's all used from our collected data.

There have been times where we've noticed, I've seen, somebody be on page two or three or four days in a row. I don't even wait for them. I'll call them and say, "Hey, what's up, blah, blah, blah. This is Jason. You know, I saw you were on the page." And they're like, "What? You know, like, that's creepy." I'm like, "Yeah, it's creepy, but this is what we do. This is marketing automation. It's what we do. We wrote a book on it. You know what I mean?"

A good marketing agency must be able to implement workflows that will reap benefits and rewards from marketing automation.

That is one of the blessings of marketing automation. When you can run it correctly, a good marketing automation agency can do that for you. That's the idea. They're going to be able to implement those same workflows so that you reap the benefit and reward from it. There are marketing automation agencies, and then there's marketing automation for agencies. Both of those things they're the same. Marketing automation is marketing automation, whether you are an agency that is using it for your clients or you're an agency that's using it to acquire clients. It's all the same thing.

It's connecting different pieces of software so that things talk and trigger.

Zapier

There are lots of ways to do marketing automation. Zapier tends to be the place that everything comes to. It's kind of the head between all of the different sides. If you're running a Facebook lead ad, you will use Zapier to put that email address inside your CRM. Let's go over here to apps. There's all kinds of stuff, Google Sheets.

Most of the Google Suite has some pretty exciting stuff:

• Google Drive
• Facebook Lead Ads
• ActiveCampaign
• Facebook Pages

All of the things that it can do. We can get or send Gmail emails to new leads from Facebook Lead Ads, which I don't recommend.

You can also get emails with new Facebook Lead Ads leads. You can send lead ads to different rows in Google Sheets. We do that all the time, especially for our real estate clients.

1. We'll set the trigger.
2. Facebook sends the lead-in.
3. Then, it adds them to the CRM.
4. Then, finally, it puts them in a spreadsheet.

The CRM triggers, then the email marketing workflows, and then the spreadsheet is what somebody would call a sales guy would start screaming and working those leads.

If somebody comes in from a Facebook lead ad, we can add or update active campaign contacts—lots of different things you can do there. Your imagination is the limit when it comes to marketing automation. It is that simple. There are so many ways to trigger all kinds of cool stuff.

Slack

Slack is huge. There are so many integrations you can run with Slack. Microsoft Teams is fantastic, too, but Slack will integrate with everything. I'm not in a Microsoft environment at all. I don't think I have any Microsoft products installed on my computers, maybe Skype. We set it up with our CRM. We'll have Facebook Lead Ads ping Slack whenever there's a new sale.

A new conversation goes off into Google Sheets. We can set up some stuff in Airtable in Slack for project management. We're used to having it, so we get a Slack notification every time a base camp task is updated. We've set it up so that there are KPIs inside ad managers that will ping a Slack notification.

There are lots of different ways to work. There are lots of different ways to work on that moving forward. Now, let's see if we go to some of the other methods.

Anyway, your marketing automation agency will know all of this stuff. They will learn to trigger things that will move somebody through your prospect's scenario and pipeline. That's just what marketing automation does.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

1. The first is you're going to sell more.

You're going to sell more because people are in front of you or your brand is in front of them, I should say. You're going to generate more revenue in the long-term from that.

2. Your brand will be remembered better.

You will also, and perhaps more importantly, you will be remembered better. If somebody is seeing your ads, emails, text messages, or whatever for months and years to come, they're much more likely to buy. I can't tell you how many times we ended up getting somebody. They come in, and the first time they ever bought anything, a book or maybe a video course or whatever. Then, all of a sudden, they're our best customers. They've been on the list for six years.

They're our best customers because it just took a long time to warm up to us enough or to be ready to buy something. But once they do, they're committed because they're getting results. They know our process, and they know us without working directly with us. It ends up working out that much better for them. Marketing automation makes that possible.

Our marketing and marketing automation agencies work to set it and forget it.

It's a big question. We get asked all the time, and the answer is not. Marketing automation will make you money long-term, but there are always rules and things that break.

I mean, marketing automation is very much you're looking at Zapier. I just got one yesterday. My Instagram Zap broke between Instagram and Google Drive. I have no idea why. I haven't investigated. But it shows that even though something has been working for years, sometimes it breaks. Sometimes, there's a coding issue. Sometimes, a lot of these integrations have three parties.

They have your ad account. You have two sides. Let's say Instagram and Google Drive, and then you have Zapier in the middle. You have three coding teams who are all trying to work together technically. They're building the frameworks for everything to coincide. Sometimes, it doesn't work out all that well. Sometimes, something will break for a few days, and then it will magically get re-enabled. There are just some things to look at there. Here are some things to take note of.

You are always going to think of ways to do things better. You're going to say, "Oh man, I should've sent lead ads to Slack rather than to a spreadsheet." As I'm talking about it, I think that because we go into a spreadsheet for our clients. Like, "Well, why don't we set them up with a Slack account?" There are always ways to do things better. You have to keep your mind open to it.

As I said earlier in the week, if you're researching and thinking, some of my best, most transparent marketing automation "gotchas" happen when I'm mowing the lawn. I don't know why. I'm just driving around, riding on a lawnmower, but then I'm like, "Oh, damn, I shouldn't do this. Or I should do that."

Some of my most significant kind of aha moments come from when I'm driving, which my wife pointed out. In the middle of this pandemic, she's like, "Yeah, we don't drive anywhere." She's like, "So you don't have any processing time." And it's right. She's absolutely 100% right, as always. And I don't. That's always what I did when I drove. I'd process things that happened during the week because we don't go anywhere, as you can tell by being in this office. However, we will start shooting some on-location live streams, which I'm excited about, at a co-working place in town.

Marketing Automation Tips

You want to email, SMS, significant, big marketing automation components—any alert, triggers, or anything important to your business is also essential. Suppose you need your sales rep to know immediately when something comes in the door. In that case, you can set up a marketing automation trigger, put it in Slack, send it to a text message, put it in a spreadsheet, whatever the motivation, or some other bell or whistle. There are all kinds of exciting things to do. You can download an app called If This, Then That: I-F-T-T-T, IFTTT.com. If This, Then That, it's on iPad, probably Android too. But it's kind of like Zapier, only it's mobile, and you can trigger all sorts of cool things. When a sale comes in, it can ding. You can change the lights in your room, and all kinds of fun stuff there.

Advantages of Marketing Automation

Now, one of the most significant advantages of marketing automation is it creates a customized personal; it just customizes your marketing message for your end-user. You can do so much to customize the way they're marketed. If you have a survey and there are four answers on a survey, and depending on how they pick one of those answers, you enter them into an email sequence. That's one way to do it. You can send them down different paths based on a link they click in an email or a page they visit.

They go to a particular page, like a Facebook traffic page or how to make a garden table out of two by fours pages, then you can send them three or four two-by-four emails. You can think about all kinds of really cool stuff if you just sit back and think, "What do they want from me? What can I give them to help them grow or help them transform their lives or help them do something better?" That's all marketing automation is.

For Questions and Guide

With that, if there's anything we can do to help, we're happy to. Go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form, and book a time on our calendar. We will dig in and figure out where in your business, what in your business can be automated, where we can find traffic, and what kind of automated processes and sales systems we can set up so that everything scales well and fast and as mechanical as possible inside the framework that you're already working in. That ends marketing automation week.

The post How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Agency for Your Business appeared first on Done For You.

This is marketing automation week and at the end of the day, everything we’ve been talking about is how to automate your marketing. We are going to talk about Facebook advertising or Facebook ad. In most cases, this marketing automation involves CRMs. It involves email and email automation. Outbound email, outbound SMS. Somebody comes in, something triggers, something happens, and then all of a sudden, they get an email. Or they get a notification is sent, or whatever.

What we’re going to talk about today is what I like to call two-stage remarketing. Basically, on a Facebook ad, we can segment down. When somebody hits a website, or somebody watches a video or whatever, including these live videos, what we can do is we can start a timer. That timer counts down until they move to the next phase of retargeting. If somebody visits your website today, then you’re going to show them one ad. But then if they do not reengage with that ad, with that website, you’re going to show them a different ad in six days.

It’s ninja stuff, and part of the reason we started doing this, and part of the reason why we started kind of thinking out of the box when it came to this kind of setup was really that so many of our clients have multiple offers. They might have a report, like a book offer, so they’ll sell a $27 book, and we want to remark it though. Everybody who comes to their website gets axed, can seize the ad for their book.

But then they also have an automated webinar, so how do you advertise two different offers to the same group? The same group being the people who are already engaged with your brand. I mean, it’s not hard when you have 20, 30, 50, a hundred thousand people inside of a retargeting audience. But when you have a very small number, let’s say 5,000 or 2,000 or 1,000 when you’re just kind of getting started, then this multiple-stage retargeting is important.

It kind of adopts some of that same methodology of when you’re like an exclusion. When somebody buys your thing, you want to exclude them from seeing future advertising. If somebody comes in, they hit your website and then they register for your webinar. Well, you don’t want them to then continue seeing the webinar registration ad. You want them to move to the next evolution of advertising, which is going to be promoting the offer that they were pitched on the webinar. Really, important to identify and address the ways people are engaging with your ads, your website, and all that stuff, and playing it all out through remarketing.

What I’m going to do, I’ve tried describing this to clients in a bunch of different ways, and it’s always kind of fell short, or at least it seems like it falls short. What we’re going to do is we’re going to draw it out inside of just Google drawing. Then, I’m going to show you how to set it up. We’re going to flip over to the share screen.

For those of you who don’t know who I am, because every day we’re meeting new people from these live streams. For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in three things, creating offers, building sales funnels, and setting up marketing automation. That’s really where our skills and disciplines live.

Two Primary Things To Track for Retargeting

What we’re going to do is, we’re going to just go to go through and just draw out what this multistage. This two-stage remark retargeting is.

1. visits your website
2. watching more than 15minutes video

I mean, there’s more, if they like a page, if they add something to a cart, if they, whatever. But those are the kind of the two primary things that we’re going to be tracking. What we do is we’re just going to move. We’re going to bump these down a little bit. Then up above, we’re going to, just going to add a little text box, and this is going to be five days out. This is it’s going to be less than five days.

2-Stage Retargeting Set-up

We’re going to say more than five days. This is going to be a multistage, two-stage retargeting setup.

1. What we’re going to do is, everybody who comes in, we’re going to use this shape. If they watch, if they visit the website or watch more than 15 seconds, they see the lead magnet, or we’re going to say book offer.

2. If they watch for more than 15 seconds or visit the website, and it’s been more than five days, we’re going to show a webinar registration.

Now, we’re going to draw a couple of arrows. We’re going to do lines pink, and then there.

Audiences for your Retargeting

What this gives us, is it gives us two audiences. We have our primary retargeting audience.

1. If all you’re doing is retargeting, then basically you’re just kind of lumping all of these people into the same audience. The same audience is everybody who’s been on my website or everybody who’s watched more than 15 seconds of a video in the last 180 days. Last six months.

2. Your warm audience is going to be everybody who watches a video or has been to the website in the last 30 days. This is going to end up being six to 30 days. After 30 days, they’ve kind of forgotten about you, so it’s probably not worth reaching back out to them. Their time has passed. They’ve probably already moved on. If they didn’t choose you, they chose someone else. The problem was that dire and they needed a solution, or they were just tire kickers.

Again, if they’re still around after 30 days, then you’re engaging with them through email and whatever, but it’s not. It doesn’t make sense to kind of go back after them or spend significant dollars, ad dollars going back out after them from a retargeting standpoint. It’s just simpler just to cut everybody after 30 days. If they come back awesome, and if they don’t awesome, but still that gives you 30 days of branding. They see your Facebook ad all over the place, which is awesome.

Now, what we do is split. This is our primary retargeted audience, website watched more than 15 seconds. Now we’re just going to do a segment of who has done those things in the last five days.

1. If you’ve been to a website, or if you have watched a video in the last 5 days
2. If you’ve been to a website, or if you have watched a video in the last six to 30 days

When we separate the groups, we’re able to put a different Facebook ad up, so we can show we’re just going to do this. We have our Facebook ad for the book offer, and we have our ads for the webinar registration. They’re not the same. They’re not advertising to the same person. What’s happening is, is you’re getting the best of both worlds. They are seeing an offer switch up, live, in front of them. They see your book offer for five days. And then they see, after six and on, you see your webinar registration offer. They don’t know that it changed. All they know is that it changed. They don’t know what triggered the change. It might just be that you took the book offer off. But in this way, you can daisy chain different offers to a retargeted audience, so you can go far out.

A caveat on this 2-stage retargeting set-up…

When you do this, you always want this offer to be the most pressing, because if they are day 60, or if they are six plus. Let’s say they’re day seven. They’re seeing your webinar registration. They go to the webinar registration, but they don’t opt-in. This method, what it does is it bounces them back to the book offer because they were active on your website in less than five days.

What you want to do, is you want to make sure that this is always your prevalent offer. This is the main focus, the primary offer in your marketing funnel is this first offer. Then, this offer is in terms of priority is less. Obviously, like last week we talked you can only have one priority, but in terms of priority, from a marketing standpoint, this is of lesser priority, your second offer, than your first. It only makes sense, because people are the warmer they are, the more recently they watched a video, and the more recently they were on your website, it means the warmer they are. Your best offer should always be your first offer, your primary offer. Then, you can drip them to the next lesser priority offer.

You can continue down that path. They don’t opt-in for that, they’re going to bounce back to the book, and then they’re just going to go right back through the same sequence, which isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t need to be your priority.

Facebook Ads Manager

The magic of this is all done inside of your Facebook ad manager. Inside the ad manager, we’re going to go to our audiences. If you open up your business tools, you’re going to go to audiences. Now in audiences, you see that I have two different groups here. I have video views, 15 seconds for five days. Now, if you look at the drawing here, in less than five days, we’re going to be promoting a book offer. Right here, video views, anybody who has watched more than 15 seconds of a video view, and these are the videos that we have so far, there are 13, 14, 17 total videos in here.

In the past five days, and then we give them an audience name. Now, we’re going to have, that is going to be a special ad inside of the ad segment itself. The ad’s set, we’re going to specifically target that audience, the five, the 15 seconds, five days audience, and then also the website traffic five days audience now. Now, and then, that’s the only people we’re going to target. If they’ve been to the website and watched a video in the last 15 seconds, then they are going to see that first ad.

Now, if you look down here a little bit, we have another. We have website visitors, 30 days. And then, we have video views, 15 seconds. These are our two groups of folks who are plus six days. If we look back at our little sequence, here we go. If we look back here, those two audiences are our website traffic that is plus six days. And our 15 seconds of video that is plus six days.

Now, once you have those audiences set up, and like I said, when you have small audiences, it makes all the difference in the world. But if we go into, we’re going to go back here, and then I’m going to show you how this is all set up. We’re going to go into the book offer. All right. Okay, here we go. Five to 30 days, we got a webinar registration. Zero to five days, we got ebook traffic. Check this out.

If we open up the ad set, we’re going to go in here and look at how this is set up. We have a warm, zero to five days, ebook sales, traffic. And this is a dynamic creative audience for both males and females. Now, if you scroll down, you see that the website traffic, the only custom audiences that we’re marketing to, we have website traffic five days, and video views, 15 seconds, five days. Those are the only two segments that this ad is going to. And then, everything else is pretty well open. Age 25 to 54, because that’s the market, both genders, and then, we have the United States. Demographics, this is all retargeted. If they’ve been to the website or watched more than 15 seconds of a video in the last five days, then they see the ebook offer.

Now, where it gets tricky. Not even tricky, but just the one little hack. The one little hack is here. If we open up this warm on this warm, not five days, we have warm five to 30 days, webinar registration, and this is a conversion campaign. This is a not five days, creative, dynamic, creative ad. What we’re doing is, we’re including website visitors who are more than six days. Six days. We’re including all website visitors. If you’ve been to the website in the last 180 days, or if you’ve been to the website in the last 30 days, or if you have watched 15 seconds or more of a Facebook video, then you see these Facebook ads. But we’re excluding. Excluding. This is the big gotcha. We’re excluding website traffic five days, and video views, 15 seconds, five days.

We’re taking everybody who’s been to the website, and then we’re cutting off the five-day people. Only six-plus days are seeing this webinar ad. It ends up working out, really, really nice. It’s dropped the conversion cost because when you retarget two offers, two different Facebook ad to the same group of people, then the ads compete with each other. Because of Facebook ad, the algorithm is always trying to figure out how to make the most money using the parameters that you set for the people in your audience.

If you have two different ad campaigns that are going to the same audience, it’s going to default to the one that makes it more money.

In this case, we were doing a conversion campaign and a clicks campaign. It was defaulting to the clicks campaign, which meant that we needed to split up the audiences, and to do that, to split up those audiences from just a very easy way of doing it was to then drop days in.

Five days, or six-plus days, we can always do it again. We could do, if you’ve been to the websites, in the last 10 days, then you see the webinar. Or, if you’ve been plus 11, then maybe you see a different offer. Maybe you see a coaching call or something. There are lots of other, really, really creative ways that we can get into doing this staged Facebook ad retargeting.

I just really wanted to go through all of this stuff, talk through it in a better way, I think. One of the reasons I do these videos is so I can kind of point down the road.  Say, “Yeah, this video explains it better than I just did.” And I’m kind of hoping that this video did it. I’ve tried explaining this to probably four or five clients in the last four or five months, and we’ve been doing it a long time, and every single time, it’s like, well, I kind of get it, but I don’t. This, I think, is a little bit better way to describe it.

For Questions and Guide

For those of you who have any questions about this, or you would like to go through, put together some Facebook ad, put together an action plan for your ads, for your funnel, for your marketing automation, just go ahead and go to doneforyou.com/start, and fill out the little application. It’s going to direct you to a calendar that you can set up a call with my team and me, and if you have any questions at all, just drop them in the comments below this. I always take a look at them, so I’m keeping track as we go. Tomorrow, we’re going to finish up marketing automation week.

This was kind of a big little big hack. That didn’t quite email, wasn’t quite a text. But this will get you results, especially if you have small budgets and small audiences.

The post Ways In Setting Up 2-Stage Facebook Ads appeared first on Done For You.

Automated, sequential email messages are a great way to describe drip campaigns in plain English.

Often referred to as drip campaigns but also known by other names – automated email campaigns, drip marketing automation, email automation, lifecycle emails, autoresponders, and sometimes marketing automation – the idea is the same…

Drip campaigns are a sequence of marketing email messages that are sent out automatically on a preset schedule.

Picture this – one email will be sent out as soon as a new subscriber joins your list, another will go out two days later featuring your services, and one more will go out four days later asking people what they’re struggling with. That would be a time-based sequence.

The emails in the drip campaign can be triggered by actions the subscriber has performed or some behavior they have demonstrated on your website. For example, an effort is when a link in your email is clicked; A behavioral trigger can be a visit to a particular web page or a purchase.

NOTE: If you'd like to forgo the rest of this guide and skip right to the fun part of getting it set up, make sure to set up an Action Plan call with us through the Done For You Email Marketing page...  We'll get you dialed in quickly :0)

Table of contents

In this complete guide to drip campaigns and email automation, we're going to discuss the following:

Chapter 1: Why Your Marketing Needs Drip Campaigns
Chapter 2: Infographic: Drip campaign basics
Chapter 3: How is email marketing different from drip campaigns?
Chapter 4: When should you use a drip campaign? Drip use cases.
Chapter 5: Who runs drip email campaigns?
Chapter 6: How to create effective email drip campaigns
Chapter 7: Best drip campaign examples
Chapter 8: 7 Lessons Learned from high-performance Drip Campaigns
Chapter 9: Where drip campaigns go off the rails
Chapter 10: The tools you need for drip marketing
Chapter 11: How to measure drip campaign results
Video Transcript: Quick Strategies For Drip Marketing Automation

Why you need drip marketing automation campaigns

Combining marketing automation with drip campaigns can generate 20% more sales opportunities.

Every organization needs to run drip campaigns to reap the following benefits:

Be relevant with timely communication

With drip campaigns, you can deliver relevant information precisely when your users need it.

The information delivered through drip email sequences is activated by how a user engages with your brand and web assets and where they reside in the sales cycle.

Nurture leads until they are sales-ready

Drip marketing nurtures warm leads until they are sales-ready.

Drip campaigns can provide your business development team with an ongoing supply of prospects ready to close, making the most of marketing and sales effectiveness.

Work smarter with marketing automation.

Drip campaigns allow you to put tedious parts of the sales process on auto-pilot. Drip campaigns inform and nurture your business leads without you lifting a finger. This way, you can spend less time pitching your services and more time closing clients.

Infographic: Drip campaign basics

Want a closer look at drip marketing automation? Pardot has put together the infographic below to present the basics of what you can do with automated email campaigns. Click on the drip campaign infographic to zoom in.

Back to the table of contents.

How is email marketing different from drip campaigns?

You might be wondering how email marketing is different from drip email campaigns. Watch the video below, which explains where the two terms intersect and how they follow different paths.

When should you use drip campaign automation and drip campaign software?

Drip marketing is an umbrella that covers several different marketing techniques. But the end goal remains the same: keep users immersed in your product.

Let's look at a few use cases where creating an automated drip campaign may help you deliver better information to targeted viewers and convert them into paying customers. You might want to try some of these drip marketing examples with your subscribers, or perhaps these use cases will spark your imagination for other approaches to marketing your products using drip campaigns.

Nurture leads

You can't take every user by the hand through their buyer's journey, but drip email campaigns can do that difficult task for you. You can use welcome, onboarding, or abandoned cart autoresponder sequences to nurture your leads and prepare them to become paying customers.

Welcome

You could use a welcome email sequence to automatically send a new list of subscribers some of your most popular blog posts. Or, if you get a new free trial signup for your SaaS product, you could try a drip showcasing an example of how other customers use your product features.

Onboarding

Pageviews and free trial users are good, but ultimately, you need your users to purchase something from your business. That's where an onboarding drip campaign would come in handy: combined with welcome campaigns and newsletters, onboarding emails provide targeted messages to the customer, which are small wins for your business.

Abandoned carts

You designed compelling newsletters, offered flash sales, and tempted your user to click the "add to cart" button. But then, the user leaves empty-handed. Shopping cart abandonment can be a plague for an e-shop. But with a drip campaign to recover abandoned carts, you can reengage those customers and drive them back to complete the purchase.

Renewals

Whether your user renewed their membership or the subscription is about to end, you can leverage drip campaigns to captivate subscribers. For automatic renewals, you might use an autoresponder that sends users a notification that their account is about to be charged.

However, you need to test the effectiveness of this because, in some cases, it might result in people canceling their account before their subscription is extended.

If your subscriptions don't auto-renew, create your drip campaign with a clear CTA, asking users to commit to your service for another term or year.

Engagement

The math is quite simple: the more often someone interacts with your website, the more likely they are to become a paying customer.

Engagement email sequences are a drip campaign that encourages the recipient to return to your site and browse, triggered either by some on-page activity or complete inactivity.

Social networks are a fantastic example of using activity-based triggers for drip campaigns. If somebody on Twitter mentions you in their tweet, Twitter can send an alert-style email, motivating you to visit Twitter, see the tweet, and respond.

Courses

Putting together a drip campaign to deliver a multi-part online course is a way to repackage old content or promote new content, and it helps you attract more targeted subscribers. Plus, once the user receives the last email, they know your product and are ready to move deeper into your funnel.

Back to the table of contents.

Who runs drip email campaigns?

Bloggers

Promote a new freebie (ebook, checklist, or free course), automatically share your recent blog posts, and engage your audience in pre-launch campaigns.

Course sellers

Grow your list by dripping free email courses to new signups, segmenting your subscribers into interest groups, and send highly personalized emails to increase course sales. Build a referral program, so every student can refer their friends and earn a gift.

SaaS businesses

Warm up your leads and nurture them until they leave their free trial and become paying customers. Create an onboarding sequence to showcase your product features to new users. Reduce churn by timely managing subscription renewals.

Realtors

Stay ahead of the competition and follow up on your prospects effectively. Drip campaigns can do the work for you, as well as take care of most recurring tasks. The sky's the limit. Drip campaigns can nurture your real estate leads.

Insurance brokers

Any solopreneur or freelancer can deploy drip marketing campaigns and automation to their benefit. Take insurance brokers, for example. They need to constantly be in touch with different segments of their audience, i.e., cold leads, warm leads, customers, health plan customers home insurance customers, and so on.

Fashion industry

Set up drip campaigns to send out flash sales offers, happy birthday emails, customer satisfaction surveys, abandoned cart drip campaigns... you name it!

Beauty professionals

Track and automatically reward your most loyal buyers, use upsell and cross-sell to increase your revenue, or send personalized product recommendations based on behavioral patterns or the location of your customers.

Ecommerce

Cart abandonment drip campaigns, product replenishment drips, VIP customer reward campaigns, and upselling/cross-selling sequences are the most typical drip email examples in eCommerce.

Online entrepreneurs/affiliate marketers

There are unlimited ways to use drip marketing automation to grow your business. With drip campaigns, you can achieve any of the goals mentioned here, plus create any customized campaign, like promoting an affiliate program to grow your business even further.

If you are an affiliate marketer, you'll be interested to read this post about high-conversion affiliate marketing email sequences.

Back to the table of contents.

How to create successful drip campaigns

1. Determine your goal

If you have no idea what you intend to achieve, how can you even accomplish it? You have to choose whether to warm up your leads, get them to purchase, or take other action that serves your marketing goals. When describing your plan, you need to be specific if you want to be able to measure it.

2. Optimize your messages

Simply having a drip campaign in place won't bring you much. The information in these emails must be excellent. If you send poor content, the outcome will be lousy. If your drip campaign doesn't add value to the email recipients, it can harm your marketing because people will unsubscribe or even report you for spam.

Keep the emails short (up to 250 words), or your list won't bother to read them. Know that most of your customers are not exactly reading your newsletter instead, they are scanning through the content, so make your emails scannable.

3. Focus on your CTAs

When you start developing content for the drip campaign, think about this: What is it that my leads need to make a decision or take action? For example, suppose your objective is to activate more users of your SaaS. In that case, you might want to create an email drip campaign that describes the best functionality of your drip campaign software and shows success stories of how other people used it and got results.

On the other hand, you should aim to enhance people's confidence in your brand by building credibility - that is, if your objective is to sell them your products and services. You should be able to do this by educating them, addressing their concerns (i.e., removing friction), and presenting proof of how your product helps them materialize their aspirations.

4. Set frequency and timing

When it comes to the optimal email sending times, check your email marketing platform stats to see if any particular times of day generated more opens. About frequency, there is no one-size-fits-all guideline here. Typically, you should send emails more often when someone is new to your list and slow down as they go further down your funnel. You could start with sending emails once a day, then every couple of days, then once a week, and finally once every two weeks or so.

Of course, there are exceptions. Someone might be on your list for a long time, but suddenly, they express their purchase intent by visiting your e-shop and by abandoning a product in their cart. In this case, it makes sense to email them daily to recover the cart while the user is still warm.

Or you might segment old subscribers by having them sign up for a new ebook or whitepaper. Then, you could also email them frequently to educate them more on the particular subject and entice them to opt-in for one of your relevant offers.

5. Segment your lists

So, a way to optimize your drip campaigns, especially if your list has more than 600-700 subscribers, is to create segments. With segmenting, you can send different parallel campaigns but tailor them to specific groups of subscribers.

For example, you can design two separate landing pages for two different list segments. Now, when people subscribe to your list on one of those two pages, you'll be able to know what interests them more and add them to the better-suited email drip campaign.

6. Always measure performance

This goes for all your marketing efforts. You must measure the results to find and fix bottlenecks and optimize your marketing spend. With email marketing come basic KPIs like open rate and click-through rate. Besides those, we suggest that you measure the revenue your campaigns generate. The impact on your bottom line is all that matters. Set up UTM links within your drip campaign emails so you can track the complete funnel and identify the source of a sale.

Now, let’s move on to some drip campaign examples so you can get inspiration and ideas for your next drip campaign.

Back to the table of contents.

Best drip campaign examples

1. Example of an onboarding drip campaign

When someone turns into a buyer, you can schedule a series of email messages to encourage them to use your product and be satisfied. Here is an example of an email drip campaign for customer onboarding:

Email 1: Encourage customers to finish setting up their new accounts. Take them through the basic steps they need to take to start using your product. If the account is fully set up automatically, use the first onboarding email to welcome new customers and let them know you are available for a demo.

Email 2: Show them your training material and user guides. Give them links to resources, videos, your knowledge base, community forums, or FAQs. Encourage them to contact support if they need extra help.

Email 3: Point new customers to your blog, ebooks, or relevant beginner resources. Educate them, show them best practices, and anything else that will help them move forward and succeed. Show them that their success is your success.

2. Welcome email drip

The most basic drip that you need to have is the welcome email sequence. This is the first sequence activated after a new subscriber has joined your list. This is often the first impression people will get from your brand.

So, the welcome email is super important. Welcome email drips also serve to increase your bottom line. According to Experian, they generate 3x more revenue than other types of emails.

Have a look at this illustration of a welcome email from Yoga Pod. It offers a brief greeting, a vibrant video with real customers, links to explore the class schedule, and details about the business location.

SmartrMail also did a comprehensive review of the welcome drip series from Barnes & Noble. This drip campaign consists of an initial welcome message, then an email with a 15% off coupon, then recommended products, followed by an email summarizing the value of Barnes & Noble, and finally, an email informing customers about their mobile app. After this email series come the regular newsletters.

The value of this complete drip campaign example is that it gives users a thorough look at the Barnes & Noble brand and highlights the brick-and-mortar locations of the stores.

3. Retain current customers' drip example

There's a perfect chance that you will want to return the favor when somebody does something nice for you or gives you something. This natural urge to even the scales is called the reciprocity effect. Reciprocity can have a significant impact on customer advocacy, loyalty, and retention.

For instance, one of the top ways to keep current clients is to help them obtain more value from their investment in your product. You can deploy an automated drip campaign to share helpful content about market trends influencing their situation, inspiration, ideas and ways to use your product, and other practical resources to keep them engaged with your product and brand.

Look at this use case: After closing the sale, Contently's business development team sends customers regular emails sharing popular blog posts that bring practical value.

4. Drip campaign example to acquire referrals

About 83% of happy customers are more than willing to transform into your advocates.

The Yesware sales team sends out automated email campaigns to follow up with active customers two months after they join. When your team makes sure customers are satisfied and are seeing the value of the product and your support, it becomes easier to get upsell and referral opportunities.

In this example, the dripped sequence of messages looks like this:

Forty-five days post-close: The sales team sends the buyer a reminder email to confirm that they are satisfied and doing well. Then, they schedule a two-part email campaign to send to the client, with the first of the two emails going out that day.

Sixty days post-close: Email #2 is automatically delivered, wishing the client a happy two months. Yesware is asking if they know of any other organizations that would potentially benefit from Yesware's products.

5. Offer and promotion drips

Anything like offers, sales, promotions, other in-store campaigns, or seasonal campaigns can be added to a dripped series to automate the workflow. Such a drip campaign could include promo codes, discounts, limited-time offers, freebies, VIP access, or anything else you may use to drive a purchase.

You've got a 24-hour coupon! Claim this offer before it expires! These are great drip campaign examples of the subject lines of a promo email.

Moreover, customer milestones make fantastic reasons to present a one-time offer to your clients. Plus, contacting them as they progress lets you make your communication more personal. Email drip campaign ideas are when you send them a birthday email or celebrate their anniversary of becoming a customer.

Here's how Nike makes the most out of email drip campaigns to put birthday emails on auto-pilot:

So, instead of sending a primary "happy birthday" email, Nike rewards customers with a unique coupon code for a 25% discount on a product. It makes sense that you need to provide value, not just wish your customers happy birthday for the sake of it.

Back to the table of contents.

Lessons learned from high-performance drip campaigns

Neil Patel has published a fascinating blog post on seven lessons learned from top-performing drip email campaigns.

He studied seven branded drips that achieved their goals and presented the results in this article. In brief, here's what the best practices are:

1. Highlight the next step

Most free trials (~50%) don’t turn into paying users. People need guidance on what to do next, especially if they haven’t seen that ‘first win’ yet.

Neil gives the example of how Time Etc., a virtual assistant service, sends an early task or feature highlight to new free trials to activate them. The goal is to prompt people with a specific next step.

2. Use psychology and personalization

Neil uses drip email examples from different brands to demonstrate how psychological triggers (like urgency and scarcity) and personalization elements (e.g., location-based email campaigns) can generate more sales.

The lesson learned is that more sophisticated drips can increase your bottom line.

3. Reduce cart abandonment

While as many as 67% of potential e-shop customers might abandon a loaded cart, 81% of people looking to book a hotel or trip might also bounce.

In that article, there’s an example of how Expedia sends behavioral, event-based emails shortly after the user abandons the search for hotels in specific locations.

The moral of the story is that you can build a winning drip campaign when aligning what a web visitor was doing on your site with the email subject line. This aligns with what they were thinking about and will get their attention.

4. Start slow and escalate

Neil also teaches, when he brings up the example of one of Ramit Sethi’s campaigns, that you can fork a drip campaign to segment users according to their behavior (e.g., clicks) and use these segments to transition seamlessly from mentioning pain points to offering a solution.

5. Reduce churn proactively

A churn rate of 5-7% might be typical and acceptable, but anything more excellent can quickly send you out of business.

To cater to that proactively, you can utilize email drips that will be triggered at some points where you sense or predict churn. You can avoid churn by proactively responding to it.

6. Set up personalized notifications

Another drip campaign lesson is learned when Neil mentions how Mint uses email notifications to help its users recognize and understand their difficult situation and then explains how Mint can help.

One example of how Mint does that is by tracking personalized historical averages and then sending notifications or alerts when aberrations appear.

7. Timely and stylish communication

Finally, a lesson learned from op performing drip email campaigns is that contacting new user within a short time after they’ve signed up can help to activate them. The communication style and content, as well as personalization elements, are essential to keep your users coming back to your site and keep them engaged with your brand.

There’s a pattern among all drip campaigns that have a significant impact on their success. Personalization. Keep in mind that the more you can personalize your drip campaigns (using name, location, job title, stage of the customer journey, or anything like that), the better results you will get.

Back to the table of contents.

Where drip campaigns go off the rails

For every effective drip campaign, dozens crash and burn. But what makes a campaign go off the rails? These are some of the most frequent missteps with drip marketing:

Don't: Send too much email

A subscriber's level of engagement and stage of their journey can give you a hint about the ideal frequency of your emails. As we discussed, it's normal to contact the new lead every day soon after they've subscribed to your brand's mailing list. But when the user is mature, maybe once a week or every two weeks is best.

Don't: Email your list more than once a day.

Some marketers would say that mailing more than once a day can increase engagement. According to our experience, that's not true. It's a bad idea. It can come off as too salesy or aggressive, even intrusive, if you mail people more than once a day. They might think you are too desperate to get their attention - and that's not good.

As time goes by, you can look at your drip campaign stats and see what time of the day brings the highest open rates. That's the best way to do it, instead of sending a lot of emails to make sure the subscriber opens at least once.

Don't Resend old content.

Repurposing content for publishing on different media is a good content marketing strategy. But sending the same old content repeatedly to the same people will not go unnoticed.

Your audience will soon realize they are part of a robotic drip campaign that has lost the human touch. They will also think that your company has nothing new to say to them.
Make sure your drip email content is delivered once to every customer or lead, or else it will have the opposite effect.

Don't: Leave your sales staff in the dark.

In most companies, there is a gap to bridge between marketing and sales. What you need to do is use account-based marketing (ABM). ABM will help your business align sales and marketing efforts so that you derive the maximum benefit. If your marketing team launches a drip campaign but neglects to loop in your sales team, then prospects will wind up receiving both a drip campaign and a direct call the same day. This wouldn't be the end of the world, but can be confusing to receive mixed messages.

Establish regular sales and marketing meetings to discuss outbound strategies and campaigns.

Back to the table of contents.

Email Drip Campaign Software

Axis One: Convert customers with email marketing and automation

Axis One helps you contact and convert more customers by building email marketing campaigns that work. From sending broadcast messages to deploying triggered autoresponder sequences, all is done for you in Axis.

With this tool, you can achieve the ultimate goal of every business: get as many conversions as possible from the prospects that visit your website.

Watch the video below to learn how simple it is to use Axis and how it stacks up against competitive email marketing tools.

Some of the benefits you can reap from Axis include:

• Grow your email marketing list the simple way
• Send one-off broadcasts, i.e., email blasts
• Automate new subscriber onboarding with autoresponder sequences
• Create triggered email sequences that will automate your communications
• Effortlessly stay in touch with your past customers
• Reengage your list and convert more subscribers into customers.

All these reasons make it a worthy investment for your business. After all, you need to do email marketing if you want to grow your business. There is nothing quite like reaching your customers’ inbox when we talk about conversions!

Other Drip Email Software

There are dozens of tools available for managing your emails and crafting an effective drip campaign -- Drip, MailChimp, and Active Campaign are some of the most popular ones. But each of those marketing automation tools has a different set of features, limitations, and price points, so you'll want to review them thoroughly before committing.

Scripting: Autoresponder engine with email swipes and DFY scripts

Scriptly provides professionally written scripts that you can use as they are or customize to suit your business better. These scripts or email swipes will help you write high-converting sales copy immediately, even if you’ve never written a line of sales copy before.

As a Scriptly user, you’ll get instant access to:

• Autoresponder engine – This is a set of dozens of email sequences that are completely done for you. Anything from affiliate autoresponder sequences to webinar sequences is there.
• Page builder – Create any customizable landing page. All templates are tested and proven to convert to paid traffic.
• Customer avatars – There is no need for a separate tool to define different customer avatars to customize your marketing material to address other target groups. We have it all covered in Scriptly.
• VSL creator – Video sales letters can be easily created using Scriptly’s well-structured templates. For every part of the sales letter script, you can choose the sales copy that resonates with your audience.
• Webinar creator – Create your next webinar in minutes, not hours, with this unique fill-in-the-blank formula. The webinar creator is a handy tool that will help you get past writer’s block instantly.

Statly: Understand marketing data to improve sales performance.

If you want to succeed in drip marketing automation, you must be able to track and analyze data. See, you may be successful at attracting tons of targeted website traffic. But what if only 2% of those visitors convert, while the rest remain anonymous? Don’t you want a way to identify who they are, track their behavior, and keep them coming back? Of course you do.

How are users acting when they visit your website? In today’s competitive times, obtaining meaningful data is an integral part of a successful marketing plan.

This is where Statly comes into the picture. As the complete tool that helps you in real-time tracking of users leveraging the sales funnel strategy, it can immensely help your chances of converting traffic into sales. Statly enables you to obtain meaningful data to make the right business decisions.

But how does Statly work? Statly gives you a comprehensive idea of how your sales funnels are converting. It helps you spot opportunities and the parts of your funnels that need to be improved. Watch this video to learn more about what our patent-pending tool can do for your business.

Here are some of the salient features of the tool:

• Real-time website analytics
• Conversion tracking through sales funnels
• Tracking conversion opportunities
• Tracking sales and user behavior on the website

If WordPress powers your site, then all you need to do is install the latest version of our plugin to get started with Statly’s advanced analytics and sales funnel tracking. Click here to sign up for a free Statly trial!

With Statly in your arsenal, you can better optimize your automated marketing campaigns and the buyer’s journey so you entice more web visitors to convert into paying customers. Sitting in front of a load of data wouldn’t do any good, would it? But with Statly by your side, all these previously intimidating numbers will finally make sense.

Back to the table of contents.

How to measure drip campaign results

As with all business endeavors, establishing a set of metrics you will use to track the success of your drip campaigns is crucial to making the right decisions. So, what's the best way to keep track of how users are engaging with your content?

One of the best strategies to accurately track sources of traffic (and the funnel that follows) involves UTM codes (alternatively called URL parameters) -- small text strings that come at the end of a URL. UTM codes don't affect the destination. They add tags to the URL so you know where the visitor came from.

UTM

UTMs track web browsing via cookies in Google Analytics and other analytics suites. Using UTM tags, Google Analytics can show you exactly where a user has been before they visited your site and whether or not they've been to your website before, amongst other information.

When you use UTMs in your drip campaigns, you can track visitors coming from each email message that is part of your drip.

Google has built a custom URL builder that you can use to create custom UTMs.

The beginning of a UTM code is a question mark. At the end of a URL. Here's an example:

https://doneforyou.com/?utm_source=dfyblog&utm_medium=drip-campaigns-post

Whether you use the part after the question mark or not, the user will land on the same page. But if the URL is tagged, you'll know where that user came from.

A lot of the time, if you're using an app to manage your drip campaigns, the app will automatically tag URLs. So, you need to set up the tagging pattern once, and your app will do the rest for every newsletter you send.

Now, here are some vital drip campaign metrics or KPIs you need to measure regularly.

Depending on the sort of drip campaign software you are using, you should be able to find most of these metrics on your dashboard. For the rest, simple calculations would give you what you need.

1. Open Rate

Open rate shows the percentage of your email recipients who opened your message. This is an essential metric to evaluate because your email drips won't do much unless your list subscribers are clicking to open your emails. Opening an email means reading it in most cases.

How to calculate open rate: Total Opens / Total Emails Delivered

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of your emails that weren't delivered to your subscribers' inbox. There might be a lot of reasons for bounces, but the most common one is that the email address does not exist.

How to calculate bounce rate: Total Bounces / Total Emails Sent

3. Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate is the percentage of clicks on a link inside your email over the total number of emails delivered. Typically, getting your list members to click on a link within your email message will be the main objective of your drip campaign because clicking a link is equal to taking action.

How to calculate click-through rate: Total Clicks / Total Emails Delivered

4. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribe following an email blast. If you send 1,000 emails and ten people click on the "unsubscribe" link inside your email, then the unsubscribe rate is 1%.

How to calculate unsubscribe rate: Total Unsubscribes / Total Emails Delivered

5. Conversion Rate

It's all about conversions. So, the conversion rate is the percentage of the people on your list who completed an action (e.g. filling out a form or purchasing a product) after receiving your email.

As explained before, you will need to have UTM links in place to track the whole funnel from click to purchase. Click the link to read more about how to keep track of the complete customer journey.

How to calculate conversion rate: Total Conversions / Total Emails Delivered

6. Drip Campaign ROI

Your campaign's Return On Investment is the overall return on your money spent on the email drip campaign.

How to calculate drip campaign ROI: ($ Sales-- $ Invested)/ $ Invested

7. List Growth Rate

This is a generic measure of how good you are doing growing your email list. List growth rate is the rate at which the number of people on your list has grown over a specified period of time.

How to calculate list growth rate: New Subscribes-(Unsubscribes + Complaints) / Total Subscribers (over a period of time, e.g. the last month).

So, that was it! The Complete Guide To Drip Campaigns And Email Automation.

We hope we did a good job explaining what drip campaigns are and how marketing automation works towards optimizing your processes and increasing your revenue.

Email drips or email automation or marketing automation, whatever you call it, is here to stay; jump on the bandwagon to reap the benefits of automated lead generation, lead nurturing on auto-pilot and sales conversion 24/7 using email drips. Click here to go back to the top of the article.

Video Transcript: Quick Strategies For Drip Marketing Automation

Today we're going to be talking about drip marketing automation.

This is going to date me a little bit but back when I first got into internet marketing 14 years ago, but I remember listening to an audio program from this guy named Eben Pagan and Frank Kern. They were talking about the miracle of email marketing in building your email list, and this thing called an email autoresponder.

The magic of an email autoresponder

This email autoresponder, basically somebody will go to a landing page, they'd fill in an opt in form for a lead magnet or a freebie of some kind, a bribe, and this autoresponder would send them email, after email, after email, after email. Day one it would send an email, day two it would send an email, day three it would send an email. So, that was this autoresponder. The big company back then was a company called AWeber, and they're still around. They're still actually a great drip campaign software. They're also in Pennsylvania here, but AWeber created this autoresponder so that an assistant, or you, or whoever wouldn't have to actually email your list every single day based on when somebody signed up. So day one, the email goes out. Day two, the email goes out. Day three, the email goes out.

So, everybody is happy and everybody is being marketing to automatically. It's the beauty and the magic of technology. Now fast forward to today, and that autoresponder has since been renamed a drip email sequence or drip marketing.

The evolution: drip marketing automation

So, drip marketing is same thing as an autoresponder. Email one goes out, email two drips out the next day. Third email drips out the next day. Fourth email drips out the next day. Your membership content is dripped out week, after week, after week. So, this drip is now basically what the terminology is calling automation or autoresponders. Now, when we get to drip marketing automation really, the automation piece just adds another layer on top of it. So, the automation piece adds a trigger. So, now you have this email, this drip marketing sequence that is set to go out. Email one, two, three, four. It's set to go out.

Now the automation piece adds in a trigger, and the trigger might be a tag is added to a contact record. This person visited a landing page. This form was filled out. This webinar was attended. This survey result was submitted. So, there's lots of triggers that will fire that drip marketing automation, and that's where the magic all comes together. So, it's the trigger. When we build sales funnels for our clients, we will go in and we will set up a bunch of drip marketing already because we already know how people are going to be moving through the sales funnel.

Ideas for drip email examples

Some of them, the biggest, most common drip email examples are we will set up a lead magnet fulfillment sequence. So when somebody downloads a lead magnet, then they go into this fulfillment sequence. The fulfillment sequence drips out, day one, drips out the link, the download link that they can get the report. Day two, maybe it drips out the social media profiles for our client. Day three, what we're trying to do is we're trying to bond them. It's called an indoctrination sequence. So day two it might be social media profiles, day three, "Hey, this is what we do." Day four might be the about page of day five is, "This is why we do what we do." So, it's basically telling the story of our client.

Webinar Promo Campaign

Another example of a drip marketing automation campaign that we have, that we put together for our clients, would be a webinar promo campaign. It's a four email sequence that promotes a webinar, or a webinar replay sequence, which is a six email sequence that we use to promote the webinar replay. Or, a strategy session promo sequence. So, these we already have all loaded up inside whatever CRM our client is going to be using, because we know that these emails are going to be used.

We're going to be increasing website traffic fast through a sales funnel. Now we have to figure out what triggers.

1. automation piece of the drip marketing automation
2. triggers are going to fire
3. forms are going to be figured out
4. pages are going to be visited
5. webinars are going to be attended
6. if that person signs up for the webinar and doesn't attend, what happens?

All of those triggers then put people in different drip marketing campaigns.

It layers all of that complexity in on top of itself. So, that's some great drip marketing examples. Ways that you can engage your folks through your sales funnel. Another thing is an affiliate sequence, so finding three, or four, or five, or eight affiliate products in your space that you can promote and get paid commission. Another drip marketing example would be looking at all of your blog posts over the last six months and then taking your best ones, putting it all together into an autoresponder, and then letting your prospects go through it on autopilot. So that they're bonding with you and engaging with your company without you actually having to do something.

Deploying the best drip campaigns now in terms of the best drip campaigns, there are so many examples.

Many different ones to use. My absolute favorite are Axis One, Infusionsoft, Ontraport, and ActiveCampaign. We have clients using all of them. Infusionsoft, a little bit bulky. It's Keap now but like I said, I've been doing this a long time. So, it will always be Infusionsoft to me. Ontraport is one that we use personally for our stuff. We use Axis One personally for our stuff, and then we also use ActiveCampaign for a bunch of clients. ActiveCampaign, brilliantly awesome drip campaign software however, it doesn't let you do much from a sales pipeline standpoint. It doesn't let you do much from an API tie in standpoint, so it's one of the reasons why we choose the other three unless our client is just looking for drip marketing automation, that's it.

What is an excellent open rate in an email marketing drip campaign?

That's an interesting question because when somebody is brand new to you, your open rate is going to be high. So if somebody signs up for a lead magnet, then that first email that they're going to get is going to be an open rate of 50%, 60%, 70%, even if it's not double opt-in. Then from there, it's going to go down. It might go down to 20%, 30% for the next couple of emails. Once you get to two weeks, three weeks, four weeks out then your open rate is going to be probably between 16% and 20% unless they purchased something.

If it's actually a buyer's list, then your open rate is going to be high for a really, really long time because these are buyers. As long as you didn't sell them some shit product, then they are going to love you for a while. Especially because you're emailing them. So, that is one of the biggest reasons why your buyer's list, the metric is at 16% more profitable than your prospect list, and that is why. So if you are looking for drip marketing automation software, then check out AxisOne.io. If you would like to talk about setting up marketing automation for your business, setting up your products, setting up services, and figuring out how best to use drip marketing automation for you or for your clients even, then go to DoneForYou.com/Start.

GSDdaily 078

This is episode number 78, how to set up drip campaigns and email automation. This week is marketing automation week. It was so funny, I actually talked to a guy yesterday named Clint who literally geeks out on marketing automation the same way that I do, which is, I mean, it's this magical thing, really.

When you have one piece of software that can talk to another piece of software and you can send all kinds of interesting things back and forth and really is, it's magical, because you can set the few things up so that if somebody hits a website, then you get a ping and slack. Nuts, right? You're able to literally see the life of your website, the life of your sales funnel, who is coming to your sales funnel, what their phone numbers are, what their email address is. Then you just pick up the phone if you want, if you want to be that aggressive from a business development standpoint.

It's pretty cool the way marketing automation or marketing technology or martech or adtech or whatever kind of fun little synonym you want to put into play. I mean, it's funny how all of those things come together to just give us something us marketing nerds can geek out on. That is pretty cool when you can reach out and have an impact in somebody's life, help them make some transformation, help them on their journey without having to do it personally, without having to do it one-on-one. That's the fun part.

How to Set Up Drip Campaigns and Email Automation

For those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, the creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in three things, setting up offers, helping build offers, helping build sales funnels, and then also setting up marketing automation and traffic. That is where we live. It's the thing that I have spent the last 14 years of my life perfecting. It's what my team does every single day.

This is called The Complete Guide To Drip Campaigns And Email Automation. We're going to talk through it. I'm going to show you some cool stuff.

Now for those of you, if you have marketing automation set up in your business, just say, "Yes," because marketing automation really is super, super important.

It started back a little while ago. I don't even know how long ago, 16 years ago, 14 years ago maybe. It started as just an email autoresponder. The simplest form of that is in Gmail. When you set up your vacation message, that is an autoresponder. When you get an email, then a vacation message triggers out, so it alerts the person that you were on vacation and you will not be getting back to them, and here's the number to call if you have an urgent problem. That's the simplest form of an autoresponder.

Sequence of Autoresponders

Now the next level higher is actually just a sequence of autoresponders. It's an autoresponder that's set up and sends multiple emails or multiple text messages or whatever. What this lets you do is it lets you predefine how people, what copy is going to be going out for somebody to read. You get to write five, seven, 10 emails once, and then on day one, that email goes out and somebody gets it. On day two, the next email goes out and somebody gets it. On day three, the next email goes out and somebody gets it.

It's powerful in simplicity because when you have a sales call, you can literally just put somebody on that list, and then they get the next 30 days' worth of email from you. You aren't writing any of it. You're not sending it one-on-one. It doesn't even enter your consciousness. The software just sends it and the person receiving it, usually knows it's an email autoresponder at this point, but they didn't use it. But even now seeing your name pop up in the inbox, seeing your image, your logo, the copy, the content, all of that stuff, it helps them know, like, and trust you. That is what good marketing automation does. That's what drip campaigns do.

Now drip campaigns, there is a sequence of marketing email messages that are sent out automatically on a preset schedule. That preset schedule can be daily, it can be every other day, it can be every three days, it can be at 7:00 a.m. every morning, it can be at 11:00 p.m. We try to send them out first thing in the morning. We try to make sure that they are going out a first thing or as first thing as possible.

Why you need drip marketing automation campaigns?

1. You want to be relevant with timely communication.

You don't ever want somebody to forget about you. Never, ever do you want them to forget about who you are, what you do, what you stand for. You want them to remember you, to remember your brands, remember doing business with you, to remember getting value from you. That is one of the biggest things, one of the biggest reasons why email automation is so important.

2. You want to nurture leads until they are sales-ready.

Not everybody who comes to your website is going to be ready to pull the trigger and buy something right now. You want to help them get there. That might mean a month's worth of warming up to you. It might mean days or hours worth of warming up to you. It might mean years of warming up to you. Marketing automation buys you that time so that you are able to market to that person without it involving considerable mind share from you.

If you have a list of 70,000 people, you might only actively be doing business from maybe a consulting standpoint, with 150 of them and at any time. But that also means that how many tens of thousands of them are engaged with you ready to become your next customer. It's all because of marketing automation.

It also lets you work smarter. It lets you work smarter with marketing automation. Think about it hard once and then you put it together and then you dial it in forever.

Infographic On Some Drip Campaign Basics

Now here's a little infographic on some drip campaign basics. I will let you explore that, some other little videos and stuff. Just some very simple sequences that you want to have in place when you start. You want to nurture your leads. That might involve podcasts and blog posts, other pieces of content that you create. You want to welcome them onto your list so that they are seeing what you do. They're being onboarded correctly. You want to make sure to send abandonment cart emails. Those abandonment cart emails, it's a marketing automation thing. If somebody hits your order form but then doesn't buy within an hour, you want to send them emails and say, "Hey, you really should go back and buy. Your discount is expiring. Your whatever is expiring," and hit them with a couple of emails there. That's marketing automation.

Anytime there's a renewal, so whether it's a monthly subscription renewal or an annual subscription renewal or whatever, and they're almost at their end. The subscription renewal is every 30 days usually. On day 27, day 28, you should email them a report or email them something nice.

Reengage them in your brand so that they feel value a couple of days before it's time for them to renew.

This encourages them to stick around longer. It's a very simple trigger. It's like if they sign up now, that first one goes out on day 27, the next one goes out 30 days after that, so it's day 57. The next one goes out 30 days after that, day 87. Let the software track it, let the software handle it. All you got to do is think about it. Just think about it hard for an hour and put a couple of blog posts together, put a couple of leads together, whatever, figure out what you're going to do for that person, and then let the software handle it.

Engagement is another one. If somebody needs to be reengaged, if they haven't done anything, you haven't seen them, heard from them, they haven't been to your website, they haven't opened an email in 90 days or more than you want to try to reengage them. If they don't reengage, you cut them from your email list because you want your sender score to stay high.

Drip Your Course Through Email

One of the cool things about drip automation is you can actually drip your course material out through email. Rather than go through the hard work of protecting your membership website, doing the login and the password and all that other stuff and protecting the pages and then worrying about some folks not being able to login or some password reset reminders or all of the customer support that goes with membership, which there is a lot, you can literally just automate in an email. They buy a course on day one, they get the first email. In that email, they get access to all the videos. On day eight, or seven, whatever, they get access to the next lesson, the next module, and that's all the videos.

You don't have to worry about a login. There are benefits to log in, of course, but there's also a lot of drawbacks to forcing a login. It just depends on how committed you are, if you have a support team. If your mind getting support reminders about passwords and stuff, it might be simpler just to kind of let it publicly available, but not have that URL show publicly, like in Google so you can have them de-index it.

Who runs drip email campaigns?

Bloggers, core sellers, SAS businesses, realtors, insurance brokers, fashion industry, beauty professionals, eCommerce online. Basically, if you have a business, you should be running email, you should be running marketing automation. That's really all there is to it.

Now we talked a lot about this yesterday, but basically, there's a couple of different things. Every marketing automation lives in this triggered category right up here, so in the center in the white there. Every automation has a trigger. That trigger activates the content. It activates the dripping material that's going out, it also activates any nurture sequences, but everything has a trigger. The automation doesn't start until the trigger fires. That trigger might be a URL visit, it might be a form fill out. It might be somebody logging into a CRM and manually adding a tag. Everything has to trigger in order for it to go out.

Determine your goals for your marketing automation

You want to make sure to determine your goals when it comes to marketing automation. That is a very kind of macro question. What do you want your prospects to do? If your goal is to have your prospects sign up for a strategy session with you, then everything, all roads lead to Rome. All roads need to end at that strategy session. It might be a call to action in your blog posts, it's going to be a PS, and all of your up on emails, all your webinars are going to pitch that strategy session. All marketing automation needs to be constructed around that idea of your goal is X so all automation is pointing to that one area.

That lets you optimize your marketing messages. It lets you know what your language is going to be like. It lets you focus on your CTS so that your calls to action there. All of that stuff, super, super important.

Frequency and Timing

Then your frequency and timing. We talked about this on Monday, but how often do you mail? How often do you set it up so that somebody gets something from you? Personally, we do usually daily. Daily emails go out and if somebody doesn't want an email, they just delete it. But most of our folks open and they at least open and read. Then there are the people who are engaged, click, go over and watch the live stream, go watch a video, go read a blog post, whatever.

Very little of what we do is a direct link to a sales video. Most of it is content-based, and that's by design. The people who want to buy something, end up buying something down the road. But a lot of that is based on the segments. Who are our more engaged buyers, who are the folks who just signed up, who signed up through a webinar, and maybe they're going through a replay sequence, or did they just find us by visiting the website and opting in for something?

Those segments tell us a lot about their intention. Inside your CRM, you want to set up groups. The group might be a tag, it might be a sequence, it might be a thing. But then that group is how you trigger the marketing automation itself.

Make sure to measure performance

Then you will always want to make sure to measure performance. What are your clicks, opens, or 90-day engaged numbers? How many people did you sign up for your list yesterday? How many emails did you send? All of that stuff is you can just set up a good dashboard for it. Most good CRMs have dashboards like that, how many emails were sent, how many people are on your list, all that stuff.

Onboarding Drip Campaign

Now, some campaign examples. There's an onboarding drip campaign. Email one might encourage customers to finish setting up their new accounts. Then email two shows them around your training material, maybe user guides give them some demo videos and stuff. Email three is going to point customers to a blog, maybe some updates, maybe some ways to keep track of what is new and exciting in your world.

That's an example of a nice onboarding campaign. A lot of these you can just kind of click-through. There's a welcome email drip sequence that we talk through a little bit. You can retain a customer or current customers. There is a drip campaign example to acquire referrals. That one I think is going to be really good for a lot of you. Email example, email two examples.

Offer and Promotion Drips

Then we have the offer and promotion drips. When we are trying to get somebody to buy or when we maybe do a flash sale or send out a discount code, then that stuff would be in there too.

Let's see. Use psychology and personalization, reduce cart abandonment where drip campaigns go off the rail. That's a funny picture. I didn't take that. That's funny, but it looks like something Sebastian would do. Let's see, resend old content. Don't leave your sales staff. Drip automation software and so on and so forth.

Marketing automation is something that you need to have set up in your business.

If you haven't already addressed marketing automation and you don't have a plan for it, you don't have the emails that are supposed to go out or even an idea of how those need to go, then definitely by all means set up an action plan call with us. Over at doneforyou.com/start, you can book a call with my team and me.

What we're going to do is we're going to look at the sales funnel because the sales funnel is really kind of the big piece. I mean, it's the big visual component of your process. You have your lead magnets, you have your webinar registration page, you have your webinar replay page. You have all of that stuff up live in public, but then you have this underlying piece, which is marketing automation.

Sales funnels don't work without marketing automation.

A sales funnel that is just pages is very simply just pages. It is a collection of pages that do certain things, but without marketing automation, none of the rest of it works. When somebody signs up for your lead magnet, then they will get no emails telling them what to do next. If somebody signs up for your webinar that is going live in 15 minutes, they will get no replay emails without marketing automation. If somebody goes to your webinar and books a sales call without marketing automation, nobody would get the reminders for that sales call. Marketing automation is the glue that really brings all of this together.

It's something you need to address in your business, whether the sales funnel is built, or whether you're thinking about building a sales funnel, all of it needs to be addressed through this lens of marketing automation. Click funnels are great. The lead pages are fine. Optimizepress is fine. So many of these page funnel-building software is completely awesome, but they're page builders. They don't have this underlying kind of marketing automation component. Click funnels to have something. Does it do what you need it to do? Maybe it's a great scenario, maybe it's not. You just need to know what you're looking for and what that end result is and then what the capabilities of the software are going to be in order to really put everything together.

For Questions and Guide

We will be happy to explore that with you, all the way from a done-for-you sales funnel, all the way to sending traffic to marketing automation. Just go to doneforyou.com/start, book, fill out the little form, book your call and we will get started there. If you have any questions at all about getting all of this stuff set up, just comment below and I'll make sure to kind of backfill on any comments and answers and we'll go from there.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I will see you tomorrow. I think tomorrow we're going to talk about SMS maybe. We're going to talk about different marketing automation. I think it's going to be SMS. Show you a couple of cool examples. And then Friday, we're going to wrap up the marketing automation week and I will talk to you soon. All right. Thanks. Bye.

The post How To Set-up Drip Campaigns And Email Automation appeared first on Done For You.

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.

Are you looking for a complete guide to marketing automation? Also, are you ready to implement marketing automation or find a marketing automation agency to grow your business? Are you curious about what tools you can use to automate your online marketing? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, you will learn:

• Benefits of marketing automation
• Why it is important
• The definition of marketing automation
• How to integrate automation into your business
• Common mistakes that are associated with marketing automation
• Impactful automation workflows
• Links to tools and resources to help you get started right away.

Let’s dive right in.

Benefits of marketing automation

This article will reveal everything you need to know about bringing automation and marketing together. But first, let’s look at some of the benefits of automation.

Μarketing automation is growing at a rapid pace. And the reason is obvious: it helps deliver more leads, better conversions, and increased sales, and all of that happens on autopilot.

On average, 51% of companies are already using marketing automation, while over 58% of B2B companies are on the verge of adopting the technology. Businesses that harness the potential that technology has to offer have witnessed significant growth in leads and sales. Additionally, they have increased productivity by 14% while reducing marketing overheads by 12%.

For businesses, automation offers a remarkable opportunity to improve efficiency, minimize costs, and deliver a better customer experience. However, embarking on the journey of marketing automation may seem challenging, but with expert advice, it may be simpler than you think.

Why is marketing automation important?

Here are some quick facts about why you should opt for marketing automation:

• By the end of 2019, the marketing automation software market is estimated to be worth $5.5 billion.
• B2B marketers report the #1 advantage of marketing automation is that it helps generate higher and better-quality leads.
• On average, 30% of B2B marketers said that automation helps them save time, while 25% stated it helps in big data analysis.
• Investment in marketing automation tools shows a steep rise and is projected to reach $25.1 billion by 2023 from $11.4 billion in 2017.

The image below shows the Global Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, 2017 to 2023.

Source: Emailmonday.com

In this regard, John McTigue, EVP of Kuno Creative, said:

Without marketing automation, you are just guessing – just hoping that people will take the bait and be ready to buy your products. Statistics show that buyers don’t do that. They want to learn at their own pace and be reached when they need more information or are ready to buy. A well-constructed marketing automation strategy makes that a reality.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is about the software and the processes that allow businesses to execute their online marketing actions automatically. Automation helps to adopt a relationship-oriented and real-time approach to marketing campaigns, improving productivity, efficiency, lead generation, and revenue.

As defined by Marketo,

Marketing automation is a category of software that streamlines, automates, and measures marketing tasks and workflows so that companies like yours can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.

Another definition by SearchCRM goes like this, “Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would have otherwise been performed manually much more efficient and makes new processes possible. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management.”

Having understood why marketing automation is crucial to your business, let’s explore how you can automate your marketing campaigns to drive quality leads and increase your revenue.

How to integrate automation into your marketing strategy

Here’s how you can put your marketing processes on autopilot to boost efficiency and increase your revenue:

Step 1: Identify the right tasks to automate

What are your marketing team’s most cumbersome and repetitive tasks? That’s where marketing automation can help free up time, which can be utilized on tasks that need the expertise of your salesperson, such as client interaction or building a strategy.

Automation can be effective for lead nurturing, customer communications, social media management, content scheduling, analytics, and market research – typically any task that does not require active human engagement. Say, for example, response emails. Automating your emails can dramatically minimize the burden on your marketing team. Similarly, identify all your marketing campaigns that are time-consuming and can be automated. This will help improve workforce productivity and efficiency considerably.

Step 2: Automate your email drip campaigns

Emails are still one of the most significant driving forces behind increased sales. However, managing email marketing campaigns is complex, especially when they aren’t just about one or two emails, but 20 or even more.

It isn’t simple to handle that campaign volume manually as it involves everything from building a mailing list, creating a compelling email body, adding personalized welcome messages, sending emails in bulk, following up, etc.

These eat up much of your marketing team’s time, affecting their efficiency.

Axis: A powerful, yet simple-to-use, marketing automation tool

It is time to break free from the conventional approach of setting up email marketing campaigns and adopt advanced tools such as Axis Marketing Automation. It takes email autoresponders to another level, thanks to its numerous features.

Here’s how you can automate your email campaigns with the help of the Axis powerful suite:

• The tool helps build your email list, and manage traffic and lead generation campaigns by writing the ad copy, effective targeting, and nurturing the leads through dedicated email marketing campaigns.
• Its powerful email autoresponder aids in writing all your email copies for internal and external promotions.
• Done For You Email Marketing and Automation tool will deploy excellent-quality landing pages with high conversion potential. This ensures a high percentage of sales funnel conversions.
• The tool is tailor-made to suit any email marketing platform your business is built in.
• The email automation tool is 100% system-based, which means it continues to work even when you are not. All features of the software are set to target the prospects and drive leads, any time of the day or night.

By automating emails, businesses can boost productivity in a significant manner, while targeting the right set of audiences with a compelling message that inspires them to convert into potential leads.

Step 3: Choose the right automation software

When you plan to take the “marketing automation” jump, you must select the appropriate tool that assists you in the process without overburdening your budget.

There are many automation tools available today; so make sure you choose one that best suits your requirements. It should be easy to use and meets your budget. Do your research well, seek recommendations, or opt for a free trial before you enter into long-term commitments.

For example, Axis is a powerful software suite that makes automation and email marketing a breeze even if you are a non-techie. It is one of the most useful tools for marketers struggling to find the right tool for their email campaigns. Additionally, its advanced drag-and-drop campaign builder makes marketing automation simple, effective, and hassle-free. So choose wisely and streamline your marketing campaigns while improving efficiency.

Step 4: Nurture your leads with automated follow-up

Automated workflows are a great way to follow-up with your customers in a personalized manner. Through these workflows, you encourage them to take definitive action and finish what they started. Lead nurturing through follow-up is effective in driving more conversions. Automated follow-ups help bring leads back to your website, and enable you to build strong relationships.

Only 20% of the total leads are ready to buy when they first visit your website. This shows marketers need a dedicated process known as lead nurturing to build qualified leads and continue till the time they are sales-ready. When done strategically, lead nurturing can help increase sales leads by 50% while reducing the cost per lead by 33%.

Moreover, your marketing team doesn’t need to spend their valuable time in this as everything is being automated while adding a personalized touch.

Check out the example below to see how HubSpot Academy uses automated, personalized follow-up emails to bring back prospects and inspire them to take action.

Step 5: Personalized email autoresponders

Who doesn’t love receiving warm wishes and surprise gifts on special occasions! Your customers love it too.

Sending automated emails to wish them on occasions like birthdays or anniversaries can help build strong relationships. Your customers will develop brand loyalty, which can go a long way in converting them into sales. Email autoresponders are most effective in sending personalized messages while keeping the efforts of the marketing team to a minimum.

See the example below:

Source:Knowledgebase.constantcontact.com

Step 6: Manage your social media accounts on autopilot

Integrating marketing automation into your social media campaigns is another good way to maximize conversions while reducing costs and improving efficiency.

There are two ways you can run your social media on autopilot. First, you can automate the post-distribution process, as you’d do with emails. Second, you can set part of your growth strategy on autopilot.

Automate social media content distribution

Regarding social media content distribution, do you send the same status update or post on five different platforms manually? Not only it is annoying for you, but for your followers too – coming across the same update on different channels. However, with marketing automation, you can handle the challenge efficiently.

Some tools help you connect to five social media accounts from different platforms. You can then set unique messages for different channels and also schedule when you want the posts to be updated on social media. This is an effective way of connecting to your audience on various social media platforms but in a less cumbersome way.

Automate audience growth

To automate your social media growth, you can use tools that let you see who your followers are; who you follow; or who are your followers, but you do not follow them back, etc. Based on data, you can run autopilot to take specific actions.

Common mistakes to look out for

Implementing marketing automation? Avoid these common mistakes:

Automation is a powerful tool for business management and growth. As a result, it is prone to misuse.

It is easy to implement a solution on a large scale, larger than you can manage effectively. Then, you might just lose control of what’s happening.

Also, it is possible that, charmed by what marketing automation can do, you might deploy spammy tactics that will put your business on a blacklist. So, be sure to send only relevant emails to your target audience at the right time.

Automation can be pointless if you don’t have the right processes and design in place to convert leads into customers, or, generally, maximize the result of your efforts.

Moreover, when you are aimless, the process may seem to be too expensive with a not-so-promising result. So, set your goals right, be specific, and take the correct approach. Track and measure results.

Automation is no panacea for all online marketing ills. As with every tool, its goal is to help you optimize what you previously did manually. If the process is wrong, automation tools won’t save the day.

Learn more about how you can avoid common mistakes in the process of automating your business.

Done-for-you automation solution

Sometimes, no matter how simple it may be, you need someone else to take on your project because you just want to focus on your projects. As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you might be falling into the trap of becoming a jack of all trades. But think again; You know it is not possible to do everything – and do it all right! A wise business owner focuses on what he or she does best, and leaves the rest to his or her team, or simply outsources processes.

Impactful automation workflows

There are 7 main types of email automation workflows. Each of these categories can have a lot of variations, depending on the industry and business goals, but here are the basic email autoresponder sequences.

1. Welcome email sequence
2. Segmentation / Engagement sequence
3. Sales automation workflow
4. Lead nurturing sequence
5. Cross-sell / Up-sell sequence
6. Re-engagement email workflow
7. Onboarding automation

Read more about these 7 impactful marketing automation workflows and get instant access to autoresponder templates.

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

Online business automation tools and resources

There are A LOT of tools that can help you automate your online marketing. It’s easy to get lost in software reviews and comparisons while wondering if you’ll ever be able to deploy tools and processes painlessly, and also manage everything optimally.

In this article, we have touched on why Axis, our own robust automation suite, might be the right tool for you. If you want to learn more and see firsthand how Axis can help you automate your customer communication, lead generation, and campaign management, book a free demo and consultation.

It’s time you stopped missing out on opportunities, forgetting things, and doing email communication manually! Today, there are tools for automating repetitive tasks and processes that can take a lot of weight off your shoulders. Learn more about how you can escape the rat race and lean on marketing automation to manage your business 24/7.

To learn how to get your email marketing done for you, click here!

GSDdaily Episode 76

In today's GSDdaily, we are going to kick off marketing automation and doing marketing automation to convert more traffic into sales, which is why we're here, which is why we do what we do. At the end of the day, we try so hard to get customers and prospects and folks signed up for email lists and leads fully qualified and otherwise that a lot of times we forget about some of the backend automation that is going to make that lead purchase or increase conversions at a very significant rate. That's what this week is all about. It's about converting more of your prospects into sales and using marketing automation to do it, so you don't necessarily need to have a person, a body who is pressing the keys and clicking the mouse and picking up the phone call. It's trying to automate as much of that as possible.

I love systems, processes, and building stuff that works again and again. One of the coolest parts about marketing and sales is you can automate 80 or 90% of it, to the point where if somebody enters your funnel. They come in. They come into your funnel. See a Facebook video, they see a Facebook ad, whatever.

They come in and they opt-in for something, they watch a webinar or whatever, but then it might be that it takes them three hours to make it through your funnel where they sign up for a sales call with you, or it might be that it takes three years for them to sign up for a sales call with you. But when you have marketing automation in place, then you are always marketing to them between the three hours and the three years and everywhere in between, because they're seeing your ads, they are receiving emails from you. Things are happening when they interact with your website, things are happening when they watch a video from you.

Marketing Automation

There are lots of ways to cut up marketing automation. But at the end of the day, it is all based around this idea of triggers. These triggers flip a switch and say, "If this person does this, then this happens," or, "If this person does that, when that happens," you know what I mean? That's what this week is going to be all about.

I have a marketing automation guide here for you that we're going to kick through.

One of the benefits of marketing automation, by and large, it lets you sell more stuff.

At the end of the day, only so many people who come to your website are going to buy anything, half a percent, 1%, 2%, 5%.

There are very few people who are going to purchase. That's just how it is. If you have 100 visitors, you might have two sales. Also, with 100 visitors, you might have five sales. If you put 100 people on a webinar, you might have 12 sales. It just depends on the price and the marketing and all that other stuff.

But the benefit of marketing automation is that even though they don't necessarily buy right away, they're still receiving marketing from you. It might be the email or SMS text message that goes out. It might be the email sequence that fires after somebody goes to an add-to-cart page or an order form. There are lots of ways that marketing automation is going to trigger, but that is the primary benefit. You sell more stuff without necessarily increasing payroll, without increasing human capital, without increasing mind share in your office. You set it up once and it just goes for you. It might be a retargeting campaign. It might be emailed. There are lots of different kinds of marketing automation, but at the end of the day, it's all designed to increase sales.

Why is marketing automation important?

By the end of 2019, last year, the marketing automation software market is estimated to be worth $5.5 billion, which is ridiculous. I mean, from an automation standpoint, that includes companies like Zapier, which includes companies like Salesforce or other CRMs. Salesforce., The report that I heard or read at the beginning of 2020 was that Salesforce, which is the largest CRM in the world, had $13 billion worth of contracts already signed for the next three years. They could not sell another thing and they're still going to make $13 billion. It's just crazy for software.

On average, 30% of B2B marketers said that automation helps them save time, while 25% stated that it helps big data analysts. And the big data piece is interesting because I mean, I... We're growing fast, so some of what I was doing last week was putting together reports of all the people who hit certain sales pages so that we could automate some of that marketing from an email, outbound phone call, text message standpoint.

I ran a report that said, "Who are all the people who are in our CRM who hit this page in the last six months? And then of those people, how many do we have email addresses for? How many do we have phone numbers for?" When you have marketing automation set up, you can run all kinds of really crazy, really detailed, specific queries like that and get real data and say, "All these people, they're subscribed to the website. They've opened an email in the last three days. They were on the website and the page," so on and so forth, "Call that person." Do you know what I mean?

We have Slack set up to do all kinds of really crazy marketing automation stuff, but we even have Slack so that if somebody goes to a sales page, like the sales funnel development page, if you land on it if you go to that page right now and actually in our CRM, then it will start dinging who is on that page. It will give us a Slack notification, "Mark is on, Bob is on, Sandra, is on," whatever, and we will see who was actually on the page and if we have the phone number, we have their phone number too.

If you guys want to run a little example, so let's see ... If you want to go to that page ... This is kind of going to be fun. If you are in our CRM and you go to this page, I will be able to see who was there in realtime. It was 9:54. There was a Sean there. That was a little bit before we started. There was an R. Saunders, a Brian Wright, there was a Gerardo who was there a little bit earlier. If you go to that page right now and you're in our CRM, then it will ding and say who's there. Just an interesting little test.

But anyway, so the importance of marketing automation. What is marketing automation? How do you integrate marketing automation into your marketing? The first thing to think about when it comes to marketing automation is what do you need it to do? There are so many different ways that marketing automation can benefit your business. But what can it do? What will it do? And how does it aid your process?

I talk to people all the time, and especially businesses who are doing half a million, a million, three million, $5 million a year, you already have your internal processes. There's a workflow. Even if it's not well-defined, there's still a workflow in your business for turning prospects into customers and then fulfilling and onboarding those customers. So there is something specific to that process, and marketing automation needs to add to that. It needs to automate some of that process.

The goal of marketing automation is not to make things more complex. It's to make them run better and also give you some better insight into the prospects and customers that are coming through without introducing a whole lot of new weird bottlenecks.

For instance, sales. If you have an outbound sales guy and they are paid to cold call dial, 100 calls a day or whatever, then a better alternative and a better solution for their time might be setting up an automated webinar funnel or a Zoom presentation funnel, where he gets people onto this presentation, onto the sales call, this one to any kind of presentation multiple times a day, so he might have four people or 10 people or 12 or 100 people on this presentation and then he's just basically pitching everybody and then having them go schedule a call on his calendar afterward.

Completely doable. It changes his dynamic. Rather than cold calling a bunch of people, getting a bunch of nos, maybe getting through the gatekeeper a couple of times and reaching the decision-maker at some point, now he's got 25, 30, 50 people a day who are sitting in his presentations and then the interested people are booking calls in his calendar. It flips the dynamic.

When that is true, you can employ all kinds of marketing automation, like if they scheduled a call, they get a couple of emails. If they didn't schedule a call, they get a couple of emails. You can send outbound text messages. You can send confirmation emails. Still, in that particular scenario, you can automate a lot of it, but what I always tell our clients is to make sure that as soon as somebody schedules a call, you send one personal email and that personal email is supposed to connect with them.

You show just a genuine interest in what they're doing, their business, their whatever, whatever it is you're selling, show a genuine interest in them, and then close that email with a question, so it's a personal one-on-one thing. And oftentimes you'll find that when somebody replies and engages in a conversation, your strategy session is going to go incredibly well. It's just a change in dynamics. There's a lot of things you can automate, but there are some things that you shouldn't.

One of the things, probably the easiest thing to automate is your drip email campaigns, your email sequences. If somebody comes in, they download the lead magnet, then they get these 20 emails. That's why we built our email copy app because at the end of the day, running email sucks. Writing blog posts sucks, too. Writing, in general, is just not a whole lot of fun, but you need to do it because that's how Google sends you traffic and that's how people engage with you. You got to have content. Email is one of the easiest things to automate. That's why we built to access, and that's what triggers our CRM.

Now, email, the triggers are anything and everything you can think of. If somebody downloads a report, they get this sequence. For visitors on the page, they get that sequence. If somebody goes to the order form and doesn't buy, they get this sequence. There are lots of ways that you can cut up email and email automation based on lots and lots of different triggers. It's the easiest one to automate.

The second easiest to automate is SMS. You can do a lot of text message marketing in a very automated way when you understand that somebody's text messages are sacred almost. I mean, so we don't do a lot of broadcast text messages, meaning we don't just drop text messages and think that we're going to be pushing traffic the same way we push traffic through email. Text messages are very timely. They're very time-based notifications. If you send a text message, you want the person receiving the text message, you want to convey urgency. It might be a live event that is about to go live in 15 minutes. It might be a discount code that is about to expire.

That's really about it. Anything more than that and it's going to seem like you're just crying wolf. If you send daily text message reminders about some random fucking promo, then you're just going to get unsubscribed and piss off people. My wife, there was a ... Who was it? There was some retailer that was sending text messages the same way they would send emails. And I mean, the first one was like, "Maybe somebody made a mistake," and the second one was like, "Delete." That's just how text messages go. It's a very personal method of communication so you just want to consider that before automating your SMS.

One of the places we've seen it work well is events, live events where the host, the event owner wants to communicate throughout the event with live guests, and that has worked out well, like, "Hey, remember to do your homework for tomorrow," that kind of thing. But now who knows when we're going to be able to do live events again. Well, some people are doing live events again, but the way we used to do them, at least.

You also want to make sure to nurture your leads. Not every email automation should be sales-based. You don't want every email going out, every notification, every whatever to be sales-related. Also, you want to give a lot of content, so you want to bond with your audience. You want to send them to blog posts. Blog posts are a big one.

Here's a little story. Four or five years ago, before I purchased DoneForYou.com, we were doing a lot of sales funnels and all that stuff, and I was promoting a lot of affiliate products and I would promote the affiliate products, not every day, but pretty often. And I remember sitting out on the back deck shortly after we moved into this house and I was like, "My list doesn't even know who I am because all I'm doing is I'm basically giving them a lead magnet and then sending affiliate offer, affiliate offer, affiliate offer."

And we were making great money doing it. But I wondered, "What am I sacrificing because of it? What is the opportunity cost of making the affiliate money?" And I realized that it was just much, much more valuable to not promote any affiliate products and then do videos, do blog posts, and at the time we were writing a blog post a week or whatever. So I would mail the blog post and then I might mail a lead magnet and then I might mail a promo video or something for one of our software offers or whatever. But I felt that people were learning more about me, and they were engaging more with me and that has just kind of been the MO ever since then.

Now we don't ever mail affiliate products. We might do a favor for a client or if we think that somebody has something cool that you guys would love, then we'll promote it whether it's a video or we'll mail it out, but we don't take a commission for it. That has been nice, because now it's like, when we create the content, we mail it out, like these live streams. We mail these live streams out every once in a while.

We're going to start doing it more, just because people are like, "Oh, I didn't know you were going live." We go live every day at 10:00, every single day, Monday through Friday. This is episode 76. We've done it 75 previous times. Wherever you're on YouTube or Facebook, this is where our show is. Every day, 10:00 AM Eastern, this is where we go live. I've been thinking about pushing it to noon or one though, just so our west coast friends can jump in rather than have to watch the replay later. But I don't know. You can comment on that. If you would like to see these things a little bit later in the day, then just let me know. We might push to one or two or noon or something.

But yeah, you want to blog, you want to live stream, you want to podcast. You create the content that you're most suited to create and then use that content in your emails and your marketing automation. One of the things that I used to do and still do, when we write a blog post, let's say about sales funnels, then what I do is I mail that sales funnel post out to the list and then I just literally drag it up into my automation for sales funnels. I mail it out to the list.

You get the content. And then now everybody who comes in later, they see that blog post later, or if it's about email marketing, I'll mail it out to the list and then I'll drag that thing over into the email marketing sequence. What I'm doing is I'm only adding our best content to our automated email sequences, and now those automated email sequences sometimes are 80 and 90 emails long because I write it once, then I use it in multiple ways.

You want to nurture your content, nurture your leads through your automated follow-up. You also want to personalize remodel responders. I'm up on the fence on this one. I like the idea of graphical HTML newsletters. I don't know that they work any better. What they do is they do let you do a couple of things in the same email, which is nice. This email that you're looking at, literally is, "Happy birthday to you," so happy birthday. There's a message in there. Then we have, "Enjoy 50% off," a nice graphical coupon. And then down below, we're inviting them to connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube, and we're also doing a little bit of branding.

This one graphical newsletter is doing a couple of things as opposed to a plain white text-based email that is copy and then a link and then that's it. You can only promote one thing. You can ask for one action inside of a text-based email. With HTML, you can ask for two, three, four actions. The conversion on that email is going to go down because you're asking for more things. It's just one of those things. If you, really, really care that they convert into one offer, just make one offer in an email. However, if you want to give somebody your main offer and then down below, you might want to promote a book, like some of the stuff that we do.

Every once in a while, I mean, most people are to do that top thing. They're going to go through and do the thing you want them to do. However, every once in awhile, I mean, not every once in a while. I mean, we sent out an email, we'll sell eight or 10 books and the bottom banner block underneath all the text and all the other stuff we told them to do, and we'll sell some books if that's where they want to go next.

For me, the way I see it and the way I'm viewing it in my mind at least is that we're presenting people with more options. If they want to go watch a video, that's awesome. But I would rather just go buy a book just because that's how I enjoy learning is through the written word as opposed to having to wait through a video. And even in waiting through a video, I usually do two times speed or two and a half times the speed just to get through faster, just to get the meat, you know what I mean? That's how I listen to audiobooks is two times, two and a half times, whatever. It's up to you. Marketing automation, use HTML newsletters, don't use them. It's up to you. Test them.

You also want to manage your social media accounts on autopilot. I use Hootsuite for all of our management, Hootsuite. Two Os. I use Hootsuite for our social media management. I just have the professional version, although I think we're going to start doing a little more so I'm going to upgrade to the team, basically every morning what I'll do is I will log in and just post a bunch of articles. We're going to start doing some small, condensed social videos, Gary V style, which I'm pretty excited about, so you're going to start seeing those a lot more.

In social media, that's always your outermost arm. You have your social media profiles and posts and all that stuff. You have your videos and you have your posts and you have your live streams and all that stuff. And then they come into your inner circle, which is all your landing pages, your landing pages, your sales videos, all that stuff. I should draw this out. Your landing pages, your sales videos. Then you have your innermost circle, which are your buyers. In terms of engagement and commitment, automation is going to take them through all of those.

But you have your outer ring, which is all your outer channels, I should say. That's a pretty cool graphic. I'm going to draw that. That's cool. See? Sometimes when you're put on the spot for a live stream like this, you have no idea what you're going to say. And sometimes it's pretty good ideas like that, where I'm like, "Oh, that's a great lead magnet. Okay, cool. So we'll just do that."

Now, some common mistakes for marketing automation. First of all, you got to set it up, you got to activate it. I can't tell you how many times I'm mowing the lawn and I am like, "Wow, I didn't even think this particular trigger could be triggered in this way, which would throw the whole automation off," and here's what I mean. Let's say you have a couple of email sequences that are all set up. somebody comes in, they downloaded the report, they get a bonding sequence. Then they buy something else and they get some other sequence, then they buy whatever.

Sometimes the way you set up the marketing automation can break when certain things happen. Like if somebody does this and then goes to this page. Then it cancels that automation and goes to another one, whatever. The only way to deploy this stuff is to hit go and watch it. I can't tell you how many times I'm mowing the lawn. I'm thinking, maybe not even consciously, but my subconscious is still working on this automation and I'm like, "Holy shit. I didn't even realize that that particular action that somebody could take would then all of a sudden put them into some buyer sequence or whatever," and then I end up coming in from mowing the lawn and fixing this thing because all hell would have broken those if somebody did that specific scenario of things.

You wouldn't believe how many times that happens. People, take the path that you want them to take often, but that doesn't mean that everybody does. I mean, some people going off in different ways through your marketing automation and sometimes it breaks. So you just want to make sure that you think through the scenarios. I mean, quiet place, quiet room, quiet office, kids aren't running around, sit down for 30 minutes. Plan out all the ways that this thing could get fucked up because it probably will. That's just how marketing automation is. I mean, people take their path through it, and sometimes software goes weird and wonky or whatever.

At the end of the day, your marketing automation workflows. There's a couple of email automation we're going to talk about it a little later this week. One of them is a welcome sequence. Another is an engagement sequence. If somebody comes in, we want to engage them in the sequence. But then also there's re-engagement, which is if somebody doesn't do anything for 60 days or more. We want to reengage them through an email workflow. There's onboarding. There are upsells, which is a big one.

Now, so many sales funnels have gone from really high tickets. High ticket still works great from a sales funnel standpoint, but a lot of order forms start low and then go up, so your order form at 4.95, like a 4.95 book, then it goes to $37, then $97, and then 297, that might be the upsell path. Well, what you want to do is you want to have email automation that if they don't take those upsells, you want to email them into those upsells. Make sure to set-up the Ascension Sequence.

Sales automation, lead nurturing, all of it important. We're going to talk about this week, some of the more engaging workflows that you want to think about. How to write the email copy for them, and all that stuff. That's kind of an intro to marketing automation. At the end of the day, super important for engaging with your prospects. Qualifying the people that haven't purchased yet and who want to purchase. They just don't know it yet, or bonding with your prospects as they move through your sales funnel so that they're more comfortable about purchasing with you. That is what marketing automation does.

For Questions and Guide

For those of you who are interested in talking about some marketing automation, go to DoneForYou.com/start. You can fill out the little form on our site. From there, we'll get on the phone with you. We'll talk through the specifics of marketing automation, sales funnels, traffic, and all that stuff. If there's anything you would like me to cover this week specifically, comment underneath these live streams. They will all come to me and that's probably the better way. Then I'll just pick it up in the next couple of days. We're going to be talking about marketing automation all week, so I will talk to you soon.

The post Marketing Automation That Will Increase Your Potential Leads 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.

Video Transcript:

Aaron Parkinson:
I'll tell you the story behind my Facebook shirt.

Jason Drohn:
What's up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to Sales Systems Experts, episode number seven, where we talk about marketing automation tips and buyer journeys. And I am joined by Aaron Parkinson. So how are you, good sir?

Aaron Parkinson:
Well, I'm double barreling today because I've got the Hulk.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
And I've got the shirt.

Jason Drohn:
Nice. There you go.

Aaron Parkinson:
And this shirt is directly from Facebook headquarters. You cannot get them anywhere else. I've never worn it. Think I had it for like two years.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
And I thought, today I'll break it out for our show.

Jason Drohn:
Very nice.

Aaron Parkinson:
It's my very fancy special Facebook shirt.

Jason Drohn:
So is there like a merchandise counter at Facebook where you go? Or do they just give them out for free?

Aaron Parkinson:
Well, this one was given to me. But they do have a merch store there, but it's their very specific blue, their very specific font. So you can only get it at Facebook headquarters, and-

Jason Drohn:
And they're copyright protected or trademarked.

Aaron Parkinson:
I'm sure. It's probably listening to me right now talking. Probably collecting data. Probably analyzing my BMI and all sorts of things, but I don't even know. Probably a microchip in the collar. But yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
So we're talking today about marketing automation tips and follow-ups. Really kind of go hand in hand. So maybe, you or I can do it, is sort of giving people the lay of the land of when you're creating an offer... And I want to talk a little bit about this today too, what the difference between the brand and the offer is. But when you're creating an offer, there's a certain baseline of conversions to a sale. If you're in e-commerce, it's how many people visit the site? How many buy the product? How many buy the upsell, the downsell? What do they add to their cart? What is their lifetime value? Or what is their average order value?

Aaron Parkinson:
And then there is all these marketing automation tips that can be put into play that then traditionally from our experience, and I'll use e-commerce as the example today, can boost the average order value or the return on your paid media by as much as 40%. And if you don't have that 40% in play, then it's almost like running a race with one leg. It's very, very difficult to get to the amount of revenue you need, to justify the costs of paid media. And we specialize in paid media, so. It's all about getting the ROI on that dollar invested.

Aaron Parkinson:
So for me, when we take on an e-commerce client, we look at what their baseline conversion is through their product offering. And then we look at five different sectors of where they can increase their return on their ad spend. And so I'm talking about it from an e-commerce standpoint. You can probably talk to it even more in-depth from an info marketing standpoint. But maybe I'll give you my hit list of e-commerce stuff when we deal with a store. These are the things that we check right away.

Aaron Parkinson:
So the first thing that we check is, do they have their email set up appropriately? And when we're talking about email, your order confirmation email. Your abandoned cart email. Your onboarding series for your email, some people call that a nurturing email series. And then your promotional calendar. So we got four different sectors there.

Aaron Parkinson:
Number one, your confirmation email. So many people undervalue their confirmation email because they just think it's supposed to be that thing that says, "Here's your receipt." But it's the one that people open the most.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right? So offering some type of call to action inside of there is super, super valuable. Just a really simple thing you can do is say, "Thank you so much for your order. Here's your confirmation receipt. Here's a special promo code that you can use," right, "To get an additional 20% off of anything, if you use it in the next 24 hours," right. "Use the promo, click here, go back to the store." And people like, "Oh, I get a bonus if I use it today." You'll have a certain percentage of people that'll take that. Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
Your abandoned cart email series. Right. I mean, our abandoned cart email series was responsible for almost 2% of our revenue in our store. So somebody gets to a cart, they don't finish their order, they get an email series that says, "Hey, you left this in your cart. Do you want to continue? Do you want to buy it? Time's ticking down," kind of thing. You can pick up another automated chunk of money right there.

Aaron Parkinson:
Then in your onboarding and nurturing series, so, "Thank you so much for buying with us. Over the next couple of days, you're going to learn more about our company and what we do and why we launched it, what makes us tick," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, traditional nurturing series. Inside of that, there can always be subtle or aggressive links and calls to action back to your store, where ultimately people are going to shop some more.

Aaron Parkinson:
And Ezra Firestone is a friend of mine who owns BOOM by Cindy Joseph. He was showing something the other day were on his About Us page, so the story of the business of the brand, the people who go to that page and click on the link, he has a call to action on his About Us page to visit the store, are the highest converting people of any place that he possibly has.

Jason Drohn:
It's interesting.

Aaron Parkinson:
Because they're reading the heart and the soul of the brand. And if they resonated with it, they almost want to be like, "Yeah. This is what I'm all about. I'm going to click here." And again, that's just another automated place. And I never really thought about it to be honest with you until he told me that. I've never put a call to action to shop the store on an About Us page. But he's like, "These are the most valuable customers we have." So that's another automated entry point that can pick it up.

Aaron Parkinson:
And then last but not least, a promotional calendar. Right? So if you're like, "Hey, I'm going to launch a new product," or, "I'm going to feature a new product," or whatever, "and I'm going to do it on these three days a month," you can set that up way ahead of time. Emails go out, countdowns go down to when the sale ends, or the promo ends. And then you'll pick up...

Aaron Parkinson:
And email for us in our e-commerce store accounted for over 10% of our monthly revenue. And I know that in the info-marketing world, this is like breathing. Everybody... I've been teaching info-marketing since the mid-2000s. And if you didn't have a follow-up email series and a promotional series and all, you're a moron. But in e-commerce, I think a lot of people undervalue it. And it was 10% of our revenue. And more importantly, it's not the same revenue. Because there's no advertising cost associated with it.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
So where you might spend 50% of your advertising dollars acquiring a customer, you're spending no money in the email to sell to that customer. So the profit margin on those sales is exponentially more value, increasing the revenue of the business by 10%, but it might only cost you-

Jason Drohn:
Nothing.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. It's as much as whatever the email autoresponder costs you per month. So it's free marketing. It's automated and it's free. And so many people just undervalue it.

Jason Drohn:
Don't do anything with it.

Aaron Parkinson:
So just don't do it. And we would email every single day.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. Totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
And a lot of people will say, "Oh, that's too aggressive." But I'm, we did it. And it ended accounted for... Every time we sent an email we made $1,400. And it didn't even have to be good. I mean, it's better if it's good, but.

Jason Drohn:
Right. I have a friend, e-comm friend who, he sends two emails a day, every day, morning and afternoon. Morning is an offer, the afternoon is bonding and content. So every day, two emails.

Aaron Parkinson:
And I'd be interested to see what his number or her number is.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. So he's got 350,000 people on his email list. So he's, yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. We had 1.4 million on that list. And the open rates when you're emailing all the time, they go down and they go down.

Jason Drohn:
Oh yeah, yeah. Totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
So we'd have to scrape them and clean it up and do all that kind of stuff. But, it didn't matter. We'd send an email, we'd make $1,400. And for 20 minutes of your time. Because it's usually a template or something. And you can set it up completely automated for 30 days. Just let it do its thing, right.

Jason Drohn:
Just go through. Yeah. Totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
Absolutely. How do you see that apply to the more info marketing side?

Jason Drohn:
So the same thing. You have your transactional emails. So the transactional email would be you downloaded a report, you bought something, the invoice gets sent out and all that stuff. So of course that needs to be set up. In the info-marketing, in the coaching space, it's important to realize that it's not, you turn on the traffic and you get sales. Like with e-comm in a lot of situations, physical products just generally have a higher conversion on the sales page than a digital product because it's not tangible. So physical product, you might have 6%, 8%, 10% conversions. If it's on Amazon, it might be 16%. Whereas digital product, half a percent, 1%, 2%, 3% is what you're a little bit more accustomed to seeing.

Jason Drohn:
So the buyer journey typically takes a little bit longer. There's a more knowledgeable, like, and trust factor that needs to be built up because it isn't a physical product. You're not receiving anything. You're receiving something digital, so. So the thing that I try to impress upon clients is, it isn't they click an ad, they go buy something. Oftentimes it's they click an ad. Then they watch a video. Then they read down the page. Then they click another page. Then it goes through an order form. Then they have to go find their credit card. There are lots of little microtransactions that have to transpire to get them to purchase.

Jason Drohn:
And in the marketing automation tips game, each of those little microtransactions, oftentimes you can trigger an email that goes out. So somebody hits... For us, for instance, if somebody hits one of our sales pages, and we have their email address, they get automatically added into a sequence that fires out and says, "Hey, we noticed you were on this page. So now let's send you six emails in a day because I know you're hyper-aware of this thing right now."

Jason Drohn:
So then they come to the page and then they click the Add to Cart button. Then they go to the order form. Well now that puts them in a different email sequence and that's the cart abandonment sequence. So in that, if the order isn't processed in 30 minutes, they get an email from us that says, "Hey, your, shopping cart is still full. You still got those special savings," or whatever, "That is in your shopping cart."

Jason Drohn:
Then once they buy, they get that order confirmation. And then we tell them, "Here's your thing. Within the next couple of days, we're going to be emailing you a free webinar or a free video," or whatever. "So make sure you read this thing, because it's important for your growth, your future success," whatever. And then, "Look forward to the next few things that we're going to be emailing you."

Jason Drohn:
And that's if there's no upsells. If there is an upsell in the process, then we send them what is called an ascension email sequence. So they bought the front end thing, but not the upsell. So we then send them a bunch of emails to try to get them to buy that upsell. And if they bought that, but not this, we send them a bunch of emails to try to get them to buy that. So we step them up through the process. And if they don't buy anything, we send them a couple of other front end offers sideways. So they didn't buy this thing, so we want them to buy this thing. And then this thing. So that's how-

Aaron Parkinson:
Something that might be in alignment with what we were trying to sell them, but just wasn't the right fit.

Jason Drohn:
Right. So, and if you have multiple products, you can sell multiple products sideways like that. Or you can sell affiliate offers, which is what a lot of our clients do that don't have multiple offers. So just because somebody didn't buy from you doesn't mean they don't like you. Or it doesn't mean they don't like the thing, the product, whatever. It might be that you didn't resonate with them. Or your page didn't catch their attention. Or it was, people just don't buy for men or women or the age was wrong or whatever. So maybe there's an affiliate offer that you can mail them too. You're still capturing some revenue, so generating some cash flow. But it's not necessarily selling your thing. Does that make sense?

Aaron Parkinson:
It makes perfect sense to me. It may not make any sense to anybody looking at the video.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
But it makes perfect sense to me. The second marketing automation tips that I want to talk about is retargeting. And from an e-commerce standpoint, so I wore the Facebook shirt today, there's a whole bunch of statistics thrown all over the place. Like a customer needs to see your offer seven times before they convert or 14 or 21, or just depends on who you talk to. Right? So for us, anytime somebody watches a video or anytime somebody clicks on our page or anytime somebody engages with our social media, that's the first interaction.

Aaron Parkinson:
A lot of people think the first interaction is the first time they go to your site or they give you an email or they buy, and it's not. It's the first time they engage with anything you do. It could just be watching 10 seconds of a video. It could be liking your fan page. It could be Googling your stuff and ending up on one of your blog posts or whatever. Right. So the whole idea is if we're targeting the United States and there are 400 X million people, and all of a sudden 20 million of them take some action somewhere, then you don't want to be marketing to the 400 million anymore. Because that's expensive and it's the shotgun approach and scattered. You want to market to the 20 million who already put their hands up and said, "I have some interest in what's going on here."

Aaron Parkinson:
And that's where you can start to set up automated retargeting campaigns based on different events inside of Facebook, inside of Instagram, inside of Google, inside of YouTube. Wherever you're pulling data in, you can structure them. You can send them content about your company. You can send them case studies about your product. You can send them testimonials from people unboxing it. You can send them promotional material.

Aaron Parkinson:
The longer they're on without buying, you can just send them promotional stuff that's accelerating in aggression, where, "You've seen my stuff for 30 days, but you haven't bought. Well, I'm going to offer you a 10% discount today. 60 days, I'm going to offer you a 30% discount. 90 days of seeing my stuff and you're still not buying, I'm putting the hammer down to get you in." Because once we get them to be a buyer, then that's like the holy grail. It might be a 50% discount in 90 days or whatever. Right?

Aaron Parkinson:
And so we structure all of that media retargeting up as part of our campaigns automatically. And then a lot of cases we'll use outside services as well, like AdRoll right? And AdRoll is just basically an automated way to get your banner advertisement. Which, I see doneforyou.com everywhere I go, for example. And it's just an automated way to get your banner up across all of the inventory of banners that are available everywhere. And if you've ever clicked on something and then you see their ads in banners on every site you visit forever, you can do that through Google. Or you can just do it through a simple service like AdRoll.

Aaron Parkinson:
And typically for us, if we add AdRoll into a client's account, it will attribute somewhere between 5 to 10% of their sales, automatically add a return on ad spend that's seven to 10 one. Because it's all retargeting base. The people already know the product. They already know the customer, or they already know the business. It's not fresh. It's retargeting. They already know about it. So you offer them a little discount or something to get them off their butt. You don't even have to offer them a discount. It's just the fact that they're seeing it everywhere-

Jason Drohn:
Everywhere.

Aaron Parkinson:
And following them. Setting up those types of retargeting marketing automation tips. When we have our campaign structured, we'll see what we call the warm audience, the retargeting audience, we'll see that convert at somewhere between a five to an eight times return on ad spend. Whereas a cold audience might be a two. Right. So the whole goal is to blend them all to get ultimately the average that you want out. And much of it, there's lots of creative testing that goes on to improve it. But just putting it in and automating it will increase your revenue and cut down on your cost per acquisitions tremendously.

Jason Drohn:
Totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
So. I don't know if you have anything genius to add to that.

Jason Drohn:
Well, two things. So AdRoll has an email marketing functionality now. So if AdRoll can find the email address for somebody who visits your website, then it will send out templated emails to them. And you can segment it like a sequence, so. Which is super sweet. I just turned it on last week. So you're probably going to be getting some email from me. Not from me, but AdRoll.

Aaron Parkinson:
Awesome.

Jason Drohn:
So, which is cool. Also in the whole buyer journey, it's important to realize in setting up the retargeting campaigns, that people are either getting warmer to your offer or colder from your offer. And Aaron mentioned it in giving bigger discounts as people are leaving or they're cooling off from your offer. One thing is, how you would set it up inside Facebook is you create audiences. So the audience might be, if they've been to my website within 30 days, then they see this ad. If they've been to my website in 30 to 60 days, they see this ad. And then you step it out.

Jason Drohn:
We oftentimes have done it as small windows, as small as seven days. So basically we treat the seven-day windows like little mini autoresponder sequences, where we're throwing a different offer, a different lead magnet, a different thing in front of them, so. Because they are cooling off. And if they cool off enough, then you might need to pivot them into a different offer or a different lead magnet or a different thing because they've maybe already found a solution that wasn't you. So it's just an interesting thing to think about.

Aaron Parkinson:
Absolutely. When you start to see that type of retargeting being set up, you know that the person knows what they're doing. Because most people won't go that. We talk about retargeting buyers. That's the funny thing. Lots of people won't set up retargeting post the buy. Once they got the buy they're like, "I won."

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, right. No, there are six more offers.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. Why are we not retargeting with more stuff that we have, and selling those things? They're your best leads. Let's sell them more stuff.

Aaron Parkinson:
So we see a lot of people stop that retargeting process at that point. And they leave a lot of money on the table. From an e-commerce standpoint, one of the hot things, but it's been nerve-wracking, is SMS. And with SMS, with text advertising, the open rate is-

Jason Drohn:
It's crazy.

Aaron Parkinson:
... or email, 17% on average or whatever. Where SMS is 90 something percent. Even if they don't open it, they see it and it goes ding on your phone. And it's super, super effective and super simple to set up those automated SMS. And you can use that for all the same things as email autoresponders. Like, "Hey, your order's on the way," or, "Hey, here's a special discount or, "Hey, here's our promotional calendar."

Aaron Parkinson:
And some of the e-comm guys that I work with, SMS especially around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, played an unbelievably massive role in their revenue and their sales.

Jason Drohn:
Interesting.

Aaron Parkinson:
But on the same side, the laws are so strict on text marketing that you have to dot your I's and cross your T's. You're going to text somebody, on your order page it has to be very clear. There's the very specific legal language you have to use around it. Like, "Hey, I check this box and I agreed to receive shipping notifications, promotional emails," or promotional texts.

Aaron Parkinson:
When you're doing outbound texts, there has to be an indication of where they can click to stop. It's a very, very specific ruleset. And if you break those rule sets, there are lawyers all over America that will opt-in in different places looking to trap you and looking to settle with you for a big lump sum.

Aaron Parkinson:
Because I think the law says, for every text you send out illegally to somebody, it's something like, I don't know, it was like a $10 per text fine. Enormous. And I remember being at an event a year and a half ago where a guy, very successful guy, eight-figure e-commerce guy, came into the room at the event we were at in full-blown tears. And he's like, "We just got hit with a $180 million SMS lawsuit."

Jason Drohn:
Oh wow.

Aaron Parkinson:
It goes big, fast. It's egregious the fines for it. So it's effective, but you just have to make sure that you just follow the letter of the law to a T. And if you do, you have nothing to be concerned about. But you got to make sure you don't slip up. Or you'll be in trouble, so.

Aaron Parkinson:
I don't know. How much SMS do you layer into your stuff?

Jason Drohn:
We do SMS here and there. Whenever it's event-based. So we have a couple of live streams, a live stream client working right now. So we send out SMS to his people. They have opted in for SMS notifications because it was basically to send a reminder about the live stream. So they are good. Other than that, we try not to be invasive with SMS, just in general as a rule.

Jason Drohn:
Sometimes I appreciate them. I just put in an embroidered t-shirt order. So I got an SMS that said, "Your stuff is hitting the assembly line," or the printing line or whatever. Which was super cool. It was like, "Oh, all right, got it. So it'll be here in like four or five days." But otherwise, some of them are like, "10% discount." And it's like, "You could've just emailed it to me."

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. It sort of like this story I read the other day and I was laughing. If you think back to the 1950s, right, if somebody showed up to your door and knocked, it was this major event. Like, "Oh my goodness. Sally's here! Let's get out fine China and let's get some cake and some coffee. Everybody, Sally's here!" And everyone's, "Oh! Somebody showed up to visit us." And everyone was so excited. And now if somebody shows up unknown and knocks on my door, I'm losing my mind. "What is happening here?" I am so offended and so angry that somebody is knocking on my door without telling me they're coming.

Aaron Parkinson:
And it's sort of the same thing with email, right. Everybody gets emails. They expect to get emailed. They're like, "Hm." But SMS is a level up. Like, "What are you doing texting my phone?" Right. And then a phone call now. When somebody calls my phone, even if it's one of my friends, they're just randomly... I'm like, "What are you doing? No prep text? No preface of what we're... What, do you think I got all the time in the world?" Right. It's funny how we've evolved as a species, and what irritates us. And SMS is a level up from email and then outbound phone calls is another level up from SMS. So you got to be cautious about when and where you use them and use them wisely so that you get the most impact out of it.

Aaron Parkinson:
As far as the next marketing automation tips for us, and again, I think a lot of people overlook it and we've talked about it before, is just the upsell and downsell paths. Right? We pick up an average, again, of another 10% of revenue through upsells and downsell paths. And people, they know they should do it, but they don't for whatever reason. And even if they do, usually they'll throw in one and they won't test it.

Aaron Parkinson:
And upsells and downsell paths and e-comm are reasonably easy. You can just offer more of the same thing at a discount. Or you can offer something that matches, where you can say, "Hey, get one as a gift for a friend." There are a few that are pretty standard. And then your downsell is just a better deal on the upsell. But putting one, in my mind, is mandatory. Putting three is ideal. There is no too much. People like, "Oh, I get offended when there's 8,000 upsells." Well, then don't buy them.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
I'm more concerned about the cart value than the fact that you didn't like seeing all the upsells. It's expensive to buy media, so. And the things can be set up, tested for a month, find an optimal number, and then you just leave them. And they're just checking along. And in e-commerce, I feel like more people overlook it. Whereas in info-marketing it's the business model. It's mandatory.

Aaron Parkinson:
And I had a great conversation yesterday, and I'm sure you can give some insight on it, with a guy that wrote the book on gaining followers on social media. He consults huge brands and artists and musicians and all this stuff. And only this month did he have an upsell into a higher-priced product-

Jason Drohn:
Thing.

Aaron Parkinson:
... in his funnel. And it's not even correct. I went through it and went, "This is all wrong." This guy is spending $90,000 a month on paid ads and grossing $130,000. And I'm like, "Should be a million." Especially with the credibility, this guy has. And so in the info-marketing space, there's a very specific science to your upsells and your downsells in your model that make the whole thing profitable.

Jason Drohn:
Worth it. Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
And if you don't have them, you don't have a business. Which is why you don't see anybody out selling books, physical books. Or they just sell the book and then they go to a thank you page. And they're like, "Oh, thanks for buying my book." Because it would cost a hundred dollars to make a book sale. And they'd be underwater immediately.

Jason Drohn:
Well, even like the funnel factor textbook that I sent you. So I'm getting a proof next week. That book, the cost to print that book, is $24. Because it's full color, 274 pages, and it's a full 8.5 By 11. And so-

Aaron Parkinson:
And then?

Jason Drohn:
I don't know yet. It's going to be expensive.

Aaron Parkinson:
Let's call it $7. So your $30 cost, right?

Jason Drohn:
Good. Because it's not medium mail. Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right. Your $30 cost. And then there's the actual cost per acquisition of the marketing. And if you're going to charge... If we sell a book for free plus shipping, so just pay the shipping cost, $7, on a really good book it's going to cost us about $30 to make that sale.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. Totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
So it cost us $30. Right. They paid $7. So we're in for $23. Then the actual book costs $24. Right. So $23 plus $24, we're in the hole $47.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. And before breaking a sweat. Right? And then, yeah. Then thank you, confirmation.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. Congratulations. You made a sale. We lost $47. Right. If you don't have that upsell path behind it, you can kiss your savings goodbye. You could go out and say, "Well, I'm going to become a bestseller. I'm going to sell a hundred thousand books in my first six months." Awesome. It's going to cost you $4.6 million.

Jason Drohn:
Which is how a lot of people do it. I'm sure you've met the professional New York Times bestselling people. And their guarantee is, "I will make you a best seller." It's going to cost a million dollars to do it. And $900,000 of that is buying your book.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right. It's insane. Or you could create a business model that made that whole thing profitable and become a best seller.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
I don't know which road you want to take.

Jason Drohn:
I'm thinking of the latter. Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. Thinking the latter. And I'll wrap it up with this. When I was talking to this guy yesterday who I like a lot and is extremely successful, his skill set lies in the brand building awareness, social media, paid social media. But going viral, I just call it branding, right. It's a branding and awareness side of the business. And the reality is, is he wants to create a money machine to offset his consulting fees. Because consulting fees are very intensive. But with all of his marketing wizardry and knowledge, he doesn't know how to do direct response marketing.

Aaron Parkinson:
He doesn't know how to create the angle and the hook and the funnel and the ascension and the marketing automation tips and everything else to make it work. In the same way that I don't know how to run social media. I don't. It's not my jam. I know enough about it to be dangerous, but not good. Right. And he was sort of the same. He knew the terms and he knew the... But he didn't know the art side-

Jason Drohn:
Of it. Totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
... of it. Not enough time in the trenches. And my daughter, this morning I was talking to her about him and she was all excited because I dropped some big names that he's working with or whatever. And she's like, "Why does he need to hire you?"

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
And I had to explain to her the difference between branding and direct response and that one's not better than the other. They're like completely different planets. Even though you think they're the same thing because they're both-

Jason Drohn:
In the same ecosystem. Or the same galaxy.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. But they're just not. One's like a bike and one's like a car. They're just different, so. What we talk a lot about on these calls is the direct response world, not the branding world. And the great thing is, is if you can get proof of concept with direct response marketing and prove that it will sell, then when you invest your money in the brand side of it, you win everything.

Jason Drohn:
Well, that's like Ezra and BOOM. That's what he did. He started, what four years ago, with direct response. Four or five now. And the brand is much bigger collectively than just the products that he started with.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. I think they're going to do somewhere around $50 million in revenue this year. And I don't know what the valuation on a company like that would be, but I probably guess it's in the neighborhood of $600 million to $800 million.

Jason Drohn:
Something like that. Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
I think we can wrap it up though. I know you got visitors to your office.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. Savan, come to say, "Hi". Come here. No, you're not going to say, "Hi?"

Aaron Parkinson:
No? Shy. It's because he doesn't have a Facebook shirt.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Exactly. All right, man. You have fun. Have a great weekend.

Aaron Parkinson:
Everybody enjoy your weekends.

Jason Drohn:
And next Friday, we'll have... I don't know. Figure out something else cool to talk about.

Aaron Parkinson:
Absolutely. All right. I'll talk to you soon.

Jason Drohn:
Later.

Aaron Parkinson:
Bye.

Savan:
Who was that?

The post Marketing Automation Tips From DFY Sales System Experts appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we’re going to talk about software and tools to manage remote teams. Now, we have had to do it remotely for a long time. So I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and I’ve never had an office outside of the house. Do you know what I mean? We’ve always just done it remotely.

When the pandemic and the lockdown and everything happened, my wife and I joked a little bit that we had been training our entire lives to do this very thing, which works out at the house, “be forced to work out of the house.” It’s just a different scenario than it is because I’ve never had an office to walk into and manage remote teams or walk into and get a status update.

Like everything we’ve done has always been online, using GoToMeeting, using Zoom, using Slack, using Basecamp and Trello and Asana, and like all of these tools have always just been how we’ve done it, and using things as simple as like a Google Drive or Dropbox to share documents and files back and forth. This week has been the tools and technology we’ve needed to manage remote teams.

The first thing I want to kind of talk about is some of the stuff you’re going to need. Every business has people and processes. Those people and processes, there are lots of tools that you can use.

The ones that we use, we use Basecamp for project management. We use Google Docs, Google Drive for spreadsheets, and processes like SOPs, standard operating procedures, like that kind of stuff. We make use of those tools.

Outsourcing

In terms to manage remote teams, if we need to outsource something that we don’t necessarily have like in-house, like let’s say if we need a graphic designer or a banner designer or whatever, then we’ve gone to Upwork before.

Upwork is an outsourcing company that lets you manage remote teams. So basically any provider can go and put a profile up and then bid on jobs. And then we as employers, can go to Upwork and then post the job that we want help with. Do you know? So that is kind of how Upwork works. Ask Sunday is another one and so is Fiverr.

Let’s talk about the intricacies of each of the different platforms, how we find people, how we use tools to post jobs, how we use tools to manage remote teams, and all that other stuff.

Upwork and Fivver

We’re going to go to Upwork. We’re going to start with the outsourcing piece and Fiverr. In terms of finding people, the best person that you can hire is somebody you already know, somebody who is already proficient in something. Sometimes the budget doesn’t necessarily allow it.

If you are a startup and you’re looking for a graphic designer, sometimes you just have to go to Upwork. Every once in a while we’ll get a call, somebody will come in and say, “Hey, I want you to run our ads,” and they don’t have an offer up there. They don’t have any ads up.

I’m like, well, if it’s like literally just a startup and you’re not all that solvent if this is your last $500, then what you need to do is you need to spend $100 or $250 and have somebody go set up a campaign for you and then spend the other $300 in ads. You try to flip that $300 into more money, more leads, which brings you more money, and leads that you can work, and all of that stuff. In that scenario, the best way to find somebody is Upwork.

• Outsourcing Team Members

Basically, you can just go to upwork.com and then just hit the get started or watch a demo and it’s going to show you how. In the early days, all of my team members came from Upwork. I still have programmers that originally came from Upwork. They were mobile and web development team members. We have found images, like banner designers on Upwork.

I’ve never hired copywriting on Upwork. For the most part, I’ve always just done design and programming on Upwork.

• Posting Job Projects

You can find great bloggers on Upwork too. You post a project and then they bid on it. And what I will tell you is when you’re posting a project on Upwork, I always make sure to include three things whenever I’m posting a job or a job description.

The headline is exactly what I want, so bloggerfordoneforyou.com. Then what I did before I posted that project was I went through and wrote like an SOP almost, like a standard operating procedure or like things that I wanted every blog post to have. For instance, every blog post that somebody from Upwork writes for us has a great keyword-loaded headline.

It has the keyword phrase in the first line of the blog post, the last line of the blog post, and then it is roughly like a 1% keyword density throughout the rest of the blog post. It has images, nice prominent images, preferably multiple, and those images have the keyword phrase in them. There is internal linking. All of the blog posts are between 1,000 and 2,000 words because that is what Google likes right now.

I went through and kind of wrote up all these guidelines. And then inside the job posting, I posted a link to those guidelines and said, “This is what I’m expecting of you, and I need two articles a week, three articles a week, and I will give you the keyword phrases for those articles to write for.” I made it very, very simple for them to understand what the project was, and that’s the biggest thing. You want to make it simple when you’re outsourcing projects.

You want to make it simple and easily understood. And the simpler you can make it, the better quality you’re going to have and typically the cheaper you’re going to end up getting talent for because they don’t have to put a whole lot of thought into it. I found that to work well.

When I hired that particular role, I didn’t hire just one person. I hired three, and I wanted each of them to write at least two articles. I think it was two articles a week. Then one of them turned out to be good, so she ended up writing a lot more. That was kind of how that worked.

You can do the same thing with programming. One of the things that Patch and I talked about last week, or maybe it was Mars, talked about giving a very difficult first task. Making sure that the first task is not easy so that you know they’re with you for the long haul. I think that is a really good idea too, and it works well for developers, programmers. Writers are writers. Writing is just a pain in the ass anyway.

If they can bust out a 1,500-word blog post twice a week that is good, then that’s good. Also, in looking for talent on Upwork, I put a lot of emphasis on the way they’re responding to my job postings. So in the job posting, it has a good title, it has exactly what I want, and then the third thing it does is, I say, “Do not copy and paste a blanket reply to this job posting, and do not be part of a team.” I want one person to do this well, and it’s the same thing for the programmer. Moreover, I wanted one programmer to be able to do it all, as opposed to being part of a programming team and they use Upwork as a feeder system for leads into their agency. I didn’t want that.

I wanted one person to do it for me, so I included that in the job description, don’t reply, don’t be part of a team, don’t copy and paste a generic reply. These are the projects we worked on, and this is what we’re good at, and blah, blah, blah. Tell me exactly what you’re going to do for me. And then especially for writers, I make sure that their reply is grammatically correct.

It is as on point as it can be, and it’s conversational. There’s no broken English. I mean, if there’s ever like a microcosm of how they’re going to write for you, it is that reply, because that reply is going to be… That’s the thing that’s going to set them apart. They’re trying to impress you, and what I want is for them to try to impress the readers of done for you.

Do you know? So that’s how I find people on Upwork. I don’t ever take the cheapest. I don’t ever take the most expensive. There’s a way you can hide bids that you don’t want to see that you filtered out, so I always hide those. I narrow it down to five or six. I kind of communicate with those guys, and I’ll usually try to pick two or three depending on the project.

There’s like one that wins or two that win typically. I’ll give them a couple of weeks to just kind of test them out and then we’ll go from there. So that’s how I use Upwork.

Ask Sunday

The other one is Ask Sunday. Ask Sunday is a VA company. So basically you can hire a virtual assistant for lots and lots of different things.

Some of the services that they offer are they do data entry, research, tribal planning, customer service desk, outbound calling, like all of that stuff. This is a service that lets you do all that, as opposed to finding a person who can manage remote teams. And then Fiverr is a way to get something done cheap, really quick. Like if you want a logo, you can go in and just search for a logo and it’s going to pop up all the different people who are going to do logos, starting at $40, starting at $120, starting at $50.

There are lots of different prices. It was five, I mean, that’s why it’s called Fiverr, and then they went to 10, and now it’s not five anymore. You’re able to still get good work. There’s one that’s 1,500 bucks.

You can still get great work, and it’s a lot cheaper than if you were to hire a designer straight out. Those are the three resources for finding talent to extend your services or your, whatever, without necessarily having to hire somebody from scratch. Does that help? Do you like that? And then in the comments just say yes, no. Okay, cool. All right. Let’s see, we’re going to talk about next.

Those are my outsourcing. It used to be Elance and oDesk. I used to hire a lot on Elance, and then Elance and oDesk merged, and then they did an IPO. So now Fiverr, or not Fiverr but Upwork is a publicly-traded company, so they’re solid. Every once in a while, we do some stuff. I have a couple of open contracts on Upwork for programming and stuff.

I mean, it’s a good company to extend your team, and then they also do some monitoring on manage remote teams and all of that kind of stuff too. It works out nicely when you’re trying to find somebody.

Project Management

Basecamp

In terms of project management, let’s go over to Basecamp. Basecamp is a project manager that we use internally for all of our stuff. Asana is another one.

Asana and Trello

We talked about Asana yesterday, and then Trello was another one. Each of them has its flavor, and there is about 70,000 other project management software out there. So really it’s just about finding one that makes the most sense for you. Trello is very… So you have your tasks and then you kind of go sideways.

You can see here, you have your tasks and they’re set up as cards, and then you move those cards depending on where they need to be in the project flow. Then you have Asana, which still does have some card-like functionality. Asana has changed a lot, largely I think because Trello was so popular. And then we have Basecamp and Basecamp is kind of a very… It’s very extensible. I mean, you can do a lot with Basecamp, and Basecamp has some great client-side functionality and manage remote teams.

Now, we just started using it more with clients, and it is working a lot better now for what we need. I’m going to be moving away from using Dropbox because we can use Basecamp for file storage. Some things are just a lot more seamless now with Basecamp. It’s very much the industry standard.

I think they have 20 or 30,000 people who use it, 20 or 30,000 companies. So yeah, it works out pretty nice, and everything will manage remote teams. You can create your templates, and this is how I do it. For all the major services and stuff that we sell, I have templates for each of those services. For instance, when we build a sales funnel, then there is going to be…

Here, let me see if I can do this. I’m going to show you how I have my template set up, I think, which will help you understand kind of how to templatize this stuff for yourself. I just need to remember what my login is here. All right, here we go. Okay. If I want to manage templates… So I’m going to manage my templates. What do you want to talk about…

Let’s look at a base webinar funnel. Okay, cool. All right. Now, I’m going to move and I share this new screen. There we go. All right. Basically how I have Basecamp set up is we have our templates. Whenever a new project, a new client comes on board, I have a template. Let’s say a webinar funnel. A new webinar funnel client comes in, then I just deploy this webinar funnel template, and then I modify it based on what we’re doing for the client.

I assign my team to the different pieces of it. Inside Basecamp, there is a Campfire, which a Campfire is just a… It’s a chat. I mean, there’s nothing more than that.

Slack

We use Slack for chat, and we invite our clients into Slack, and then we have some partners and stuff in Slack too.

We use Slack for all of that. I have a paid Slack account that does video and audio and all that. There’s the message board, which our clients use every once in a while. They’ll drop messages here and then we’ll figure out where to put it inside the to-dos. Then we have the schedule, which is all of the dripped out tasks or all to do’s.

They arrange themselves in the schedule, so you can at a glance see what your schedule is, what your team’s schedule is, and all of the other stuff. There are automatic check-ins. So on Monday or Friday, you can send a notification to your team members that have them reply. What did you do this week? What are your blockers? Like a status update kind of thing. What are the results of this campaign? Like whatever which makes it easier to manage remote teams.

Your team responds. The client sees that. You see that. So it’s a way for you to keep on track. Then you have docs and files, which docs and files are kind of like a Dropbox. Do you know? It’s a common folder that everybody in your team gets to have, and then your clients can also have access to the parts that you want them to have access to.

If you want them to have access to a folder so they can upload their stuff there, then you would just give them access. Also, if you want them to have access to the document that shares where they give you the logins, then you can do that here. If they update a password, then they can just log in and change it themselves without having to like go back and forth with email.

I will tell you that since we started implementing this for clients, our emails have drastically dropped, which is a lovely thing. I don’t fear email as much. It used to be when I sit down and I check my email and it’s like whoa, bam, you got 150 emails, like 80 of them need to be answered from clients, because they’re not sure where they are in the process and you can’t fault them for that. Because so much of what we do, it’s done for you.

When we’re writing a webinar, I don’t need your involvement in writing the webinar. We do an onboarding call. I figure out what the offer is. We write the webinar. We send you a revision one. There isn’t a lot to go back and forth between it. We’ve done this so many times and for so long that manage remote teams is easier to do.

Then revision one hits, we make the modifications. We do the final, the finishing touches, then I’m going to record the webinar. It’s a very seamless process. I just was told this yesterday. For people that have worked with a lot of other marketing agencies, there’s always go back and forth and there’s always an agency. Give me this. Give me that. They’re just wasting time. The fact that we don’t do that, sometimes it’s unnerving from a client standpoint.

This helps everybody stay on track, in the process, everything’s good to go. Then docs and files, we’ll throw logos up here, video files, any kind of press releases, logins, whatever. As you can see in this template, basically whenever this template is deployed, there is an example proposal.

This backs up everything that the client saw, and then we always drop the real proposal, the signed contract in here too, so that it’s here. But the real magic is here in the to-dos. Whenever this project is deployed, all of these to-do’s or automatically deployed as well. As for us, for our onboarding, our onboarding is four steps. Well, three steps for the client.

We send a welcome email, and in here, so my account manager, there’s a copy here for the welcome email. There’s the copy for the welcome email, and what they can do is they can just copy that, drop it in an email, and then send it. It’s ready to go. Then we set up software accounts for all of our software that they’re going to need.

Then we set up a Dropbox folder, which is going to be going away because we’re using Basecamp now, and then I record a project walkthrough, or whoever sold the project records a project walkthrough for the team. This is what we’re doing. This is a website. These are the assets they have.

This is the type of sales funnel we’re building. This is the call to action, the offer, all of that stuff. And then I go through and I just start assigning all the tasks. The tasks: write webinar copy, write webinar promo email sequence, write webinar replay email sequence, write lead magnet, write, lead magnet promo email. As I said, we’ve done this so many times.

You can have sub-tasks in here, but typically, I just record a video, some explanation, some memos on what we need here, and then we just manage remote teams iteratively. We go through and it’s version one, version two, version three, that kind of thing. So that’s how we use Basecamp in project management software in general. It works out nicely. It’s a nice seamless process. You can do the same thing in Trello or Asana or whatever.

Google Docs

It’s totally up to you. Let’s see. And then Google Docs. Google Docs is pretty easy to explain. There’s one thing I kind of want to show you, and I just set this up this morning, but I think it might be an interesting example. Inside Google Docs, I mean, as you know, these live streams have become…

My GSDdailies have become something that I do quite a bit. I do them every day, but I’m leveraging them through blog posts and whatever. And I just put together a procedure for having one of my team members adding these MP4 files, the transcripts for the MP4 files, as blog posts, because I’m 10 days behind right now. I was pretty well able to keep up, but I just haven’t been able to recently.

What I did was I recorded a video on how I do this. The video is about 30 minutes long, and then I put together this little spreadsheet. The spreadsheet says, okay, the date published is 5:18, so that was last Monday I published this podcast. It was episode 46. And today, this one is 54, so that’s how far behind I am.

Published it at 10:00 AM. This is the URL that is currently sitting on Amazon S3 because I uploaded it there. Then I had it transcribed. And what I need for my team member to do is log in, grab the transcript, put it on Done For You, on the blog, the way that you know that I do, go through Grammarly, keyword load it, optimize it, all that stuff, all stuff that she knows how to do. And then all she has to do when she’s done is just mark it off.

This is the date that it was added. So this morning, in my example, it was 5:28 is when it was added. Then we also have a second podcast that we’re starting. And once this process is good and dialed in, I mean, there’s going to be weirdness at first. There always is whenever you deploy a new like SOP or a new procedure.

There are always things that you forget because you know the process, you forget to communicate them. So I expect that the same will happen here, but we can always improve on something like this and it will get better in time. So whether we’re doing one show, two shows, three shows, four shows, writing a bunch of transcripts, then this is the way. And all I did was recorded this procedure in Snagit.

We talked about Snagit I think yesterday, right? I mean, the day before. Snagit is a screen capture software, so I recorded a 30-minute video on how to do this in Snagit. I exported it as an MP4 file. And then from there, I put this spreadsheet together and I put the whole thing on Basecamp and assigned it to her.

If you want to go look at Basecamp, yeah, and I assigned it to her. That was it. Other than that, that was kind of how we used Google Drive, that was how we used Basecamp.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all, just go to doneforyou.com/blog. Did you guys like today’s presentation? Did you get stuff out of it?

Now, if you would like to go through, if you would like to have an Action Plan Call on how to build your sales funnel and how to start your business online, on how to get traffic for your business, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form, and then the next thing after that is you will be scheduling a call on my calendar.

We will go through, we’ll talk about your business, we’ll talk about what your goals are, and then basically what you need to be done, and then we’ll figure out if there’s a way that we can work together. If so, then that’s awesome. If not, that’s awesome too. And tomorrow is Friday, so we have two shows. We have the GSD Daily at 10:00 AM, and then we have Sales System Experts at 11:00 AM with Aaron Parkinson.

The post The Software And Tools You Need To Manage Remote Teams 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.

Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today’s presentation. I’m actually pretty fired up this morning, which is kind of cool. First of all, first and foremost, we have… Today, we’re going to talk about email marketing, marketing automation, and basically all things outbound and automated. It’s something that I absolutely love doing. It is building systems and sequences that are around for a long time and that do marketing for you.

First off, if you are on my personal profile or in a group or whatever, might not be so easy to ask questions. We are going to go ahead and throw in the link to the Done For You Facebook page. Like it, if you are there. That would be fantastic. Share this live stream with other people. They will love you for it. We’re just going to post the comment here. Go to doneforyou.com. Go to Done For you, facebook.com/doneforyoucom, and that is where you can ask questions. I think you can ask questions on YouTube too.

Today’s presentation is entirely about CRM marketing, using marketing in automation in email in order to move prospects through your sequences, through your sales funnel so that they bond with you, so they… all of that other stuff. Basically, they bond with you, they buy from you, and then they continue to consume your products and your services and everything once you’re done. That is the idea of CRM marketing.

Now, most people when they set up a marketing automation CRM, when they do email marketing, or at least they first start setting it up, most people don’t… They add a message or two, but they don’t necessarily go through and add and write all of the email that they should. That is a problem because what happens is… and I am victim of it every once in a while too. Sometimes you just get busy. You set up a list. You add your lead magnet, whatever, and you just don’t go through and actually think through all of the different ways that you need your CRM to work for you, to trigger based on what they do and what they see and to trigger based on what pages they go to or what email lists they opt in for.

What we’re going to do is I’m just going to draw out a couple of different scenarios and just walk through this thing live you. The first scenario… Let me kick over my… Let me see if I can get my screen here to show my iPad. All right, so we’re going to share the screen, and you’re going to see my entire screen here, and then we’re going to… All right, so we’re going to share this guy. Then I’m going to drag my screen up, so you should be able to see it. Okay, cool. You should be able to see what I got going on on my iPad now in a minute once I get… All right, cool.

This is my iPad screen, and I am going to… All right. Yep. Our settings are good. Okay. From CRM marketing standpoint, basically, we’re going to go ahead, and we’re just going to write CRM, CRM marketing, up here at the top. Now, the scenarios that we’re going to be looking at, one of the most common ones that we go through is our webinars or an automated webinar. There’s a couple of scenarios. Basically, what we’re doing is, from a traffic standpoint, we are looking for Facebook traffic or AdWords. I’m going set this iPad down so that then… All right, so we have AdWords or banner ad and this might be retargeting ads or whatever, or maybe even email.

Then what we do is we send all that traffic to an automated webinar. It’ll be Facebook, Facebook, retargeted email, whatever, into the automated webinar. Now, what happens is, is there’s a couple of different scenarios that kind of trigger. The first is you have people who opt in, so you have your opt-ins, and then your no-goes.

Your opt-ins, of course, are then going to be pitched to your webinar. They are invited to the webinar when the webinar goes live. If you do an instant, so the webinar starts instantly on demand, which is how we’ve been doing it a lot of times, they just kind of kick right in to the on-demand webinar, and then they are sent out replays.

Now, if they don’t opt in for your webinar, then what we do is we try to pull them back in through retargeting. We try to get them to take action through a retargeted banner ad or through email if we already have their email address, and then from there, they go into that webinar. Ideally, we want to basically get somebody who showed enough interest to hit a landing page, but then not opt in, we want to get them back into the flow of our webinar.

Now, once they register for the webinar, then the process is really pretty simple. I mean, the webinar has some sort of a CTA on it. It either “click the button below to buy something,” to go to an order form, or it is “click the button below to schedule a call on my calendar.”. A lot of high-end services, that ends up being the offer. Click the button below, set up a call on my calendar, and we’ll get through. We’ll get onto like a consultative sales call. That’s pretty self-explanatory.

But the call to action, we have a certain number of people who jump on the webinar and then get on the call to action. Not everybody does though. Attendees who sign up for a webinar are not going to end up buying the product. Not everybody who attends the webinar is going to buy the product or going to schedule a call. What we do is we send, again, we send emails. We do banner ads, retargeted banner ads from the webinar into that call to action. Furthermore, we are trying to get them to come back to the call to action so that they actually take action on that offer.

Now, there’s a lot of different places that we’re going to end up putting email in here, so some of the sequences that we’re going to need, we’re going to need this sequence right here, so there’s a webinar promo sequence, so going into the webinar. Once they sign up for the webinar, then there’s going to be the webinar replay email sequence. Then usually we throw a sequence in after here where if that person does not take us up on the offer, we then want them to go to a different offer, so maybe it’s a flash sale or a straight-up consultative sales call kind of pitch. Then we put some email there.

We have three different places that we need email copy in this little workflow. The first is your webinar promo email. Your webinar promo emails typically are three emails. The first email, really, the goal of the first email is to basically introduce the webinar, introduce the topic, introduce what it is, kind of… It’s the [inaudible 00:08:54] the hook for the webinar, so to talk about why somebody should care that you are doing a webinar.

It might be “four steps to” or “seven strategies to” or whatever, but it is to introduce the idea of this webinar, and then break the ice, and then move people through. Ideally, you want to get as many webinar registrations from that first email as possible, but a lot of times, you don’t get actually get the emails until the second or third email. That third email that’s sent out 30 minutes before the webinar starts, that’s where you end up getting a lot of registrations if it’s a live webinar. If it’s not a live webinar, then basically, you just kind of hit them all equally.

The other sequence you need set up in CRM marketing is a webinar promo or webinar replay email sequence. The webinar replay sequence that we use is six emails, and those emails have a very specific formulaic way that we promote. The first two emails are replay promos. Those replay promos, what we’re doing is we’re dropping the link for the webinar replay itself. We’re saying, “If you missed the replay, go back and watch it here.” The whole goal is to get them to come to the replay, to open the email, click the link, and then go rewatch the replay in hopes that they make it all the way to the call to action, and then they end up buying.

Then the next email… This is day one and two. Day one and two. Day three, we send one email, and this has the replay promo, a replay link, and then the offer link. The replay link and the offer link… It’s important that it includes both because what happens is, is on this replay or after this email, we take down the replay. We use a piece of software like Deadline Funnels to remove the replay so it’s no longer up in the live.

That’s where automation comes into play in CRM marketing.

Then the offer link is then, then stays… Oops… then stays for the rest of this promotion. That’s day three. Then what we do is on day four, or yeah, day four, we send one email, and that is offer link, and then day five, we send two emails, and then is the offer link too. Usually, we try to close it down on that fifth day so it will end up being by before midnight tonight. Then what we do is we send it usually at 7:00 a.m., and then we send it again at 7:00 p.m., and the subject line of the 7:00 p.m. email is five hours left, and then 7:00 a.m. is usually something like “closing soon.”

Then while we’re on the subject of subject lines, this replay promo, email number one needs to be a replay link in all lowercase letters, and then email two is RE: replay link. If you change the subject lines, the open rate will go down. I’m just saying. All of the… We have very, like I said, we have very formulaic process to writing copy, and it’s because everything has been split-tested excruciatingly, and every time we have a client who changes the subject lines, the response goes down without a doubt. Don’t change up subject lines.

Now, so the webinar promo email copy, and then we have the webinar replay email copy. Then we usually have a flash sale, so depending on the client, depending on the offer, what we’ll do is put together a flash sale promo. A flash sale promo is usually four emails, and it’s a three-day sequence. Email one is flash sale or discount or whatever. This introduces the flash sale, introduces the discount, and usually, we try to have higher than 50% off so that it’s pretty attention grabbing.

If set up correctly, your CRM marketing does ALL of the work for you!

Email two expires tomorrow, usually, and we reinforce the 50% off. Then email three and email four both go out on that third day, and it is “closing tonight.” If we have a physical product, then… or, so physical product, digital product, anything that is order form-based, then we close it down. If it’s a consultative call… so we have a consult… then we usually do something like “time is booked,” “time is valuable,” “the calendar is closing down,” all of that kind of stuff.

By and large, what we try to do is we try to basically open up the offer, close the offer down through email, and then we use banner ads. We use banner ads and retargeting and stuff to move somebody through that process. That’s the CRM marketing strategy for an automated webinar, which tends to be one of our most powerful, one of our most popular.

Now, let’s see. Oh, Bill’s on. What’s up, Bill? Look at you. I just had a… Got to post you there, right? That’s pretty cool, right? Okay, so all right, so we have… Look at that. All right. Now, I mean, so that’s the first time I’ve ever been able to post a comment here, which is pretty freaking cool.

That’s our email marketing CRM marketing strategy. Did you like that? I mean, if you liked it, let’s see, we can throw up… There’s another one that we’ve been messing with quite often, a fully qualified lead CRM marketing strategy. Basically, what we do is we use the same traffic sources. I’m going to go through and throw the screen back up for that one. All right, let’s see. We’re going to throw this up. Okay, cool. Then I’m going to put my screen back to where it was. All right. Okay.

Now, there’s another sales funnel that we really, really, really love to build right now. It’s a fully qualified lead VSL funnel. Now, these things are super hot right now because people have a very immediate gratification kind of MO going on. Everybody’s online right now. Not only is everybody on Facebook and in Google looking for answers to try to figure out how to get through this crazy shit that we’re going through, but they also are busy. It’s like their kids are home and they’re doing homeschool and whatever. They’re wanting to make decisions quickly.

The easier you can get somebody, the more simple you can make the process and the sales flow, the better it ends up being. What we’ve been doing is putting together these FQL, fully qualified lead sales funnels for any service business. What we’re doing is we’re saying, “We’re going to… Here’s a sales video.” This isn’t even a sales video. I mean, the purpose of the sales video is to get somebody to fill out a form. The form then gets routed to a sales rep or you or the owner or whatever.

Basically, what we do here is send traffic on the front side and let CRM marketing take on the rest of the work. So we have Facebook and AdWords and email or whatever, whatever it ends up being. We go here, and then bink, bink, bink into the sales video. We retarget that guy, and then we ended up moving people into sales. Now, once they schedule a call on this calendar, then this process goes into onboarding, boarding proposals, all the business 101 kind of stuff, basically.

But what we’re doing is we’re using the sales video. We’re using a page, a webpage to get somebody to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I am interested in what it is you do, and I want to talk to somebody about it.”. Somebody then customizes the offer, puts it in a proposal, sends them, and then goes from there. Mortgage brokers, working capital, even dental. There are so many different verticals and spaces, Internet marketing, SEO, content marketing, so many different verticals that this works for.

There are some CRM marketing opportunities that fall out of this though. I’m going to switch it to purple here. Anybody who goes to this page but then does not fill out that form is going to be entered into an email marketing campaign. Those email promos are, it’s a VSL promo sequence, and it’s usually four emails.

It basically goes through and says, “Hey, we noticed that you watched the video on getting working capital for your business, but you didn’t apply,” and then you start the conversation through email and try to get them back to this sales video, which then ultimately helps them apply. This sequence, four emails, the first one always goes out 30 minutes after. If they are on this page and then don’t, if they’re on this page and then don’t apply within 30 minutes, then they get triggered into an email marketing campaign. The next one usually goes out 24 hours after that. Then the next one goes out 24 hours after that.

One of the reasons we use 24 hours is because we know that they were online… Let’s say it’s 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Let’s say it’s 2:00 p.m. Eastern. We know that they were online here, so we assume that they’re going to be online here as well because people are creatures of habit, so a lot of times we’re online at the same time throughout the day. If it’s not exactly the same times, it’s usually pretty close. That’s one of the reasons why we keep to this schedule as opposed to rerouting this email at 7:00 a.m., which means this email is going to be 7:00 a.m. It’s just kind of understanding how people are working.

Now, if they fill out the form right here, they schedule the call, so they schedule with the sales rep, but yet they don’t show up, there’s all kinds of other email marketing, CRM marketing campaigns here that we can spin off. We can do no-show emails. Another one is going to be like a retaining email. Let’s say they were a nurture email sequence, so they came to the call but they weren’t ready to start up. In this case, you would send them two blog posts, videos, that kind of thing.

If they get the proposal, then you would send them like a taking action kind of email sequence. Basically, you want to follow up on the proposal and keep them warm, but you don’t want to. They got the proposal from you. I mean, that’s like the ultimate action that they could want, except for saying yes and giving you their credit card. You want to treat them really well. You still want to bond with them, but yet you still want to close them.

This is very much kind of a closing sequence, and it ends up being pretty customized. It’s probably customized from a person-to-person standpoint. This one. The nurture sequence can be largely automated. The no-show emails can be pretty automated, but there’s the closing sequence we also send an email. There’s kind of a ninja… I don’t know if it’s a ninja strategy, but it’s just something we’ve done forever. It always has made a really, really big difference in consultative sales calls and how well they work.

We’ve always tried to implement it with clients, even if they’ve pushed it back. That is, within 24 hours of them booking a call, you should send a personal email and ask a question. It’s really, really, really super important if you’re selling on the phone to do this. Basically, somebody fills out a form on your website. They watch a video, fill out a form, and they are in the process with you. They book a call on your calendar.

Now, not everybody’s going to show up to that call. I mean there are some chuckleheads online, and they just won’t. They were testing out your processes. I cannot tell you how many times that’s happened to us. They were just trying to see what happens, like, “Well, I’m going to fill out this form with some bogus dummy information and then see what happens.” They leave and do something else, which is fine.

What we try to do is, is everybody who schedules a call with us, we always send them a personal one-on-one message. It is an email that shows that we took some sort of initiative for them, and so we visited their website. You always want to ask a question that gets them thinking and talking and then hopefully replying to you.

We worked this into every high ticket sales funnel that our clients have run. It has been incredible for them. Every once in a while we get, “Well, if it’s not automated, I don’t want to do it.”. It’s like this is the highest value activity that you can do because when you start that conversation with somebody before they jump on a sales call with you, they are going to buy that much more easily.

Jump on email, look them up, friend them on Facebook, look up their websites. Try to dig in and gain a little bit of understanding about what it is they’re doing in their business. Then ask a question about how it relates to what they’re jumping on the call for. Bring everything close, like close that loop so that they know that you are going to be on the call. It might be a somebody from your team is going to be on the call. Yet, they also were going to answer the question, which is going to give you more information than you can use to further customize that sales call.

CRM marketing really is a win-win solution. Every single, whether you get 10 or 2 or 20 or 30 bookings a day, just make sure that somebody is scheduling a call or somebody is replying to them, to every call that comes in and just taking five minutes out of their day to look through their answers, and then fire off an email and say, “Hey, we’re going to be talking about this, blah, blah, blah. I checked out your website, and it looks awesome. A couple of things you were missing are here, here, and here. Where are you planning on implementing those things?” question mark, done.

If they answer, awesome. If they don’t, awesome. Doesn’t matter. But the thing is you got to connect with them, and literally, right now, I mean, right now, connection is the thing that everybody is striving for. It’s funny, I have been literally doing the exact same thing for years, working remote, doing what we do, and now, with everybody craving the connection with everybody craving video chat, all of a sudden, the stuff that we do is super fucking cool.

Everybody’s on Zoom and everybody’s, like face-to-face conversations. It’s really intriguing to watch because, at the end of the day, it’s the same as it always has been. Zoom has always been popular. Now, because we can’t go outside our house, people are connecting and doing meetings and stuff through this medium. They are connecting. Even myself, it’s like, “Well, I’m doing daily live streams.”

It’s crazy. I have never done that much weird… I’ve never… For two weeks in a row, this is the 12th episode, we… I haven’t ever done anything 12 days in a row at the same time every single day in forever. It’s teaching and training and stuff, this is something that I want to make a difference in the world. I want to help, and just a tweak or a thought or something can make that happen. That’s why we do these things.

Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about, probably, we’re going to talk about VSL funnels I think. If you need anything at all, go to doneforyou.com. Let me find my little banner here because I’m still working my way around the software. Doneforyou.com/start. Set up a call with our team. I will talk to you soon. We’ll get this transcribed, then up on the website. I am running way behind on all that stuff, so we’ll get it when we get it. Then tomorrow, I’ll send out an email letting you know where the live stream is going to be, what the topic is, all that stuff.

The post Importance of CRM Marketing To Your Website appeared first on Done For You.

Sales and marketing teams love inbound marketing funnels. Do you? It takes all of the hard work of prospecting off your plate.

You are putting your best efforts into capturing leads through inbound marketing, but the results are disappointing.

Well, you are not alone; Numbers show that more than 32% of marketers believe they are going nowhere with their inbound marketing campaigns.

So, what can you do to make the most out of your inbound marketing efforts?

There is one recommended solution to this problem: funnels. Sales or marketing funnels can help you deal with your inbound marketing frustration.

What are funnels? How are they related to inbound marketing? What kind of success can you experience using funnels? Why are funnels your best option compared to other inbound tools and tactics?

By the end of this post, you will have the answer to all these questions. We'll also link to related inbound marketing and sales funnel resources to help you get a complete picture. So, let's look at how marketers use funnels as part of their inbound marketing strategy.

The 3-part Inbound Marketing Funnel Formula

To sell stuff online and successfully architect a profitable sales funnel, there are three pieces of the puzzle:

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

The sales funnel is the first thing you need to set up, even if it's just a standalone sales page… Driving traffic to a sales page without a funnel wastes resources.

You want to ensure you get an ROI from your inbound marketing budget and consistently stoke the fire with new prospects to keep growing your business!

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

Read more about our exact sales funnel formula to drive tons of targeted, high-converting traffic to our business and clients' business in our brand-new version of the Funnel Factor report. No time to read? Please register for our on-demand Sales Funnel webinar. You can watch it anytime from home.

ToFu: Top of the Inbound Marketing Funnel

If you have a basic understanding of sales funnels, you would know that a top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) priority is to capture your audience's attention. This is the first step and most crucial part of the funnel structure. Therefore, top-of-the-inbound marketing funnel actions can bring in the most significant number of quality leads for your sales team to nurture and convert.

So, what does ToFu relate to your inbound marketing efforts?

You need to step up the game and invest more resources towards getting as many relevant leads as possible as part of your inbound strategy.

Optimized content

One of the best ways to achieve this is by focusing on content marketing. Create epic content that provides value and helps readers connect with your brand. Use search-engine-optimized content to attract many users through organic search.

Social media

Build a solid social media presence so that when you make an announcement, you get a higher chance of it spreading like wildfire!

Your content won't become viral from the get-go. You must first grow your audience, understand them, and create exciting content.

Customer experience

You will be amazed to know that more than 70% of all social media users will likely recommend a brand to their network if they have had a good experience.

This figure makes it quite evident how important it is to build strong content marketing and social media strategy to increase customers as part of the funnel strategy for your inbound marketing efforts.

MoFu: Middle of the Inbound Marketing Funnel

The Middle of the funnel (MoFu) is where you get to know different kinds of audiences through the ToFu.

However, this is part of your inbound marketing funnel process, where you qualify different lead segments based on their interests and readiness to buy. The leads closer to converting are often called MQLs or Marketing Qualified Leads.

Nurture and convert

After you've spotted the most qualified leads, you must nurture them until they convert into paying customers. This is done partly through automated marketing workflows but also through the active involvement of your sales team.

There are different marketing strategies that you can employ to nurture these leads. Here's an example:

Suppose a user has subscribed to your newsletter. Instead of just sending a welcome email, why not pair it up with a welcome offer or discount coupon? Or maybe add a free eBook download to your welcome email? Click here to get more ideas on how you can build automated email sequences that bring results.

BoFu: Bottom of the Inbound Marketing Funnel

This is the phase where the saying 'strike while the iron is hot' holds entirely true.

The customer has already gone through the basic steps of your funnel. They have shown interest in your product or service at the top of the funnel. They have gained all the relevant knowledge they need about the service, have been qualified and nurtured thoroughly, and are about to convert into paying customers. This is the most significant opportunity for your sales team to close the sale.

So, how can they do it?

Present an offer

Tempt the BoFu customer with an offer they cannot resist. You might have the best product for the user's needs, but – unless you can make an irresistible offer and present it in a compelling light before you lose the sale.

This is where the power of content, as part of your inbound marketing strategy, comes into the picture. By content, we mean all elements, such as graphics, copy, design, and everything in your marketing material.

Read this highly relevant article about how to create content for every stage of the buyer's journey as your incoming leads move through your marketing funnel.

Content is still King!

You may agree that creating a sales funnel that works for your inbound marketing strategy requires planning and effort. User-friendly content is not enough; you need to make a conscious effort to take action tightly related to the buyer's journey.

From creating compelling landing pages to writing effective web copy and posting on social media, every step you take must be part of a plan, your sales funnel, and an inbound marketing plan.

Don't forget – that marketing efforts generate three times as many leads at a 62% lower cost.

Creating A Funnel To Solve Inbound Marketing And Lead Generation

All we have to say is that succeeding in the game of inbound marketing requires sincere efforts, just like in any other field.

Creating an inbound marketing funnel could be just the piece you were looking for to solve the inbound marketing puzzle. Now, it is up to you to create a strategy in which you add a funnel that complements your marketing efforts and enhances your sales numbers.

Inbound Marketing Funnels: The Video Recap

What is an Inbound Marketing Funnel?

In the vast ocean of sales strategies, inbound marketing funnels have started to distinguish themselves as a unique force. While they might seem synonymous with sales funnels, they serve a different purpose. The essence of a marketing funnel is to engage with potential clients based on their familiarity and comfort with your brand.

The Three Market Temperature Levels

• Cold Market:
  • You will typically see generalized ads.
  • Promotions like downloading a lead magnet or signing up for a webinar will resonate with them.
• Warm Market:
  • Presented with slightly more direct promotions.
  • Engagements may involve signing up for sales calls, reading advertorials, or delving into specific blog posts.
• Hot Market:
  • These are the prospects ready to make a purchase. They will be presented with direct purchasing options and pitches.

Retargeting: A Game-Changer

With the rise of digital platforms, retargeting has become invaluable. For instance, if a visitor explores one page on your website but not another, this behavior can dictate the type of ads they see next. Similarly, email triggers can be set up based on which web pages they visited.

Our company's marketing automation is so advanced that we even receive Slack notifications detailing which page a user views. This immediate data can be a powerful tool. For instance, when I noticed that a potential client had visited the same pages multiple times without taking action, I occasionally called them to address any questions directly. This level of attention can make all the difference in the conversion process.

The Funnel Components

1. Your Offer:

This is the product or service you're offering, whether a coaching program, a digital product, a physical item, or something else entirely.

2. Follow-Up:

Initially, this was just email correspondence. Now, with retargeting, this follow-up includes ads on various platforms based on a prospect's interaction with your brand.

3. Traffic:

The potential clients who visit your web page and hopefully take the desired action.

ADA and The Funnel

The ADA model, which stands for Awareness, Desire, and Action, perfectly complements a marketing funnel's top, middle, and bottom stages.

• Top of the Funnel (Awareness): The goal is for prospects to become familiar with your brand, almost as if they're getting to know a friend.
• Middle of the Funnel: This stage involves multiple interactions. Prospects recognize your brand, engage with your content, and, ideally, join a nurturing database. They might sign up for more information, begin to trust your brand more, or even schedule a time to discuss a potential purchase.
• Bottom of the Funnel: This is where the offer is presented, and a prospect ideally becomes a client.

Remember, while some might navigate this funnel in hours, others might take years. Regardless of the duration, consistency in marketing is crucial. If you slack off, you risk being forgotten.

Crafting the Ideal Funnel

To create an effective inbound marketing funnel, focus on:

• Optimized Content at the Top: Content remains King. Engage with optimized content and maintain active social media interactions.
• Nurturing in the Middle: Convert prospects into leads, eventually leading them to the final stage.
• Presenting Offers at the Bottom: Lay out your offers clearly and compellingly.

To conclude, perfecting your inbound marketing funnel is the key if you aim for a strategy where potential clients come to you willingly.

The post Triple Your Sales Overnight with this Inbound Marketing Funnel Strategy! appeared first on Done For You.

TRANSCRIPT: Hey, what's up? This is Jason. So one of the big things about running surveys in your sales funnel is that you can do marketing automation, based on how people, what answers they choose. So if you have three questions, and your first question is how old are you, are you 35 to 44, or 45 to 54, or 55 to 64, then you can segment those people and send them emails and send them marketing material, based on their age or their gender, or, you know, age and gender is probably the big ones. But also, what they're looking for. Are they looking to lose weight? Are they looking to have more energy? Are they looking to live a more active lifestyle? Who knows. But each of those answers are going to be, should, they should be, married with some different email copy and some different promotional material. Because what this prospect did is tell you why they're interested in you. So the better you can fulfill on that, and the better you can use that information to help them understand that your offer is the best offer for them, the more revenue you're going to generate.

So this is a little video snippet that I pulled out of our survey sales funnel workshop inside Funnel Formula. So we're going to send you here and just check it out, and then we're going to come back and recap it.

But the email copy itself can get pretty crazy when you start thinking of all of the possibilities and all of the different ways that somebody answers the survey, and then you match all of those possibilities up with email copy. So even in our example, if our survey is what is your gender? Male or female. And what is your age group? And maybe four age groups there. And then what are you interested in? Life insurance, property insurance, car insurance, whatever. Then each of those combinations could have its own email sequence. So you're looking at three or four or five emails for each of those combinations. I mean, you quickly get up into 60, 70, 80 different emails, and depending on their answers, you are only at like four or five days' worth of email copy. It can get pretty intense, pretty quickly. Of course, reusing email copy is beneficial. If you can just clone or copy and paste, and then maybe change a couple of words, that's awesome. But the email copy still is going to be where you're spending a lot of time.

All right, so isn't that cool? I mean, it's super cool to be able to survey somebody and then send them outbound marketing communication, text messages, email marketing, whatever, based on their answers and based on helping them overcome their objections and helping them move closer to the thing they want to move to. Do you know what I mean? The bad part is there's so much email copy that goes along with it. I mean, if you have eight different possible outcomes from the way you're serving these folks, and every campaign has 10 or 15 emails in it, you're at a hundred emails. And yes, some of them can be the same, but still you're probably going to want different blog posts, different bonding material, different stories based on that stuff. So it's just something to keep in mind.

Now, if you would like to learn about putting together these survey sales funnels to help your marketing automation and to further customize your marketing efforts, then check out the Funnel Formula course...

If you would like us to go through and put your sales funnel together for you, giving an action plan, click here to schedule a call with our team!

The post How To Deliver Personalized Marketing Messages At Scale appeared first on Done For You.

TRANSCRIPT: All right. When it comes to surveys, one of my favorite things to do is, in marketing automation ... one of my favorite things to do is basically segment people based on how they answered a question. So, are they interested in losing weight, more energy or a more active lifestyle, let's say.

You know, so each of those ... each of those scenarios is going to be met with different email copy. Maybe different sales videos. Maybe different ... might be the same product, but it's going to be met with just subtle little changes inside the marketing to help the prospect bond, know, like, and trust you, your offer, and then ultimately buy.
But one of my favorite things to do is what we call funnel jumping. So, it's where you start sending somebody down one path, but then they do something which has them jump to another funnel. So, this is a, a little snippet of a video that I pulled out of Funnel Formula. I'm going to have you watch it and then we're going to come back and recap it. So, check this out.

So for us, we have a landing page and then a survey. Survey leads to a book order, a book sale and then from the book sale, we go into a course, and then from a course, we go into software and that's our, that's our front end stuff we put in offer based on a survey. So not only are we profitable on the front side, but we're also getting data and details about our prospects.

Now, if somebody wants a sales funnel based on the survey, if somebody wants a sales funnel then we send them ... we have emails that go out and send them to VSL1. If they want Facebook ads, emails that go out with some blog posts and some other information, we send them to VSL2, the Facebook VSL. If they want Google ads, they go through some Google emails, some Google blog posts, and then go to VSL3. If they want content marketing, then they go through the fourth funnel, the fourth sequence which is content marketing blog posts and material and VSL4.
Now, pretty crazy, right? Here's where it gets like wicked. Now, the person who wants the sales funnel, yes, they want the sales funnel. But if they don't buy the sales funnel, there's a pretty good chance that they need traffic. So what we do is, we send them from the last ... so if they ... if they don't purchase going up into a buyer, they're not a buyer yet, then we go from email three on sales funnels to email one of Facebook traffic. If they don't purchase, they go from email three of Facebook and go into email one of Google. If they don't purchase Google ads, they go from email three into content marketing one.

So, they start with, like, Google traffic then they'll go into Facebook and then they'll go into sales funnels and then they'll kick over. So, so basically we're using all of these assets as promotional material but we're giving them what their most urgent need is first. So, again, pretty crazy stuff.

Now, if they still don't purchase ... so, if they still don't purchase, they go through all four of these little promos, then we send them into ... we send them two emails that promote a piece of blog, a blog content which is an advertorial. And if they still don't, we send two emails about educational content which might be videos or something like that. Then we send them some more emails about video content and then internal or affiliate offers.

All right, so wasn't that cool? I mean, we use this all the time in our stuff, as you saw. I mean, basically somebody comes in. They fill out a survey. They want sales funnelS, content marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, whatever and we send them down the path that they want to go down. But sometimes, a week later, three days later, two weeks later ... then they jump to the next, you know, a parallel funnel because they think that something else is important or they heard something different or, you know, whatever. But they take an action that moves them to, into a different channel.
So then we just send them down that channel until they want to either A, purchase or B, move to another channel. So, it's super, super important when you're building your sales funnels and when you're building experience your surveys and your buckets and your outbound emails, your marketing automation, that you want to take all of that stuff into consideration.

You know, it's not just that prospect. They come in ones, they come in the front side of your funnel and then they go to the end. They might come in the front side and then they move around and they bounce around all over the place inside your sales funnel and then, you know, eventually, a month later, they buy the thing that you didn't plan on them buying. It's just ... sometimes it happens that way so you, you know, in architecting your sales funnels, you need to address that. You need to think about all of the different ways your prospect is going to be engaging with you and what each of those engagements means.

You know, if they want a video, what should they be doing next? If they read a blog post, what should they be doing next? If they sign up for a webinar, what should happen next? So, just take that stuff into consideration. Now, if you would to learn how to put together sales funnels from scratch, there are eight different sales funnels that we, that we profile including 40 or 50 case studies inside Funnel Formula. Go to ProAccelorator.com/funnel to check out the course and if you would like us to map out and build an action plan for your sales funnel, go to DoneForYou.com/start and I'll talk to you soon. All right! Thanks. Bye.

The post Automating Prospects From One Sales Funnel To The Next 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.

So, how do you create a strong brand? And how do you use automation to empower your brand? In this article, we’re going to talk about building a strong brand faster by using email automation.

To create a significant impression on the minds of your customers you have to represent your brand consistently across all marketing strategies, especially email marketing. Emails are one of the most effective ways to build a strong brand presence and drive sales online. It is a great customer retention tool with which you nurture your leads with personalized messages and convert them into profitable sales.

When you leverage email marketing to create a strong brand, the biggest challenge is determining which email campaigns will work for you best. Marketers often adopt the strategy of ‘email blasts,’ sending the same message to everyone on their subscriber list. When customers open the email and find the content inappropriate to what they are looking for, it can cause dissatisfaction, and they might refrain from opening your emails further.

Email personalization and marketing automation is the answer to delivering the right message to the right person, and enhancing your brand.

Successful email marketing campaigns aren’t just about one or two emails. When it comes to sending bulk email messages, each personalized as per your unique customer needs and preferences, email automation can help streamline the processes.

With email marketing automation, you can do several useful things, such as:

• Segment your audience
• Personalize campaign messages
• Track buyers’ actions
• Lead scoring.

Automated emails get 152% higher click-through rates than broadcast emails. Automation is all about catching people at the right moment when they’re ready to act. And hey, it works.

Source: Epsilon.

Here’s how email marketing automation can help you create a strong brand.

The numbers say it all…

Before you proceed to how you can use email automation to create a strong brand image, let’s check out why it matters at all.

Check out the statistics below:

5 ways you can use email automation to build a strong brand

According to stats, 90% of businesses haven’t automated their marketing efforts yet, and the 10% that do enjoy remarkable benefits.

Here are five effective email marketing automation tips you can use to create a strong brand.

1. Segment your email list

One of the biggest benefits of email automation is that you can segment your subscribers’ list to deliver personalized experiences to your customers. Sophisticated email automation software like Axis Email Marketing and Automation helps build your email list and segment it based on their demographics, buying interests and spending behavior, what emails they have read, when someone subscribed to your emails, etc.

DFY Axis email automation tool will manage your lead generation email campaigns and traffic by creating high conversion email copy, sending it to the right audience at the right time, and nurturing the leads to increase conversion. Creating customized emails based on your segmented audience makes them more relevant, while increasing click-through rates. When they know the emails have content related to what they are looking for, it will keep them out of the spam folder, and the open rates will be higher.

This can go in the long run to help build a powerful brand image and customer loyalty.

2. Create email copy that represents your brand

Whether you are a seasoned marketer or a novice, nothing can beat the importance of effective branding. Moreover, email marketing automation is a unique way you can use to showcase your brand impressively. Make sure every email you send clearly publicize your brand so that whenever someone opens your emails, they can instantly identify that it is from your company. You can use email automation software to flaunt your brand in the following ways:

• The email header should clearly display the company’s logo or brand name
• Use the same colors as in your brand and logo throughout the email copy, including headers, subheadings, and call-to-action button. This will help your audience easily associate with the brand
• Make sure you use similar fonts, hues, and designs as featured in other marketing platforms and materials

3. Create a strong brand – Personalize your emails with automation

Another fantastic way you can use email marketing automation is to personalize your emails. Customizing your email messages is much more than just having a subscriber’s name in the body of the content. How personalized, segmented, or targeted you want the emails to be, depends on your creativity and the automation software you are using.

Personalization through email automation isn’t just about making tasks simpler for you. It is about providing your target audience what is most relevant to their needs and right when they want it. It helps set up an optimum email campaign workflow that does not overload your subscribers with just any or all information about your business. Instead, serve them precisely what they are looking for, ensuring they identify the same in the first few seconds of opening the email.       

So, how you can use email marketing automation to personalize your email content? Here are some ideas for you:

• Email automation software can customize an email by placing individual customer’s name in the subject line or to address the person. For example, instead of using a generic format “Hi,” you can personalize the email with “Dear Edmond King.”
• The software can pinpoint customer’s buying interests – which products they have seen before, what are pending in the shopping cart, etc. Based on this, you can personalize the email by providing special offers or discounts on the product they have searched for earlier. This can help boost conversions.
• Send email content based on the lifestyle of the email recipient.
• Email recommendations for similar items they might like. The email automation tool can analyze a customer’s website behavior and likewise, send comparable items that might appeal them to buy.

Personalized emails are an effective tool to engage your audience with relevant content, spark excitement, and boost conversions. Moreover, email automation is the only way you can streamline the processes and create a strong brand.

4. Target abandoned carts through automated email series

Do you know the average rate of online shopping cart abandonment is 81.4%? That means as much as $4 trillion is lost from buyers who were genuinely interested in your products but did not complete the purchase due to some reasons. The good news is: smart marketers can recover 63% of the revenues lost to cart abandonment. That is why it is important to address the shopping cart abandonment with automated email campaigns.

Rather than focusing on a single reminder message, send a sequence of emails and continue nurturing the prospects to convert them into sales. Set up an email series, considering sending the first email after 24 hours of cart abandonment, the second email after 48 hours, and the third email after 72 hours. If required, send more emails to keep the campaign live and until the customers take definitive action. The email automation software will automatically trigger the emails to target the buyers at the right time and with the right content.

• 1^st Email: Remind buyers what product offerings they left behind in the cart

• 2^nd Email: Address why they are not purchasing your products

• 3^rd Email: Provide special offer, reward or incentive

When customers get the impression that you care for them, it will help build loyalty for your brand. This can go in the long run to ensure business success.

5. Let your subscribers manage their email preferences

If you want the most from email automation, then allow your subscribers to manage the preferences on their own. Choose a tool that lets your subscribers change their preferences – what kind of emails they want to have, how frequently they want the emails, etc. This will help in effective segmentation while enhancing your attrition rates based on relevancy, time management, and frequency.

Conclusion

There are umpteen ways you can use automation to drive your email campaigns, build a strong brand, and boost conversions. In this regard, you can use Axis email marketing and automation tool that helps you grow and manage your email list, and market your business in an automated and effective manner. From building your email list to creating high-conversion email copy and proven landing pages, the software ensures you leverage the potential of automation to the fullest.

The Axis email automation software is built to work on most email marketing platforms. If you do not have one yet, Done For You will guide you through the custom software we have created. What more! The email automation tool is systems-based, which means it will continue working even when you are not. This ensures your target audience is being efficiently marketed and leads will come pouring in any time of the day. It is powered by all the triggers and rules to help send personalized emails, create a strong brand image, and drive sales.

Book a demo today and get one-on-one expert coaching to help you harness the potential of email marketing automation to build a strong brand.

The post Email Automation Tips: How To Create A Strong Brand appeared first on Done For You.

Today we are going to talk about SMS text message marketing and using texts to close more deals...

Now, SMS marketing and text message marketing hit big-time like two or three years ago.  I remember thinking, "Wow, it's so terribly unfortunate that we marketers are going to be abusing this platform that is very near and dear to a lot of people's hearts." We're just going to ruin it (ie. like Pinterest, Twitter, etc...)

So, I had a lot of trepidation about SMS marketing and text message marketing just because it just seems like such an invasion of someone's privacy.  When I get a text message, I assume it's from a friend or a family member... And that it is much more urgent than an email but not quite as urgent as like a phone call.

So, it was just my expectation around text message marketing that needed to be changed - not the technology or the platform itself.

Now, the reason I bring it up now is that people are using SMS marketing and text message marketing a lot more frequently, in a lot of good ways. It actually has served to boost conversions in a lot of marketing automation workflows that we've rolled out too, when used right.

When To Use SMS Marketing

Text messages engage prospects in a different way than just email or just phone calls.

So much so, that we actually built it directly into Axis, our business growth platform, because from a marketing automation standpoint hitting people with one touch is great...  Hitting people with two different touches at about the same time is even better.

Where Text Message Marketing Works

So, here's an example.

Let's say you own a window company. You have a crew that goes out and puts windows in houses. Somebody visits your website, does a bit of research on the brand of windows you recommend, and then they fill out a form for more information. They want you to call them back at some point to schedule an estimate...

Now. put yourself in their shoes.  They've just filled out a form on their website.  Immediately they should get an email afterward, saying, "Hey, thanks so much. We will get back to you ASAP." That's normal, right?

Now, the problem is that person probably isn't checking their email at that moment. So, you may tell them that there is an email coming to their inbox, but they probably aren't going to go log in to their email at that very second.

I can't tell you how many things I've signed up for and I haven't gone and checked my email when a web page told me to. I think to myself, " The next time I'm in my email I'll just see it."

Then, I forget.

How SMS Marketing Engages More Prospects

Well, imagine taking that little customer-getting campaign one step further and sending an email AND THEN a text message right afterward!  So, somebody signs up for a sales appointment and not only do they get an email (that they may or may not check!) but they also receive a text message immediately! Their phone is probably in a pocket or it's sitting somewhere around the keyboard that they are filling in that form with.

That is the power of SMS marketing and text message marketing when it's done right.

How about appointment reminders? Or discount codes? Think about all of the little marketing things that are time sensitive and the only way that we really have to get in front of somebody is email or phone...

SMS Marketing Automation

Right now, you probably are not calling each of your customers every time you run a promotion.  You probably don't have a call center who's doing cold calling or leaving voice mails.  What you're probably doing is sending an email and that's it...  Not multiple emails - just one.  That's a shame too.

Imagine being able to send an email and a text message at the same time, reminding them that this promotion is going on right now!  Take it a step further - adding them to a marketing automation workflow that sends them an email and an SMS message once a day for the next 5 days while the promotion is on!

So, inside Axis, we took all of the headaches out of sending SMS messages and text messages to your contact list.

You can send a text message right from your customer's contact record itself...

Send An SMS Message Your Entire Contact List?

Or right from the contact dashboard, sending an SMS message to your whole list even!

Basically, you log in, select which contacts you want to receive the text message, write the text message, and hit send.  That's it.  It's out the door.  Your prospects will get it seconds after you hit send inside Axis. And not only can you send broadcast text messages, but you can also add these text messages into your marketing automation campaigns!

Combining Email Marketing And SMS Into A Single Marketing Automation Campaign

After that text message is set up inside an Axis campaign, whenever someone fills out a form on your website, gets tagged inside of Axis, or triggers a campaign... In other words, they move into a marketing automation campaign... They get email #1 and SMS message #1.  Then a day goes by and they get email #2 and SMS message #2.  A few more days go by, they get the third email and text...  And on it goes!

So, the key here is using SMS marketing or text message marketing in a way that deepens a relationship with your prospect and engages your customers on a whole different level. That is why we built it into Axis.

... And SMS Is Painless To Set Up

And the beauty is, you don't have to set up some stupid middleware plugin to make text messaging work in your marketing automation (or to send a text message for that matter).  You don't have to go set up the text message service or pay out of pocket for some plugin plus each and every text message you send.

Literally, you log in, you upload your contacts, choose who you want to text, and hit the "Send Text" button.

To make a long story short, there are lots of different ways you can use SMS marketing and text message marketing to engage your customers more deeply. Some of the things it's perfect for are appointment reminders, discount codes, and any other kind of a notification that is more urgent than just an email.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to book a strategy session with my team and I. Go to consultingsession.com and we can look at SMS messages, your marketing automation campaigns, and figure out what you can be doing better to generate more revenue from the leads that are coming in.

The post SMS Marketing – How Text Message Marketing Can Get You Sales appeared first on Done For You.

Are you looking for some B2B promotion ideas and ideas on how to promote a product? Are you interested in launching a product and promoting it online?

This article will teach you how to create a plan to promote a B2B product. Before starting, we’d like to stress that you must stay up-to-date with the trends in your market before you start promoting your offerings.

Promoting a B2B product can be challenging.

Today’s harsh reality is that no matter how good a product is, it can generate zero revenue unless you market it right. Things can become even more complex when you want to promote a B2B product. For example, online marketing channels like Facebook might not work well for B2B products.  Promotional products are solid B2B marketing resources but don’t help you acquire customers online…

Also, an online competition for paid keywords makes it very expensive to bid on the keywords you want. This is another reason you must find B2B promotion ideas for your service or product.

Now the question is – what have you done so far that could put your B2B company up with the big names? Anything?

No matter your stage, we’re here with some ideas that will help you pick the right B2B promotion ideas. Look at these promo ideas and see what you will implement in your business.

B2B Promotion Ideas: Getting Started With Product Online Promotions

Before we lay down the specific ways to promote a product, let’s clarify that your business can use hundreds of tactics and channels online. The primary two options you have for promoting your launch or revamped offering are:

Content marketing (free)

Content is king. Content marketing is the king of online marketing. Now, more than ever, blogging is synonymous with “content marketing.”

Content marketing is about blogging and creating different types of content, such as videos, to be distributed through various online channels. Your base will always be your blog, where you post search-engine-optimized content. Then, you have email, YouTube, third-party blogs, and other media for your content marketing efforts.

More than SE-optimized, your published content must speak to your ideal customer persona. This will attract an audience from the search engines or social sites, getting you traffic and exposure, ultimately helping you promote your product to the world.

Content marketing is free and an excellent B2B promotion idea… In the sense that you don’t pay Google or Facebook to post it or promote it. However, it might consume a lot of your resources (time & opportunity cost) when you want a dedicated person or team to create good content pieces consistently. The good news is that you may bear fruit once you invest in an epic content piece. This possibility makes your results passive because there will be no recurring expenses, as would happen in paid ad campaigns.

Advertising (paid)

If you have a budget, you can go the paid route. This probably means that you would create Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, Pinterest ads, Twitter ads, LinkedIn ads…  LinkedIn, in particular, may be one of the top places to start because not only professionals and business owners (your ideal audience) hang out there, but LinkedIn is not yet saturated or spammed.

Indeed, there are plenty of other places you can advertise depending on your chosen method. For instance, an affiliate network can be the right choice for your product promotions if you decide to grow through affiliate partnerships.

Regarding B2B promotion ideas with paid advertising, you pay for every person who visits your website or hits your sales page.  That is called Pay Per Click. Then, the revenue you’re generating should offset the ad costs, if not make your campaigns profitable.

So if you generate $1000 of revenue and it costs $300 to get that sale, you just put $700 in your bank account. Paid advertising can consume money if you don’t optimize your campaigns for keywords, audiences, and Cost Per Click.

How to effectively promote a B2B product

Promoting the product effectively is the key, though. This means that there are qualitative factors you need to consider when launching a promotional campaign. Let’s look at them and more ideas for B2B product promotions.

1. Mix clarity with creativity

We won’t beat around the bush asking you to focus on creating valuable content that people will like, share, and all that buzzword.

Enough has already been said about such topics. Now is the time for some action!

See, there are two types of content regarding B2B promotion ideas.

The first is the one that offers a solution to a client’s problem, i.e., knowledgeable content.

The second type builds a story and keeps the user hooked. It encourages them to come back for more time after time.

Today’s clever marketing needs you to bring the right mix of both. You have to mix creativity with clarity and then put it in front of the audience to judge.

If you successfully crack the code for writing such content, you will see a rise in your brand value and customer traffic in no time. Each market is different, so be genuine in your writing and make it appealing to your niche audience.

2. Be where the users are

It can take years to create the need for your product in the market. So, why not sell your product where the condition is already present?

We mean here that you’ve probably already identified your target audience; the next step is to find where they are present.

2018 is going to be the year of data analytics.

You need to rely on data to plan your B2B promotion ideas. For example, contrary to what you might have thought, B2B Decision-Makers Are Spending 760 Minutes A Week On Facebook (ComScore, 2017.)

Thanks to Google Analytics and other reliable sources of user data on the web, it has become relatively easy to figure out the source where your audience is present. So use this data and make your presence felt in those locations.

3. Go ‘paid-marketing’

Please get the desired results from your organic marketing endeavors.

However, the current market scenario requires you to mix paid marketing with organic marketing to get assured results.

Whether you are talking about SEO or social media marketing, all channels have their own paid advertising.

As a B2B company, you need to get your team working to figure out which B2B marketing channels are the best and most efficient for your business to invest in.

Once you have that figured out, your B2B promotion ideas should be tested first…

4. The good old SEO

No matter how advanced we become in our marketing strategies, the basics will remain the same for the foreseeable future.

You cannot ignore the importance of SEO.

By optimizing your business for the right keywords on search engines, you can get more traffic for your business and build a brand out of it.

SEO works on several levels to help your business. From getting more traffic and interaction to establishing market authority and gaining a certain level of trust in the market, – well-planned and implemented search engine optimization strategies can do it all for your business.

So, you cannot ignore its importance – not in 2018 or anytime shortly!

Now, when it comes to creating fantastic content fast, no question that investing in top content curation tools can help.

5. Be responsive to customers

Coming full circle from where we started this post – it’s all about how efficient you are in using your time that will dictate the success of your business.

Whether you are dealing in the B2B or B2C markets, responsiveness is a trait you cannot afford to take lightly.

Customers of today are impatient. They are looking for immediate solutions.

In such situations, you don’t have the luxury to employ a laid-back attitude. It would be best if you were on your toes so the customers know how much value you put in them.

By responding to their queries quickly, you will be able to achieve two things:

• First, you will win their trust as they know you are there to care for their problems.
• Second, you will get a loyal following, which will spread the word-of-mouth publicity for your brand.

So, you will be able to kill two birds with one stone.

How to promote a B2B product – Conclusion

There is a lot that you can do for your B2B promotion ideas. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the options are virtually endless.

It’s just that you have to figure out your ultimate goals and where you want to see your business after a certain period.

Of course, you would want to climb the next step in the ladder. But what’s going to be that next step?

Have measurable goals and plans that you can implement to achieve those goals. Without your dreams and strategies, you can never get what you want for your B2B promotions.

Remember, the ultimate goal for every business is to generate sustainable profits. But only those with a plan to succeed can make it to the top.

As they say, in the business world, if you fail to plan the business strategies, you are planning to fail. You need to have a plan and then work on that plan to achieve the ultimate goal.

So, are you ready to plan your B2B product promotion?

Products and services don’t sell themselves. You must approach the right audience, stimulate demand, and use the right tools at the right time.

The most brilliant way to promote a new B2B product while on a small budget is to tap into the audience of another successful brand.

We can help!

If you’d like to talk to one of our experts about promoting your offering, click here to book an Action Plan call. Or click the button below, and you’ll be directed there…

We’ll get on the phone with you, discuss your business needs and product offer, and give you an action plan to get you started immediately.

The post B2B Promotion Ideas: Simple Marketing Strategies To Jumpstart Sales appeared first on Done For You.

Having a Mobile App Funnel that converts is similar in some ways to a more traditional Done For You Sales Funnel...  But, there are some notable differences due to App Stores.

According to MarketingLand, by the year 2019, 72% of the entire digital ad spending in the US is going to be on mobile advertisements.

Another exciting statistic making waves in the industry is that almost half of customers start their search for a product or service from a search engine while one third go the website directly.

Newer metrics indicate that there are 1 million new Internet users per DAY, due largely to smartphones.

Looking at all these numbers, it becomes quite evident that investing in mobile app marketing is the smartest thing a business can do at the moment. And, when it comes to marketing the first thing that instantly pops up into the head is marketing funnels.

In today’s post, we will share information on mobile app marketing funnels and how they differ from the usual marketing funnels. Plus, we will also touch upon the topic of how marketers can leverage marketing funnels for their business to good effect.

So, let us begin.

Mobile App Marketing Funnels

A mobile app conversion funnel is similar to a traditional marketing funnel; the entire process is divided into 5 stages in the mobile app marketing funnel, as well.

Stage 1 – Exposure and Discovery: Making the Customer Reach Your Business

The biggest difference between a traditional marketing funnel and the mobile app marketing funnel lies in the first stage. The reason for this is simple.

In mobile app marketing, downloading a paid app is the ultimate purchase decision that the user has to make, whereas in traditional marketing the final purchase decision is buying the product or service. Time taken in the former is much less when compared to the latter, usually.

However, there is no denying that the next stages, i.e. the exposure and discovery stages, hold prominence in the mobile marketing funnel.

Now, the one question that lurks around in the case of the mobile app conversion funnel is: How do the users find the apps? Here’s a graph that gives you all the numbers:

So, you can see that app store searches are the number one way for people to search and find an app they are looking for.

Strategies for Stage 1

Both paid and organic marketing strategies can work great to get your app to reach a greater number of people. Some of the strategies that marketers can use here include:

Organic strategies

• Word of mouth publicity
• App store optimization
• Social media marketing
• Social bookmarking, internet forums and more

Paid strategies

• Affiliate marketing tactics
• Retargeting
• App advertising

Stage 2 - Consideration: Building Trust Signals

How does a business build trust signals? By showcasing its achievements and customer satisfaction, right?

The same thing rings true for mobile apps, as well.

For a mobile app, app ratings are the best way to showcase how good it is. Ratings build social proof, and studies show that social proofs go a long way in enticing the customer to download the app.

Studies show that more than 85% of customers won’t download an app from the app store if it is rated 2 or below.

Strategies for Stage 2

Build an app page

App stores allow you to add information about your mobile app by creating a dedicated page. You can even add a video. So, use it to your best possible advantage.

Ratings and reviews

As stated above, getting your user rating to 4 stars or above can serve as the biggest trust factor. You need to work towards achieving this goal.

Stage 3 – Conversion: Getting Them to Finally Download the App

Although the primary goal of conversion in mobile app marketing is to get the customer to download the app, its meaning may vary depending on business needs.

For some conversion might be an in-app purchase while for others it could be a subscription to the app.

Based on what the definition of conversion is for your business, you need to work on the strategies for mobile app marketing.

Strategies for Stage 3

Here are some of the tactics you can employ to build a better conversion rate –

• Smooth onboarding – create a meaningful flow so that the user can download the app as smoothly and effortlessly as possible
• Visual design elements – close to 40% of the users part ways with an app because of poor user-interface. So, you know what to do

Stage 4 –Relationships: Providing Value in the Long Run

Just like traditional marketing, the mobile app conversion funnel also revolves around building relationships. The only thing is that you get a little less opportunity to interact with the customer.

As an app marketer, you need to make the best use of whatever little you get.

Strategies for Stage 4

• Finding the right moment – whenever and wherever possible, ask for feedback. Focus on customer service and the users' experience with using the app.
• Personalize communication – use customer data to personalize your mobile app communication, and you can easily win the customer over.
• In-app messaging – in-app feedback, message center options, and similar other strategies can work great for the success of your app. So, make good use of them!

Stage 5 – Customer Retention: Offering Them a Great Experience

It is an age-old fact that, in the world of marketing, acquiring a new customer can cost a business many times more than retaining a customer.

The same is the case here.

Great customer service and making sure that you are in constant touch with your customers are great ways to achieve this.

Strategies for Stage 5

To master Stage 5, here are some strategies you can try.

Ask for feedback – studies show that 98% of users respond positively when asked for feedback. By asking for feedback, you are staying in constant touch with the customer, and also getting to know how you can improve.

Reward programs – another great way to keep your customers using your mobile app for the long haul is by offering special reward programs for mobile users; for instance, encourage them to use mobile apps to make a purchase and, in return, give them a great discount.

Building & Launching a Mobile App Funnel

An app funnel is a kind of like a traditional marketing funnel in a lot of ways.  The main notable difference is your reliance on the app stores to fulfill your app and, in a lot of cases, bring in new users.

Now we've worked with a couple of different mobile app publishers and Android/iOS development organizations that create apps for companies as a service. Because of that, we know that mobile app funnels are very different beasts than a traditional marketing funnel with trigger marketing and marketing automation. One thing is for sure, you'll need a lot of email marketing to pull it off!

At the end of the day, you have a bunch of people who are downloading your app from a marketplace.  Then, you have a smaller subset of people who are buying something through in-app purchases. They are paying money for the app, functionality, or something delivered within the app itself.

So what is the mobile app funnel?

The Mobile App Funnel

The difference with app marketing is that marketplaces are the biggest traffic sources originally.  You can drive your traffic, which we'll talk about, but a lot of app developers are simply hoping that their app takes off in the app store itself.

Here's what I mean.

Most mobile apps are going to be installed on either Google Play or from the iOS app store. That's where the apps are going to physically be located and fulfilled.  When you're promoting your service or product, you are responsible for setting up your fulfillment.  With an app, the platform syncs it with the mobile device.

The marketplace has a LOT of traffic. People go to the marketplace in search of apps. However, I was just reading a study the other day that only 12% of people go and install a new app on their phone every 30 days. So the number of people who are installing apps on their mobile devices is drastically decreasing!

Unless a mobile user is looking for additional functionality a new way of doing something, your app will fall by the wayside if you rely exclusively on the App Store for your users and traffic.  People aren't playing around in the App Store trying to figure out what else they can put on their device, which puts some of the responsibility on the publisher in terms of driving traffic.

Driving Traffic To Your Mobile App

It never used to be that way - where you had to drive your traffic to your mobile app.

It used to be as simple as putting an app in the app store and all of a sudden you were getting downloads and installs!  People were coming through the front door, and you could monetize them through in-app purchases.

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. You need a mobile app funnel.

Your app funnel is comprised of a couple of things...

You have mobile app advertising. With Facebook and Google, you can drive traffic from those ad platforms specifically to your app marketplace listings. And sometimes that conversion goal can be an app install, which means you are paying per app install.

The bad part though is that now you have real money at stake in promoting your app...  This means that your app needs to start generating cashflow!

Simplify Your Mobile App Onboarding As Much As Possible

There were a few clients that we worked with who was driving good traffic and getting great downloads...  We were spending money to promote their app. They were getting lots of signups (ie. leads), but they had these long terms of service page that needed to be agreed to before they could get in...

Immediately after you put your email address, you were redirected to a page that made you read through the Terms.  It was quite a few scrolls down!  You can guess what happened.  People jump ship, never to open the app again.

All these app downloads were coming in and then these users just never clicked through to even create their first session!

So what we ended up having to do was retool the app to be a single opt-in and a quick TOS checkbox.  From the user setup standpoint, it helped bypass the chokepoint that the terms of service were presenting, and folks were able to download the app and get into it faster!

You, for sure, will see something similar in your app funnel.  When there's a bottleneck, it's up to you and your app development team to optimize the app funnel and the sales process. You want people to download the app, install the app, use the app, love the app, and then ultimately process in-app upgrades that end up generating revenue for you.

And then once you figure that out and you've put together some data, you can go to some of these other app ad platforms to start driving traffic!  With the new traffic and optimization, your app funnel is positioned to take off and a bevy of new users will flood through the platform.

In short, though, don't rely on ONLY the marketplaces anymore!

Conclusion

To sum it up, all we have to say is that an app marketing funnel, whether it be traditional marketing or mobile app marketing, involves a similar set of strategies, yet is different to quite a large extent.

To master the mobile app marketing funnel, you need to think of a mobile app from a user-only perspective. And, that’s where the difference lies.

Everything mentioned above paints a clear picture of how you can master mobile app marketing funnels and bring great results for your business.

So, are you up for it?

The 3-part Sales Funnel Formula

Are you looking to develop a highly-profitable sales funnel?

Read more about the exact sales funnel formula that we use to drive tons of targeted, high-converting traffic to our business and our clients’ business in our brand new version of the Funnel Factor report.

No time to read? Register for our on-demand Sales Funnels webinar that you can watch at any time from the comfort of your home.

The post Mobile App Marketing Funnel: Tips For Generating Sales From App Downloads 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.

But, what exactly is marketing automation?

Marketing automation – What it is and what it is not

Marketing automation is a way of targeting customers using software that works on auto pilot after you initially set it up. Software sends automated marketing messages and notifications across multiple channels, such as emails, text messages, social networks, pop up notifications, push messages, etc.

Undoubtedly, marketing automation fuels efficiency as well as global outreach. Research shows that marketing automation increases sales productivity by 14.5% and reduces marketing overhead by 12.2%.

Automation tools and software are very effective in lead generation through chatbots across several platforms such as email marketing, webpages, social media, and SMS. Another research reveals that 4 out of 5 users increased leads by choosing marketing automation software and almost 77% experienced increased conversions.

Automation tools are effective in analyzing customer demographics, usage patterns, and behavior. Data collected can be further used for effective customer targeting and segmentation. Using Axis Advanced Analytics, users can understand marketing data better and improve sales performance.

The most effective ways to optimize marketing automation is to map customer experience and use dynamic and personalized content.

Brief history of marketing automation

When IBM launched Unica automation software back in 1992, it was one of its kind. Presently, the same Unica products power the omnichannel marketing as well as real-time automation solutions of the company. When Unica was launched, most businesses did not even think of having an online interface. In fact, the internet was in its infancy.

With the penetration of the internet in the mid-2000s and cloud-based marketing tools like Act-In and HubSpot development, things changed. By 2010, there were almost a billion social media users. Around the same time, Infusionsoft and HubSpot integrated social marketing tools. Webinars and mobile commerce started becoming popular, thus contributing to the development of some of the finest automated marketing tools.

According to reports released by EmailModay, in 2017 over 50% of the companies were already using marketing automation tools whereas 60% of all B2B companies planned to adopt this new technology.

Today, marketing automation is touted to be a game changer. Its benefits are inarguable. Obviously, it is a massive time as well as money saver; but there is a lot more to it. Over 90% of marketers consider these tools because of their ability to deliver uninterrupted and autonomous optimization across various channels. In addition, these tools also enable teams to analyze, review and take action on marketing data and customer in real-time.

Implementing marketing automation

Marketing plays a key role in business. As your business scales, it may be impossible to communicate with all your customers and manage your relationship at a one-to-one level. As a result, marketing automation is the only solution. It not only makes communication easier but also helps businesses operate professionally and efficiently. Most importantly, it ensures that you are punctual and prompt with communication.

Automation tools are designed to serve your purpose depending on the nature of your business. For instance, if your business is a bank, you can choose marketing automation tools to nurture your prospects, convert them into customers, help with customer relationship management, etc.

Contrary to popular beliefs, most marketing automation tools and software improve communication and give time to emphasize on the quality of messages and ad campaigns. Furthermore, it also gives importance to personal space in communication through regulated conversations.

Overall, marketing automation with all its weapons aims to improve the user experience. However, we must realize that the concept of automation is not just limited to technology or software. It is, rather, a channel and a medium used to perform crucial activities for the benefit of your business.

In order to make the most out of marketing automation, you must take some preventive measures to avoid making mistakes.

Noted below are some of the major mistakes to avoid while implementing marketing automation:

1. Start with a plan

Automation is a powerful tool. As a result, it is prone to misuse. As automation allows you to create ad campaigns and schedule email campaigns with less money, time and energy, you should not go overboard to become a spammer. Because it is easy, don’t blast email your leads, especially if your figures are good. You wouldn’t know when you cross the line to hit the spam list.

In the digital domain, you have to avoid spamming. It can hurt your business like none other. So, send only relevant emails to your target audience at the right time.

Moreover, when you are aimless, the process may seem to be too expensive with not so promising result. So, set your goals right, be specific, and take the correct approach.

2. Not having a sound inbound strategy

Wise marketers use marketing automation together with an inbound lead marketing strategy for best results. However, as most marketers rely heavily on automation, they give no importance to inbound marketing.

The traditional marketing strategy involving the sales funnel is very effective. While it takes you through a series of steps to arrive at a sale, automation is a mere way of communicating with your existing leads and converting them.

If your existing lead data is not ready, automation cannot be productive. Although both the strategies are not mutually exclusive of the other, it is difficult to use one optimally without the influence of the other.

3. Don’t be an aggressive seller

When marketers target customers and convert them, they tend to pressurize a lot. Some marketers may also become pushy and intrusive with their offers, discounts, and deals. This indicates that their leads are not engaged before pursuing with their sales pitch and communication. That’s a bad attitude.

You can only engage leads and convert them with defined and relevant content. It is crucial to carry out a sale. By engaging with your leads, you can pass on information related to your business, its principles, and factors making you stand apart from your counterparts. Using a call to action such as signups, surveys, or questionnaire, can benefit too.

4. Not segmenting your audience

You have to categorize your email list based on user behavior, demographics, location, sex, and other relevant factors. Non-segmentation might lead to fruitless exercise. This is primarily because if you deliver the same content to people of all age groups and various professions, there is a possibility that most of your audience would not be interested.

Analyzing buyer personas and segmenting them can boost your returns. It also helps you to aim at the right audience before implementing a marketing automation process. As a result, there is a higher chance of conversion. For instance, if you segment your audience into married, unmarried, and divorced individuals, you would be able to deliver content, which concerns them separately, and gets a response from a likely potential customer.

5. Don’t forget you are human, not a robot

Undoubtedly, marketing automation is wonderful. Everything works on its deal and there is no hassle of the manual process. However, though it allows you to focus on important matters, there is a slight risk of becoming organic.

As you are, your prospects are also humans. You would not want them to realize that a robot is dealing with them. It is critical to humanize the brand and add value to the user experience. Simply by adding a personal touch to messages and making communication more genuine and authentic can make a difference. Make your emails more relevant to your recipients.

6. Don’t build content without a call to action

Ensure to build content with a call to action for better engagement and returns. If you believe that automation can do it all, you may be wrong.

To bring your customers back repeatedly, engage them with sign-up forms, simple clicks, questionnaires, or surveys, and make sure it has a call to action. It would help you to have access to your audience, especially those who are interested in the content or would like to know about your products and services. Depending on the purpose of your content and the nature of the call to action, your audience may engage or disengage with you.

7. Not scheduling and running tests

Running tests is non-negotiable. It is a strategy to predict consumer behavior and learn more about them. This is the gospel of truth for any marketing strategy, including marketing automation.

Always schedule and run tests for your campaigns to maximize the advanced features of the tool or software used. For example, A/B testing allows you to compare two distinct versions of a campaign and deliver better results by emphasizing on a particular element like CTA, subject line, landing page or any other important concern.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is prepared for massive growth. There would be significant changes and technological advancements. A brilliant strategy would be to focus on customers and their needs. Collecting data through customer interaction across several channels may also help businesses to optimize their content targeting client base. To succeed, analyze data and understand the pattern of your customers, their needs, and buying behavior to influence decision making in the future.

Implement Marketing Automation now. Leverage the potential of software tools, marketing solutions and expertise we have to help you grow your business.  Schedule a call with us.

The post Implementing Marketing Automation? Avoid These Common Mistakes 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.

What we're going to do is we are going to talk about marketing automation and what you need to run in your CRM stack, or your email automation stack, so that you can effectively deploy email marketing automation in your business. We're also going to talk about the best niches for marketing automation and CRM marketing.

What CRM marketing automation does for you.

Typically, when somebody first learns about you, it's through some traffic source. The traffic source, it might be Google. It might be a paid ad. It might be a Facebook page post. It might be Instagram, whatever. Wherever your traffic comes from they:

• Learn about you
• Click through a link somewhere
• Ultimately, they end up on your website finally...
• Becoming a lead.

Once that happens, then you can't just let your lead hang out and do nothing. Something needs to happen for them that moves them closer to your business... Closer to buying from you.

So many of our clients are like "Yep, we know we have a big list but we just don't email them. We don't send them stuff. We don't even send them blog posts or nurture the relationship."

At the end of the day, what you will find is the relationship with your customer, your prospect, that one person, is really hat CRM marketing is all about. It's how can you help that person understand your business better so they can make a better buying decision.

That is done through messages. It's done by emailing folks, segmenting lists with tags, putting them into marketing campaigns, and ultimately helping them understand what it is you do.

Marketing-based CRMs are made up of really only three things

You have your trigger.

So, the trigger is how did that person find you. Did they fill out a form? Did they hit a webpage?

Then you have your campaign. So, your campaign is made up of emails, texts, calls, print post cards. All of that outbound stuff is really the material that is in the campaign.

Really, to get a customer, prospects go through the exact same process every time.

Campaigns automate repetitive tasks so you don't have to do them manually and they make your marketing a predictable process.

Oftentimes when we're working with clients, they're like, "Okay, we're launching. When is our first customer going to come?"

I'm like well, that's a great question. It's kind of a trick question, but it's a great question.

The reason is is because in order to get a customer, first somebody needs to opt-in to your website and then they need to get some emails about the thing they just opted-in for because nobody ever opts-in to a form that just isn't going to give them something. So, whether it's a spreadsheet or a lead magnet or a webinar or a video or a course or whatever, free training, they're always going to be opting in for something.

So, your first responsibility is to get them that something. Then you can put them in a nurture sequence.

The nurture sequence is like here's what we do, here's some links to our blog. Here's a little bit about the founders. Here's links to the social media profiles, whatever.

Whatever's going to help bond them to you.

Whenever I think of customer acquisition, I have this picture of a mountain.

Are they moving closer?  Or further away?

So, the mountain is off in the distance. It's snow-capped. There's thunder clouds over top of it. When a customer signs up with you, they are either moving closer to the mountain or they are moving farther away. Everything you need... All the messages, all the campaigns... Everything you do needs to move them closer to scaling that mountain because the closer they move to scaling the mountain, the more likely it is that your going to get a buyer, you're going to get a customer. If they turn around and start walking the other way, then of course they're never going to buy from you.

So, in order to cultivate that and nurture that, then we send them four or five emails designed to get them to get to know you better. Then maybe we do a product promo. We introduce them to a physical product you have or a digital product or a lot of marketers like to put $7 trip wires here or whatever. Whatever it is you have in your portfolio or your repertoire, that's what you would promote.

Then it's not just enough to send the product emails. Then that person needs to click through the email, visit your sales page. Then they need to go to the order form, pull out their credit card and buy, which puts them in a product purchase sequence and they get added into a buyer fulfillment sequence.

So, getting buyers, getting customers, is a lot ... there's more moving parts than just asking the question when am I going to get buyers because each one of these things represents not a hurdle, but a doorway they need to step through to move on to the next piece.

Your CRM marketing stack moves people through the buyer journey

So, the first thing you have is your contact records. Your contact record is where the customer lives, digitally at least, where all their data lives. You need their general information. Of course, you need their first name, last name. You need their email, their phone number, but then ideally, you also need some detailed information like things you would ask on a survey.

We have a lot of real estate clients so some of their detailed info might be how many beds, how many baths, when was the roof remodeled, when was the roof replaced, when was the furnace replaced, stuff like that. All of that should live in the customer record associated with that customer so that later, when a sales rep goes or when this person calls in or whatever, they can just pull up one contact record and have access to everything. It's not strewn about in three or four or five different places amongst spreadsheets and amongst stuff that is hanging out on somebody's computer.

You'll also want to see the history. The history is really important, especially when it comes to paid traffic. You want to see what tags this person has, like where they've been previously in your marketing system. What reports did they download? What campaigns? What sequences have they gone through? What pages did they visit?

I had a meeting the other day with a with a bank and I was like if you have one visitor who goes to four pages on your website about commercial lending and you have their phone number, you should really be able to get a notification says "Hey, call this person. They're interested in commercial lending."

The better you can understand your contact, your customer, then the better you're able to sell to that person. Then of course, any tasks associated with that person, any purchases that they would have made and their overall lifetime value. So, all good metrics. Their lifetime value is nice because you can sort based on it. So, you can send things to your best buyers.

Email Automation

The email automation of CRM marketing piece is paramount. The ability to send emails out to buyers or send emails out to prospects, email is one of the best communication tools. From an ROI standpoint, email still works better than most everything else, but you NEED a simple campaign builder to make it work. This is the biggest issue.

There's lots of different ways of building campaigns but if it takes longer to set up a campaign than a couple hours or even 10 minutes, then it ends up being too cumbersome, too complicated, and nobody does it.

You need a clean email creator.

You need the ability to schedule things. So, if somebody opts-in for a report, they get the first email. Then a day later, they get email two. Then a day later, they get email three. So, it's being able to delay and delay campaign messages is important.

Then custom fields, this kind of mimics the CRM marketing or the contact record piece. You need the ability to use the custom fields in your marketing. So, if you're asking somebody how many beds and baths, then you need to be able to use that. And then template is another big one.

Intuitive Form Builder

One of the big problems with a lot of the software tools that we've used is the form builder sucks. If the form builder sucks, then it means that you're not able to request and ask for the information that you need. So, what we did was we actually built ... You can drag unlimited fields into a form very much like a Wufoo or a SurveyMonkey or whatever. All contact record fields and user-defined fields are available to be dragged in. There's no weird contact mapping. You don't need to map a form through an API or like adapt your API back to your amrketing CRM and it saves all the data to the contact record. Then you can easily build extremely custom forms.

So, we have a business funding client that we're actually ... We just rolled him out and we're building a full survey inside Axis and it's no additional software. All that information saves directly to the customer record. So, you're able to combine a couple different pieces of software nicely.

Then you need clean landing pages, clean sales pages that actually convert. So, one of the things that we implemented inside Axis is a landing page builder that actually converts better than pretty much anything else we've ever seen. Most of it is because we test the pages ruthlessly for our clients and for own stuff. Landing pages, sales pages, confirmation pages, video pages, scheduling pages, and automated webinar pages.

In doing a lot of automated webinars, we've found that the actual webinar tool, the automated webinar functionality, is cumbersome. It's hard to set up and really, you don't need that tool. You can just have a collection of four pages and a countdown that actually moves people one to the next and that's something that maps to your domain.

Fill In The Blank Email Scripts

One of the biggest drawbacks in terms of time in CRMs is the ability to write email copy, but we did and some of the inspiration behind putting it into a CRM itself is because if we're writing the copy, we might as well be sending it for clients as well.

There are 25 internal email sequences, a total of 83 emails to promote physical products, digital products, webinars, webinar replays, consultative sale sessions, all that kind of stuff. Then there's over 700 emails pre-written for affiliate sequences. So, there's 20 different niches for affiliates that ... All of that, you ... It's already pre-written. You go through, fill out a little form. It drops it into the email and then you can schedule and automatic from there. So, it's fill in the blank forms, email sequences done in minutes. I'll show you this in a little bit.

The best niches for email automation.

So, we've done a lot of work in the service agency like marketing consulting, all of that.

The biggest thing with the service agency is somebody's coming to you to solve a problem. So, that problem, if you can deliver the content and bond and nurture, then that problem ... The better they like you, the more readily they will call and ask for services. Banking works really well. Manufacturing ... Even though from a email marketing automation piece ... Lead acquisition isn't great in manufacturing. We have a couple local manufacturing clients and it's difficult to get a high-end enterprise multi-million dollar company to fill out an email form on a website. They will do it but oftentimes, they just call somebody. They call the sales rep or they call somebody at the company and say, "Hey, do you make stainless steel widgets?" And the company says yes and say, "Okay, here's a quote.

What we have found from an email automation standpoint is it's much more intuitive to start using CRM marketing automation in the bidding process or the bidding or the proposal process. So, being able to send a document out in an email and then automatically reply saying is the price too high, is it too low, that kind of thing. So, it's all stuff we're working on from a manufacturing standpoint. Legal's another one. Legal and law, another great place for email automation. We have a lot of real estate clients who use marketing automation, both for sellers and buyers. For people who are selling their property, whether it's a distressed homeowner or it was something that was willed to them or whatever. So, in different geographic areas around the country. And then also buyers are investors. So, people who ... they have the capital and they want to invest it in real estate but they don't necessarily have ... they're not sourcing properties themselves. So, two different sides of the same coin, but automation works really well.

Small and medium business always need solutions for marketing. E-commerce is another one. So, if you have a Shopify store set up, Shopify itself has pretty weak email marketing. They have some shopping cart abandonment and stuff in there, which is kind of cool, but it's difficult to do too much from an email prospecting side with physical products with the exception of discount codes and a lot of the physical product companies who are more content-heavy. They put out a lot of videos whether it's Instagram or Facebook and it's a little bit easier to drive prospect email list and then convert them into buyers. Insurance is another one, business services. Kind of goes with the service agency. Online education and traditional education also work great for email automation and crm marketing.

The post Email Automation: Setting Up Your CRM Marketing Stack 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.

Before we move on and discuss automation and its impact on digital transformation, let us take a moment to learn a little bit about digital transformation.

What is digital transformation?

According to Wikipedia, “Digital transformation is the transformation of business by revamping the business strategy or digital strategy, models, operations, products, and marketing approach by adopting digital technologies.”

In simpler words, it is the integration of technology into each and every aspect of your business which changes the way you operate and bring value to customers. It not only improves the overall customer experience but also accelerates sales and growth of an organization in a big way.

It is important to be aware of the nine elements of digital transformation. Let’s take a look at them briefly one by one:

1. A proper understanding of customers – More and more businesses are using social media to understand their nature, target the right audience, and gain valuable insights.
2. Top-line growth – Integrating advanced technologies to innovate current methodologies and improve sale-interactions, and customer experience.
3. Customer touch points – The latest technologies like geolocation and augmented reality enhance customer-touch points.
4. Process digitization- These days many companies have already started automating their internal processes.
5. Worker enablement – With the emergence of a remote workforce, companies have embraced technology and started using various tools and technologies to communicate and collaborate.
6. Performance management – Real data is enabling companies to be more aware of products, customers and trends, and is helping them to make well-informed choices.
7. Digitally modified businesses – To drive growth, businesses are using the latest technology to give their traditional products and services a facelift.
8. New digital business – People have started to provide services and products for comparatively older services.
9. Digital globalization – Companies are merging digital tools with information to make way for better coordination and collaboration.

Impact of automation on digital transformation

Now, if we talk about the process of automation, it is one of the new-age technologies that has played a large role in encouraging digital transformation and it is going to get bigger and better in the coming years.

As per the Gartner survey, 42% of CEOs have already started the digital transformation process in their businesses while 56% have benefited by implementing automation in their work processes.

The concept of business automation has helped organizations and numerous ventures to eliminate the need for manual work in repetitive business processes and have yielded positive results. It has helped them to provide consistent and accurate results along with speeding up the work process.

Let’s take a look at the ways automation is enabling digital transformation:

1. Business process optimization

In today’s ever-changing world, the need of the hour is to optimize your processes and workflows to get an edge over your competitors. That’s the reason why many organizations have bid goodbyes to their age-old methods and are now leaning towards a digital transformation makeover.

Automation enables you to create a holistic work environment that focuses on quality and speed. If businesses and organizations start integrating automation into their current style of working, they could definitely experience high growth while making a name for themselves in the market.

2. Better IT operational efficiency

IT teams have been hugely benefited with the introduction of automation technology. IT developers now no longer have to write long codes every now and then. By automating tasks, they can effectively tweak the overall process cycle. As technology needs no coding and tasks can be moved swiftly from one stage to another, they can easily build and deploy workflows that not only make things easier for IT teams but also significantly improves the overall experience of users.

Plus, automation leaves no chance for human error and negligence – you can be 100% assured of delivering results that are fast, accurate and reliable.

3. Increased employee productivity

Oftentimes, companies are faced with the issue of lack of resources for their projects. Automation is the most reliable and cost-effective method to take care of this issue. By automating repetitive tasks, no extra resources will be utilized and you will be able to deliver work with no mistakes or human errors.

Thus, it won’t be wrong to say that automation will not only largely reduce workload but will also increase overall employee productivity, allowing for a more agile way of working while encouraging employees to take a collaborative approach.

4. New insights

With the help of automation in digital transformation, one can get easy access to a business’s analytical information. You can use this information to gain new insights and these insights could elevate the growth of your business or an organization.

Moreover, with a little manipulation, you can use the information to explore new avenues and unlock new opportunities for the future.

Why undergo a digital transformation?

It is the age of technology with digitally-native customers who are quite well-versed in the latest trends and technologies. One must understand that digital transformation has become one of the most viable strategies to accelerate business growth.

Be mindful while taking the road to digital transformation as you will first have to consider how each aspect of business can be optimized. Automation technology is going to play a significant role in the digital tech world helping businesses and organizations to optimize their existing processes and move ahead with technology.

We hope that this article helped you to understand digital transformation and how automation is enabling digital transformation. The biggest takeaway is to start investing in automation technology in order to succeed and make more revenue.

The post How Is Automation Enabling Digital Transformation? appeared first on Done For You.

In essence, the top reason why you should be using a chatbot is that it can help you automate lead generation and nurturing with the goal to increase sales. But a chatbot can do a lot more than that.

In the early stages of using a chatbot, businesses are hesitant because they are not sure of how it could advance their marketing strategy. However, after some time, adopt the trends that are a good fit for their campaigns, and start deploying chatbots for lead generation, customer support and for responding to basic questions that web visitors pose.

According to chatbot stats and trends, Facebook Messenger bot is one of the solutions that is commonly used. It lives inside Facebook Messenger, so it’s a pretty simple and popular solution to implement. If developed for an e-shop, for instance, this bot can recommend products, reply to customer inquiries and blend with an e-commerce store.

Next and Staples are some examples of businesses that use Facebook messenger bot. This software replies to any question from their customers within the shortest time possible. Likewise, you can use Facebook messenger chatbot for other purposes such as recommending playlists or songs – just like Spotify does. In fact, any kind of chatbot can add value to your business.

To put things into perspective, let have a look at some chatbot stats and trends you shouldn’t ignore.

5 chatbot stats that can transform your marketing

1. The market is expanding fast

Facebook is the most commonly used social media network, attracting at least 2 billion users in a month including both businesses and individuals. This translates to around 2 billion messages sent via Facebook.

Clearly, as a business owner, you view this as a chance to create a long lasting relationship with your customers. Different from Twitter support, tickets and emails, chatbots create a new, instant way to serve your customers. According to a current market survey, people use chatbots because:

• 37 percent states it gives instant replies in case of emergency
• They help to resolve a problem or complaint
• 35 percent say it provides a well-detailed response
• 34 percent use chatbots as a channel for getting connected to a human

However, the last stat pays emphasis that chatbots should not be “all or nothing” technology. If a customer wants to talk to a human, then the business should provide the means.

2. Chatbots help customers interact with your business

According to HubSpot (2017), 55 percent of consumers prefer to use messaging apps as a means to resolve a problem. They use these apps as a way to engage with a business. One thing you should know is that customers hardly have the time to wait for your response. They want the answer instantly instead.

Therefore, chatbots can be of great help if your customers are spread worldwide. You’ll be able to provide customer support regardless of the time or day. This shows that chatbots are highly interactive – not like emails.

Having an appropriate chatbot configuration, it can create a forth and real-time conversation with your brand. And of course, you would be interested in getting feedback from customers as well. Chatbots will easily do that for you. It will assist in integrating different options, photo carousels, and quizzes – just to interact with your customers.

3. Chatbots boost conversion rates

Are you in e-commerce business? If so, you can benefit from a chatbot as it increases the rate of conversion. HubSpot (2017) indicates that around 47 percent of customers make a purchase through chatbots. So, owning an online business means that you get lots of inquiries about your services/products.

What happened if you didn’t have the time/chance to notify your customers about a clearance sale or promotion running? Perhaps you failed to pass this important information on time. And sales didn’t rock as you expected. With chatbot, this shouldn’t worry you because it will automatically do that for you. The Facebook messenger bot can help you sell products from your e-commerce even when you are out of the office.

4. Bots increase brand awareness

On average, the open rate for emails is 18.1%, while that of messages can go up to 98%. This is a clear indication that chatbots can send information quicker and more effectively than email.

As an illustration, you can program a messenger bot in such a way that it replies to specific keywords. So, in case a client seeks information about a bike, your bot will remind them in case you have a sale on the said item.

Better still, you can offer coupons in the event that they make a repurchase. These customers can redeem these coupons through text messaging or messenger apps. This channel provides quicker services than emails.

5. Customers prefer live chats

Successful businesses are different from the rest as they have identified a means to reach their customers. Gone are the days when businesses used to rely on emails as the only way to communicate with customers. They have noted that clients and consumers hardly have the time to read emails – or reply to them.
Actually, most people prefer responding to texts instead.

Surprisingly, a survey shows that people prefer live chats over other methods of reaching out to companies. Perhaps this is because of one obvious reason. Live chats are instant. Customers don’t wait for responses – they get them immediately. As a matter of fact, you can start chatting with a chatbot right now – no matter where you are.

Can chatbots be part of your marketing strategy?

After considering these stats, chatbots can be part of a well-rounded marketing strategy. When chatbots came into the market, few people were aware of them. Now many business owners are realizing what the bot technology can do for their marketing. This explains why chatbots have expanded since 2010 when Facebook launched messenger.

With these five chatbot stats and trends, we believe you are now more ready than ever to incorporate chatbots in your digital marketing strategy. Here are more relevant resources to help you get started. And here’s a resource for more ideas and inspiration.

The post 5 Chatbot Stats And Trends You Need To Know appeared first on Done For You.

Its impact in the world of digital marketing has not only been phenomenal but also revolutionizing in many ways. Considering its reach in the world, one must realize its potential and learn how it can benefit various industries especially that of digital marketing.

Before we dive straight into it, let’s discuss, in general terms, a little bit about artificial intelligence.

What is artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (acquiring information and rules to use information), reasoning (using the rules to reach approximate conclusions) and self-correction.

AI has been in existence for awhile, but with the emergence of computer-related technology, it is gaining more and more popularity. Speech recognition, expert systems, and machine vision are some of its common fields of application.

The relationship between AI and digital marketing

As artificial intelligence has been making waves for quite some time now, people from different industries are curious to estimate its applications, especially in digital marketing.

Although marketers were initially skeptical to integrate artificial intelligence into their marketing strategy, now marketers are embracing AI with open arms. They have realized that it holds a lot of potential and can be used to provide a better customer experience, targeted marketing, and more to get better ROI. In the coming years, it is surely going to get bigger and better.

Here are some potential areas where AI can contribute tremendously to digital marketing.

Personalizing user experience

One of the most significant areas where artificial intelligence can make a difference is personalizing user experience and making it better. Aligning your digital marketing strategy with AI can help you get valuable insights such as customer behaviors, patterns, interests so that you can customize campaigns on these factors and target the right audience.

AI-powered chatbots are another fine examples of how artificial intelligence is making things easier for marketers. Chatbots are programmed to interact with customers 24/7 and retain information. Unlike humans, they never lose patience and always treat customers in a friendly manner. Thus, AI has helped marketers personalize the whole user experience by giving the impression they are talking to a real person.

Better decision making with easier predictive analysis

Do you know that whenever you browse the web, new data is generated and collected for AI analysis to find needs, behaviors and gauge the future actions of prospects? With artificial intelligence, the collected information could be used to optimize your marketing strategy to provide customers with what they are looking for. This enables marketing teams to use the data in order to create a campaign targeting the right audience.

This predictive analysis lets you provide the relevant information to customers seamlessly and decrease their product research helping them make better and quicker decisions. Such AI-enabled algorithms have not only reduced the workload of digital marketing teams but have also enabled them to make way for better customer decision-making of customers with the help of predictive analysis.

By the way, our advanced analytics tool, Statly, can be the perfect companion along the journey to saving resources, optimizing data and reaching better management decisions.

Click the banner below to watch a video about exactly how you can achieve this with Statly.

Better ROI with image recognition

Artificial intelligence has now made it possible to use high-level image recognition and get a detailed description of that image. This is a feature that could find applications in various industries and sectors. Realizing the importance of AI, Amazon has recently come up with Amazon Recognition, which can recognize human faces and identify objects.

From faster payment processes to safer customer security, AI-enabled image recognition can be put into any use and tackle concerns involved in online transactions. What happens is that AI software looks for images in social media and compares it to a large image library to draw conclusions.

So, if you are a manufacturer, you can understand demographics and other factors that will help you align marketing strategies and extract maximum return on investment.

Easier search sessions

Though there isn’t anything wrong with users’ current search sessions they are often found to be confusing and not so responsive. It is guaranteed that, if you incorporate digital marketing with artificial intelligence, you will see much smarter and convenient search engines and sessions.

How, you might ask? That’s probably because AI easily tracks customer preferences and requirements, which help them to predict their future moves and decisions that could further lead to better semantic keywords.

Easier targeting of the right audience

One of the biggest challenges for digital marketing teams is to reach their target audience easier and faster. With various AI-enabled software, marketing teams seem to have cracked the code for this. Artificial intelligence powers you to find the right people that can bring value to the brand and assets related to it.

Based on people’s search preferences, interests, demography, search history and other important aspects, AI brings your product to those who might actually be looking for it, i.e. your target audience.

Optimizing your voice-search queries

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of voice search queries which has made it quite evident for digital marketing teams to optimize for long-tailed voice searches, so much so that around 70% of Google Assistant receives usual, daily-used words than the typical keywords by people during their voice-search queries in Google.

Whether it is a request to look for directions, dictate texts, find out movie times, or call someone, AI has found its application almost everywhere. Thus, it makes sense to use structured markup for optimization so that search engines can understand the context easily.

Wrapping up

Implementing AI in digital marketing is bound to result in a promising outcome. That is better decision making, more ROI, and predictive buying and selling processes.

Along with this, it is going to benefit both customers and businesses. Let’s hope it AI continues to do wonders in all the fields, especially digital marketing, and keeps solving customer problems.

The post How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Digital Marketing appeared first on Done For You.

Profitable sales funnels are a real asset to your business. Once you have one (or more!) going, your sales funnels can continuously bring in sales, revenue, and profits without you having to lift a finger.

That’s the pipe dream at least. To get there, you’d need funnels that work really smart. There’s ongoing work just to keep those sales funnels working the way they should.

You need the right team, the right tools, and speed of execution.

Businesses — small and large — lose out on a lot just by doing various things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, chances are that you are killing the potential of your landing pages without even knowing it.

Here’s how:

Dependence on developers for landing pages

Your designers and developers are not marketers.

Good sales funnels demand skills from varied functions. You need decent design (see below), great copy, minimalistic approach, and the right technology (including tracking, analytics, and A/B testing) to power your sales funnels.

Plus, with all those campaigns waiting to be launched, you can’t afford to wait for months for your designers and developers to send in the completed funnels and landing pages.

None of that has anything to do with your IT department. They won’t be able to do it, they are expensive, and even if they did (while you don’t mind the cost), they won’t do justice to your sales funnels.

Fussing over design

Joshua Brewer once quoted:

“Socrates said, “Know thyself.” I say, “Know thy users.”

And guess what? They don’t think like you do.”

You can fuss all you want over the design aspect of your landing pages and funnels. You could spend millions (and we pray that you don’t, at least not yet) on design. Maybe you’d wait for a full year’s worth of back and forth with your designers, marketing team, and stakeholders.

All this fussing over designing, moving buttons and graphics a few millimeters here and there, worrying about background images, won’t bring you any results.

Good design can make serious money, there’s no denying that. However, given the task at hand and the inane urgency of a need for sales funnels that work, you should aim for decent design but maximum results (like leads and sales).

Making your opinions count too much

The big trouble with digital marketing? Everyone has an opinion about it (or aspects of it). Some believe that it’s SEO that we all should be focusing on.

Others swear by content marketing, content curation, and the good old inbound marketing. There are still others who spend years doing link building, guest posting, and what have you.

Having strong opinions on sales funnels can hurt your funnels so much that they are as good as dead.

Don’t waste time with opinions on your sales funnels when data tells you something else entirely. Let your campaigns run for a while, gather relevant data (with continuous testing), and then make decisions. It’s called data-driven decision making.

It’s brutal, but it’s the truth.

Focus on KPIs that really matter

Too many people focus (if at all) on metrics that don’t even matter.

How much traffic do I get to my sales funnels?
What are the number of impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and the Cost per Click (CPC) of your ads?

While each metric has a story to tell, they aren’t the ultimate metrics you should be concerned about. Focusing on metrics that don’t matter puts you on a path that only leads to a dead-end (or is it several dead ends?). These are metrics that don’t do you any good.

The kind of metrics you should really be concerned about — as far as sales funnels are concerned — are

• The CPA (Cost of Acquiring a lead).
• Number of leads at the landing page level
• The conversion rate of your landing pages
• The lead-to-sale ratio (how many of your leads convert into customers?).
• The average sale value, Lifetime Value (LTV) of each customer.

Those are the kind of metrics that give you the brutal truth about how well your sales funnels are performing. Everything else is fancy.

No business runs on fancy, ego-inflating metrics.

Sometimes we don’t realize that we are the main culprits for your dysfunctional or underperforming sales funnels or landing pages. Need a reality check? Get on a scheduled call with us, show us your sales funnels, and we’ll talk about how you can make your sales funnels work the way they should.

The post Sales Funnels: Avoid These Needless Bottlenecks (And Maximize Output) appeared first on Done For You.

Automation is known to evoke several emotions such as curiosity, confusion, and fear – everything at once. There are people who might think that marketing automation is time-consuming, a waste of time and won’t do any good to your business and then, there are people, in awe of marketing automation, will bombard you with numerous examples to prove why it is something that your business needs desperately.

With all these opinions, there are some myths associated with marketing automation as well. Before we go ahead and bust them out, let’s take a moment to learn a little bit about the marketing automation first.

What is marketing automation?

The definition of automation in layman’s terms goes something like this – “the use or introduction of automatic equipment in a manufacturing or other processor facility.”

Now, if we look at automation in marketing then it is basically to automate your marketing and sales engagement for purposes such as:

• Generating more leads
• Increase efficiency
• Grow revenue faster

In fact, it won’t be wrong to state that it is a segment of marketing that focuses on customer management system and works in the best manner to organize, categorize, and gain quality customer interaction.

Applications of marketing automation

Marketing automation is an awesome way to target people based on their behavior, preferences, and previous sales and generate new leads while converting the existing ones. Its applicable uses include social media marketing, email marketing, lead generation, metrics and analytics among others.

As we might have got a better understanding of marketing automation, it’s time to discuss the myths associated with it. Learning about these myths will help you learn better about marketing automation.

Below are the common myths associated with marketing automation. Let’s take a look at them:

Myth #1: Automation is only for email marketing

It is surprising to see that a lot of people, including many digital marketers and business owners, are of the opinion that marketing automation is relevant for just email marketing.

However, one can’t deny that email marketing is definitely a strong medium or channel for automation but you can take it to another level with the appropriate use of social media, landing pages, and lead generation.

Automation is about the engagement of prospect customers from the moment they open their email. You can gauge their behavior and personalize email communication accordingly, make changes in the content, or the way they are being directed after a submission.

 The best example of this comes in the form of the recent rise of chatbot. Chatbots have been used by marketers to:

• Sell products and services
• Make payments simpler and easier
• Gain customer insights
• Personalize marketing strategies
• Increase engagement
• Qualify Leads

So, you can see that there is a lot of automation in marketing than just plain emails. And, this is just one facet of it.

Myth #2: Marketing automation is a ‘set and forget’ approach

It is a popular myth that once you automate certain things on your marketing campaign, you can leave them just the way they are. It is obviously false because every campaign needs to be reviewed and updated from time to time.

You have to make sure that it has not deflected from your business strategy, ultimate goal and vision. One has to take care and intervene to check even the evergreen campaigns and optimize them to increase their effectiveness.

Opting for this ‘set and forget’ approach might just make your campaigns outdated. Today, we live in a world where people want unique and meaningful content. Make sure you don’t miss out on such details and think that automation will do all the work for you. That’s just not how marketing automation works!

There is no denying that just like any other field, marketing automation is also going through an evolution. And, hence it becomes imperative for marketers to forget about the once set and done approach. Rather they must focus on evolving with the ever-evolving marketing automation strategies.

For example, the recent rise of AI and predictive analysis has made it simpler for marketers to gain valuable insights about customers. However, in order to achieve the desired results, the marketers must also evolve and understand the terminology.

Myth #3: Automation is mechanical and impersonal

It is often talked about how marketing automation is kind of robotic and is not at all personal as opposed to what it should be. Now, what we often forget is that it’s not the thing that makes a difference rather it’s being used that changes the game. Likewise, the fault here is not in the process, rather how it is being carried out.

Customers are quite well-aware of their importance and value. That’s why companies don’t mind going an extra mile to allure them. Hence, they are constantly coming up with personalized messages, emails, calls, offers, ads, and various other attempts to allure them. Thus, it is an important way to supplement your content marketing strategy.

Here’s a great example of how big names like Disney are using it to great effect. Just a while back, Disney released the movie Zootopia. They took automation marketing to the next level by creating a character named Judy Hopps bot (which was also the central character in the movie) on Facebook messenger, giving the users a more personal and fun experience.

And, this is just one odd example!

Myth #4: Marketing automation is time-consuming and too expensive

Well, automation marketing does require a monetary contribution from organizations and businesses. To all those, who are debating over this topic must see this as an investment than an additional cost. This being said, the question of money and time largely depends on the size and ultimate goals of a company.

There is a myriad of reasons that speak volumes about the value and ROI marketing automation brings along with it. Just think about the number of new customers and new lead conversions from existing ones are needed for the cost to be returned, and you’ll get your answer.

Myth #5: It is only suitable for big companies

It is probably one of the weirdest misconceptions that marketing automation is only for big industries and large businesses. On the contrary, many small and medium businesses and companies are quite successfully and efficiently using marketing automation to their advantage.

Whether you have a large enterprise or a small startup, you can easily integrate marketing automation into your business and leverage its power to meet your needs. It won’t just magically fix everything but could definitely help you automate tasks and get a better hold of your work.

As a matter of fact, there is a list of amazing tools that can help you in marketing automation, even if you are a budding startup with not a lot of cash to burn.

Over to you!

These myths and misconceptions are just the tips of an iceberg as there are so many others floating out there yet to be debunked. However, with more awareness and knowledge on the internet, people are constantly updating themselves with the right information and are choosing platforms that best meet the requirements of their business.

Do your research and target the audience with the right tactics and make the most of this amazing thing called marketing automation.

By the way f you are looking for an awesome tool that can help you automate your marketing campaigns, you need to check this out!

The post 5 Common Marketing Automation Myths Debunked 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.

To make your business a successful brand, you must focus on establishing and managing better customer relationships. This is the reason why customer relationship management has become the talk of the town. It is almost impossible to run a successful business without having loyal customers. Whether you are a CEO, a digital marketer, or a product manager, it is essential to understand your customers and their journeys with your product or services.

What is customer lifecycle marketing?

Customer lifecycle marketing can be defined as the process of providing personalized customer communication at each stage of a customer’s journey in order to attract, convert and retain them, and eventually develop a better relationship with them. The ultimate intention of this type of marketing is to maximize the overall buying experience of customers while working towards boosting revenue and contributing to the growth of the brand.

To expand your business and improve profitability, one must know about the various lifecycle stages that customers go through and strategize for providing a better customer experience to retain them for as long as possible.

Stages of customer lifecycle marketing

It is interesting to know that when the term “customer lifecycle marketing” was originated, it comprised of only three stages: attract, sell and wow. Today, not only the stages have different names but marketers have also expanded these stages and their definition as per the present needs of the time.

Below are the six main stages of customer lifecycle marketing:

Attraction

It is the first stage where your potential customers find or discover you for the first time. Some of the most common channels or mediums that enable you to be seen are through social media, content marketing and SEO.

Consideration

It is this stage that customers are looking out or considering their options. At this stage, you should focus on influencing them to form a preference of your brand and start considering purchase options. This could be done through welcome campaigns, product descriptions, product comparisons and reviews.

Conversion

Since marketing is all about making people act, it is this stage when you have to literally persuade your customers and encourage them to take the final call i.e. to make the purchase. The two most used methods are product recommendations and call-to-action (CTA).

Retention

At this stage, you have to work hard to win the loyalty of customers and make sure they stay with the brand always. Marketers use special discounts and come up with different loyalty schemes to retain customers.

Advocacy

During advocacy, digital marketers have to come up with processes and methods to make your loyal customers endorse your brand. The most trusted method would be to create campaigns that help you to display user-generated content on social media channels.

Win-back

There are scenarios where customers lapse; it is during this stage that you come up with different ways to get them back.

Join our free workshop Attract. Engage. Profit. to discover how you can attract, engage and profit from new leads by systematically giving them what they desire at every stage of their customer journey.

How to win at customer lifecycle marketing

After learning about customer lifecycle marketing and various stages in the marketing cycle, it’s the right time to know how to win in the marketing lifecycle.

Here are some tips you can use to your advantage to come up with a kickass marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at them:

1. Create multiple channels

The first step should be to provide multiple channels to customers. The more the availability, the happier they are to get options to choose from. Bear in mind that whether customers are engaging with you on an app, a store, or through your official website, make sure they are getting a smooth experience via each and every channel because anything less could lose you a potential customer.

2. Welcome campaigns

Welcome campaigns are an effective marketing strategy to get new customers and thus, boost profitability. Whenever someone (a potential customer) joins your email list, you should send him an automated list of emails as a part of your marketing strategy. It gives you an opportunity to introduce your brand to him and tell him the difference it could make to his life.

Create some messages and emails with content that helps you to build a relationship with them and get them excited about the product and, eventually, make a purchase.

3. Connect on a personal level with customers

These days, people have excellent customer experiences and service, and they have gotten used to it. However, there are so many organizations that haven’t yet mastered this art of going an extra mile to wow their customers.

This can only be done if you know them or have some data that tells you about their preferences. Start focusing on making a personal connection with customers to win their trust.

4. Browse and cart abandonment

Oftentimes, customers put an item in their cart or basket but leave the site without making a purchase. Whenever something like this happens, you get a cart abandonment email. Such information could be helpful to improve your conversion rates by knowing what could be the possible reason for their exit. You can entice the customer to come back and buy by offering a discount or something similar.

5. Add value through call-to-actions

The whole point of creating a marketing strategy is to make the customers act. It depends on your needs that what action you want them to take. Make use of customer lifecycle marketing strategy to let your current customers, prospects and lapsed customers to take a step that is profitable to the brand. Thus, one should never underestimate the power of a well-placed call-to-actions through every phase of the customer journey.

Final thoughts

It could be a bit difficult to understand and get used to the concept of customer lifecycle marketing but it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to be taken care of. More and more brands and organizations are realizing its importance and are coming up with innovative ways to incorporate it into their existing marketing strategy and increase profits.

The post How Customer Lifecycle Marketing Can Boost Profitability appeared first on Done For You.

Go to any e-commerce store and the store owners expect you to take action in this sequence (might not be in this order):

• Visit site
• Browse products
• Make a purchase

Bad news: You’ll make some sales, but it’s not a predictable occurrence and you’d never be able to tell just how much you’d make in sales or revenue in any given month (unless you are Jeff Bezos or his team reading this).

We see e-commerce stores making this mistake over and over where there’s just a store and products available for potential customers to browse.

We get it. You want to make sales. You want your e-commerce store’s revenue to soar. And, you want to profit from your business.

E-commerce store mistakes

You won’t make anything happen with the predictability and sustainability in revenue if you take that “show up expecting to sell” approach.

Here’s a simple fact:

People don’t sit with their credit cards in hand looking for something to buy. Even if they did, it’s not going to be your e-commerce store that they’ll be coming to.

You need a sales funnel for your e-commerce store

But why bother with a funnel for your e-commerce store?

Your customers go through this pattern before they actually buy:

• Visit store
• Browse products
• Read blog
• Follow you on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram
• Wait
• Wait some more – for the right time to buy or until they really have a need.
• One fine day, they buy

You don’t know when they’ll make a purchase and you have simple ways to be ready for them when they are ready. This process, from visiting the store for the first time till the customers buy, is called a pipeline or buyer’s journey or sales funnel.

That’s why you need sales, even for an e-commerce site. Here’s a simple, three-step process to get a sales funnel up and running for your e-commerce store:

Prepare to make an offer

You’ll need to make an offer to your potential customers when they visit your e-commerce store to make a purchase. Your customers need a compelling offer to consider a purchase. They have options so they need to be sure that they are likely to get a bargain (or much more value) if they purchase your products.

When we say “offer,” we don’t always suggest giving away “discounts.” We don’t even suggest coupon codes, deep discounting, or cutting costs as a way to do business or promotions.

But you can consider coupons if you have to.

Other kinds of offers could be a handy guide on how to use your product better, or a guide for your customers so they can solve a particular problem with the help of your product.

Deliver on your promise

For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that you are giving a discount coupon for the visitors of your e-commerce store. Using popups, links, or slide-ins on your e-commerce site, you’ll make that offer.

Some of your potential customers will sign up for these offers through one of the many opt-in forms.

At this point, you’ll need a way to deliver this coupon code to your leads and the easiest way to do that is with email.

Use an autoresponder sequence to send out the coupon immediately on sign up, and you can choose to have a complete onboarding series (email messages) to nurture your e-commerce store leads later on (see below).

Following a lead sign up on your e-commerce site, you can choose to take multiple routes in addition to your autoresponder sequence.

One example of that is a flash sale email sequence.

Follow up and nurture e-commerce store leads

Even after your potential e-commerce store customers express interest by signing up for a coupon code, there’s no guarantee that they’ll buy right away (some will, most won’t).

That’s why you need to grow your email list — a full list of potential customers who signed up for your offers on your e-commerce store. The longer the list, the more predictable the sales figures of your e-commerce business are going to be.

How well you make this happen depends on:

• The way you generate leads
• How your autoresponder sequences are setup and how you do email marketing
• The strategies you use to attract, engage, and profit by using sales funnels, email nurturing sequences, etc.
• How you re-engage non-responsive subscribers, non-responsive previous customers, etc.

What’s your focus on your e-commerce store, right now? To generate sales right away or to generate leads for more predictable sales and revenue?

The post E-commerce Stores: You Can’t Sell By Just Showing Up appeared first on Done For You.

Shrewd entrepreneurs have been using Facebook Ads to market their businesses since it started. Now their attention is turning to Facebook Messenger. Messenger allows you to deploy a Facebook chatbot (or Messenger bot). In this article we are going to discuss why you need to do that if you want to help your business grow.

The Facebook Messenger app has been downloaded over a billion times. Small wonder that businesses are looking at ways to automate Messenger and reach a huge market. Introducing Facebook Messenger chatbots may help business owners realize their dreams sooner than they expected.

Big companies can now meet their clients where they are spending their time, on the messaging apps. A huge number of chatbots are being developed throughout different industries from banking to e-commerce.

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot, or bot, is a piece of software.

It can automate messaging by accessing a file or relational database and using Artificial Intelligence (AI). chatbots can recognize keywords and phrases which trigger a desired response. A well-programmed bot can learn to recognize the spoken word. This allows visitors to engage in a dialogue as if talking to the business owner or receptionist.

The bot can deliver multiple messages similar to a real conversation, and ask questions that walk users step by step to the desired outcome.

Chatbot as a 24/7 assistant

Providing a chatbot service is especially useful for business owners who have limited staff and time. It means that a business can respond to customer inquiries on a 24/7 basis. It allows you to provide customer service, deliver content, gain customers, and much more, in a seamless, automated way.

Two types of chatbots

A. Searches for information from a database

For example, a coffee shop chatbot helps customers buy their coffee. It does not need artificial intelligence. The chatbot gives the customer a choice; Cappuccino, Latte, Mocha—the list includes the variations, for example, large, small, decaffeinated, etc., from an information database.

Depending on the choice, the price is displayed along with payment type and table number. The messenger chatbot may have access to other information, for instance, a previously registered credit card. Job done!

A chatbot streamlines the sales process, the robot searches for information that is pre-registered.

B. Uses artificial intelligence

The second type of messenger chatbot is the one that uses artificial intelligence. Two technologies are merging to aid the development of chatbots. They are the advancements in conversational user interfaces (UIs) and artificial intelligence (AI). This means that users can experience a two-way conversation where one participant is a robot!

Machine learning is at the heart of AI and natural language processing (NLP). This means that the Bot machine recognizes new patterns in the data and stores the pattern. While NLP can pick up speech rhythms and imitate human conversation.

Chatbots vs. email

Why should you use chatbots in your business?

Even though email marketing is still the best way to reach your audience, people are increasingly using messaging applications.

Here are some differences in using chatbot and email:

• Chatbot is a new thing, and it delivers an instant message.
• There is less competition in your Messenger feed compared to your email inbox.
• A message doesn’t interrupt or stay there cluttering your inbox.
• It delivers the right message at the right time for those who want it.

Read this article to learn more about messenger chatbots vs. email marketing.

Chatbots can add value in the following areas

Customer service

Many small businesses want to offer excellent customer service. Many say it is the most important element for their long-term sustainability. This isn’t just a challenge for small businesses. Think about airlines, banks, or phone companies. When customers feel that their needs are being ignored they will switch their loyalties.

With a messenger chatbot, people feel they are talking directly to you and have your attention. When you set up your bot messages, you can ask questions and word responses to appear to users as if you are sitting at your keyboard responding to them directly.

The bot bases the message response on the answers the visitors provide or selections they choose. This makes the entire experience feel personal. The bot helps to build trust with customers as it guides them through a more engaging sales funnel.

It is important for your customer to know they are dealing with a bot. Deceive no one. You can give your bot a name and an image. A friendly bot can provide an excellent user experience.

Chatbots working through messenger services will soon be the preferred way to contact customers. A message on a mobile phone is ‘up close and personal.’ It gets the attention of the customer. Using Facebook Messenger bots is a great way to get and keep your prospect’s attention and turn those prospects into buyers.

Sales and operations

Messenger bots allow you to engage your audience as if you were there with them. You may be hundreds of miles away from your computer. Automatically push new content to your followers by notifying them when you publish new content. If you own a brick and mortar business, you can broadcast special offers to local customers.

Travel agencies can use bots to help customers; book flights, car-hire and hotel reservations. News stations can use bots to send the latest news and weather reports. Retail stores can use bots to take orders, track shipping, handle general customer support, and more.

Automate purchasing and order tracking services. Customers can place orders from food to clothing, or anything in between, automatically. They can receive automated updates about shipping delays, delivery, and more.

Automatically deliver content with a messenger chatbot. Giving away something for free? Set up a messenger bot to send the thank-you message with a download link to the content. And set up questions before delivery, so you can keep your prospect in the sales funnel for longer.

You can book appointments using a messenger chatbot. From Uber pickup to a message, your followers can book appointments with you automatically.

These are just a few of the many ways in which Facebook Messenger bots can reduce your workload and deliver automated, instant responses to your prospects and customers.

Answer an FAQ

Frequently asked questions (FAQ) are easy to handle by the Messenger bot. Business questions are more interested in an outcome than a personal touch. Questions about refunds and terms of use, inquiries about opening times, and more, are answered automatically. If set up properly, these basic support questions can automatically transfer more important issues to a customer support agent.

Build a list to grow an audience

When someone interacts with your Facebook Messenger bot, it automatically adds them to your Messenger mailing list. They can also join by using a ‘send me a message’ button on your website.

Once you have them on your messenger list, a bot can ask for their email address and add prospects to your main autoresponder list. This allows you to contact prospects as often as you want to.

Manage guest invitations to an event

Set up your bots to manage invitations to your next webinar. Set it up and invite people to your event, having them go to your Facebook page and take action which could be to click a link, or make a comment. Once they take action, Messenger will automatically send them a message and add them to your private Messenger list.

Best practices for using Messenger bots

Using Facebook Messenger bots is straightforward. But, there are things you can do to get the best results from your efforts.

1. One goal – one purpose. Each bot you set up should have a specific purpose. It should focus on what your customer needs and how they can benefit from what you are offering them.

2. Consider the buyer’s journey. Regardless of why you’re creating a bot, you need to consider the steps your client takes to reach the outcome you set for them. You may need one bot to handle the entire journey. But, sometimes you may need different bots for different stages of their journey. What are your customers’ needs?

3. Put your bots in your customers’ boots! When setting up your bots, consider what questions customers might ask. What phrases will they use when asking the questions? What information will you need from them to help them? Generate a list of these questions and create or flowchart, or mind map. Better information will help your client make an informed decision.

4. Check your speech pattern. Just because you’re using artificial intelligence, doesn’t mean your messages have to sound like it. Write your messages in the same way you write your other content, so it appears that you are behind the keyboard helping them personally.

5. Keep on engaging. Your messages should be casual and engaging as if you’re talking to a friend or family member. You can use images, gifs, voice messages, emojis and more to make it more realistic. In order for them to stay engaged, give them the opportunity to respond regularly. If you allow your visitors to interact every two to three messages, the conversation will keep flowing.

6. Keep it short. A high percentage of viewers read your messages on their phones so keep your messages short. Ask simple questions that people can respond to with few words or with the click of a button.

7. Test and tweak. A bot is a work in progress. You must watch how customers are using it and adjust as you go. Do your customers want fewer steps, menu options, different layouts, different wording, voice, or tone. Test a few options to see which works best for your users.

8. Provide value. You want to provide as much value as possible when engaging with your audience. Over-deliver by sharing free information and tips, or going the extra mile, for visitors.

9. Respond quickly to live messages. When you have questions that fall outside the automated sequence, or when a bot transfers a customer to speak with you live, answer these as quickly as possible. This helps build trust and long-term relationships with your prospects and customers.

Conclusion and how to build your first chatbot

It’s important to remember that the user experience is the most essential part of using a messenger chatbot. A chatbot is a conversation with your current, and prospective, customers. Try to anticipate all the moves your customers make and the questions they ask. This will ensure a seamless encounter for your visitor.

Facebook Messenger bots give you a range of options. This will enable you to use automated technology to leverage your business. They help you work smarter and get ahead of your competition.

You can get started with Facebook Messenger bots by reading more on the official Messenger bot page or by signing up for a third-party tool. Here are two popular apps that will help you deploy your first bot at a lightning speed: ManyChat and Chatfuel.

The post Grow Your Business Using Messenger Chatbot appeared first on Done For You.

The importance of a well-rounded Martech stack

Today, technology is the pillar of most businesses who operate online. And marketing technology, as part of the whole infrastructure, can make or break your business. Needless to say that software tools and cloud apps that support your marketing processes can cost a lot. So, you need to find the right balance between cost and benefits if you want your online marketing to thrive without breaking the bank.

In today’s post, we will we will pick out 6 out of the hundreds of Martech tools that we at DoneForYou have created with the goal to address real business needs and provide the functionality you need to achieve your marketing goals. All of these tools came as a result of years in business, and are a product of interaction with companies who want to get the most out of each cent they spend on marketing.

What’s best about these tools is that they can get you results even if you hate the word “marketing.” Let’s face it: Not every business owner likes marketing or has time to do so. In most cases, you want to do what you do best; you want to work on your business, not in it. Therefore, with the right marketing stack, you’ll be able to free up resources and, most importantly, save your time so you can focus on business development and serving customers.

Here’s your marketing stack…

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the top six software tools you can start using right now to revitalize your online marketing, regain control of your customer-related processes and give an instant cash injection to your business.

1. Statly: Understand marketing data – Improve sales performance

If you want to succeed in your marketing, you must be able to track and analyze data. See, you may be successful at attracting tons of traffic to your website. But, what if only 2% of those visitors convert, while the rest remain anonymous? Don’t you want a way to identify who they are, track their behavior and keep them coming back? Of course you do.

How are users acting when they visit your website? In today’s competitive times, obtaining meaningful data is an important part of a successful marketing plan.

This is where Statly comes into the picture. As the complete tool that helps you in real-time tracking of users leveraging the sales funnel strategy, it can immensely help your chances of converting traffic into sales. Statly helps you obtain meaningful data so you can make the right business decisions.

But how does Statly work? Statly gives you a comprehensive idea of how your sales funnels are actually converting. It helps you spot opportunities and the parts of your funnels that need to be improved. Watch this video to learn more about what our patent-pending tool can do for your business.

Here are some of the salient features of the tool:

• Real-time website analytics
• Conversion tracking through sales funnels
• Tracking conversion opportunities
• Tracking sales and user behavior on the website

If your site is powered by WordPress, then all you need to do is install the latest version of our plugin to get started with Statly’s advanced analytics and sales funnel tracking.

With Statly in your arsenal, you will be able to better optimize your online sales process and the buyer’s journey, so you entice more web visitors to convert into paying customers. Sitting in front of a load of data wouldn’t do any good, would it? But with Statly by your side, all these previously intimidating numbers will finally make sense.

Click here to sign up for a free Statly trial!

2. Askly: Your customer has a voice; now you can hear it

It might sound like a cliché but it’s 100% true and often overlooked: You need to understand your customer before you actually sell to them.

As Peter Drucker put it, the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

So, why is it that business owners tend to overlook the need for deep understanding of customers’ needs and behavior? It’s because they fall into a common trap; If they’ve been in business longer than a couple of years, they tend to be victims of the illusion that they know their customers.

In reality, most of the time our perceptions go through our subjective cognitive prism that stops us from really understanding the customer persona. This is why you need actual data to form better views and make the right decisions.

How do you acquire real in-depth data about customer needs? By asking customers the right questions at the right time and place.

To help you in this process, Askly provides all the insights and information you need about the customer to target them in the most efficient possible manner.

Watch the video below to see how Askly has helped dozens of businesses get valuable insight on their customers’ needs.

Customer engagement is the name of the game today. In order to engage customers effectively, you need to:

• Figure out their biggest challenges
• Send them the right information
• Get the conversion rate sky high

All of this you can easily get with the help of Askly. By providing valuable insights about the customer, Askly can eventually help you skyrocket sales with no hassles.

Click here to get started with Askly today!

3. Scriptly: Done-for-you content, email swipes and sales scripts

Scriptly is a must-have Martech tool for any online business. Let us back up this bold statement.

If we talk in terms of numbers, content marketing brings three times more leads to outbound marketing, while consuming 62% less money.

These numbers make it quite clear why investing in content marketing is the key. However, this is where a majority of businesses fall flat. They don’t have any idea how to write an engaging copy that will entice the user to enter the sales funnel.

To help you with this, Scriptly provides professionally written scripts that you can start using as they are or customize to better suit your business. These scripts or swipes will help you write high-converting sales copy right away, even if you’ve never written a line of sales copy before.

In fact, you can have complete sales pages created for you with the click of a button. Sound interesting? Watch the video below to see Scriptly in action.

And, it’s not only sales copy you get. As a Scriptly user, you’ll get instant access to:

• Autoresponder engine – This is set of dozens of email sequences that are completely done for you. Anything from affiliate autoresponder sequences to webinar sequences is there.
• Page builder – Create any kind of customizable landing page. All templates are tested and proven to convert to paid traffic.
• Customer avatars – No need for a separate tool to define different customer avatars, to customize your marketing material to address different target groups. We have it all covered in Scriptly.
• VSL creator – Video sales letter can be easily created using Scriptly’s well-structured templates. For every part of the sales letter script you can choose the sales copy that resonates with your audience.
• Webinar creator – Create your next webinar is minutes, not hours, with this unique fill-in-the-blank formula. The webinar creator is a handy tool that will help you get past the writer’s block in an instant.

Sign up here to try Scriptly at zero cost!

All these can play a vital role in creating a win-win content marketing strategy that can fetch you great results. See, with Scriptly you’ve got nearly all of your content needs covered, without having to learn copywriting or spend hundreds of dollars per hour of expert work. Which brings us to our next Martech tool for content, Curately…

4. Curately: Content curation at its best

We explained how Scriptly is a unique tool for your content needs. Although Scriptly covers nearly every aspects of content marketing, it leaves out blog post creation. And that makes sense because you want a dedicated tool to help you create fresh, targeted and optimized content for your blog. That tool is Curately.

Curately makes it easy for you to find and curate content from all over the web. With this awesome tool you’ll never run out of ideas for successful content that keeps your readers hooked.

Here’s how Curately works:

• Find the biggest content publishers on the web from your niche
• Get to know what they are writing and how they are using content
• Build your marketing strategy around those ideas
• Add a personal touch to the content you are going to publish.

And, that’s about it! Did you ever think content marketing could be this easy? Well, Curately makes it easy! Check out the tool now for free or watch the video below for a quick demo.

5. TimeSlots: Simple, centralized scheduling for your e-meetings

So, you devote resources to acquire quality traffic to your website. You have all your funnels in place, you’re tracking them, and you’re investing in paid ads or content creation. You want your qualified web visitors to be able to easily schedule a strategy call with you or book a demo of your product, don’t you?

The best way to actually qualify prospects and turn them into active customers is by providing them an easy way to get on a scheduled a meeting with you. However, for this to be effective it has to be done in a centralized and automated way.

This is where a marketing technology tool, like TimeSlots, becomes a lifesaver. Combining forms and appointments online, TimeSlots lets you qualify the prospects so that you can close them.

Here’s how the scheduling process works:

• Send a link to the prospect
• The prospect books a time
• You choose your availability
• The prospect schedules a meeting with you

Everything gets done with just a single click! What else can you ask for? Click here to see how TimeSlots works and how it can save you the time and frustration that come with other scheduling tools. It also comes with a free trial; sign up here to get it!

6. Axis: Convert customers with email marketing and automation

What is the flagship of outbound online marketing? Email marketing. No business can survive unless it is able to communicate directly with their audience in a way that will constantly bring in new prospects and, ultimately, sales.

You’ve heard it before: Email marketing has one of the highest ROI compared to other online marketing channels, and here are the numbers to prove it.

So, how can a marketing stack be complete without an email marketing tool? Axis helps you contact and convert more customers by building email marketing campaigns that actually work. From sending broadcast messages to deploying triggered autoresponder sequences, all is done for you in Axis.

With this tool you can achieve the ultimate goal of every business: get as many conversions as possible from the prospects that visit your website.

Watch the video below to find out how simple it is to use Axis, and how it stacks up against competitive email marketing tools.

Axis comes with a competitive pricing and a free trial which gives you access to all the tool’s email marketing and automation features.

Some of the benefits you can reap from Convertly include:

• Grow your email marketing list the simple way
• Send one-off broadcasts, i.e. email blasts
• Automate new subscriber onboarding with autoresponder sequences
• Create triggered email sequences that will automate your communications
• Effortlessly stay in touch with your past customers
• Re-engage your list and convert more subscribers into customers.

All these reasons make it a worthy investment for your business. After all, you need to do email marketing if you want to grow your business. There is nothing quite like reaching your customers’ inbox, when we talk about conversions!

How will these marketing tools change YOUR business?

This last tool, Axis, sums up our list of Martech tools that can help you transform your marketing strategies to change the way you run your business.

To recap, we discussed how 6 top-quality tools can help you tackle major aspects of your online marketing. These aspects are:

1. Data and analytics with Statly
2. Customer surveys with Askly
3. Sales copy and sales material creation with Scriptly
4. Content creation with Curately
5. Online scheduling with TimeSlots
6. Email marketing with Axis.

Now, picture this: You have access to all these tools, they are integrated with your site, and are configured and set up live. How would it feel having this online marketing machine streamlined and working for you on autopilot? You can feel safe that you’re doing the best you can to attend to your brand online and grow your business without the hassle of elaborate tools that take up too much energy and time to set up.

Although they are simple to use and fast to set up, you might feel like you don’t want to go through the onboarding process but want a done-for-you solution instead.

If this is the case, our experts at Done For You Marketing can do the heavy lifting and set you up with your new marketing stack in zero time. Our team will make sure that your accounts are configured properly and that all the individual tools are integrated with your site and working as they ought to.

From sales page creation to complete email marketing automation, we are here to help you get started fast. Click here to schedule a strategy call with us, so you can start growing your business right away.

The post 6 Marketing Tools That Will Change Your Business 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.

You’ll get approvals, licenses, and necessary permits. You’ll put in a huge corpus of cash as capital and you’ll borrow some more funds from leading banks and other corporations to start your venture. Then, you’ll then put all kinds of teams in place — for research & development; design; manufacturing plants; human resources and so much more.

At every step of the way, you’ll need help when you launch a major corporation – incorporation, taxes, manufacturing setup, research, design, etc.

There are processes and there are laws. There are certain ways to do things (depending on where in the world you are located). Even within the United States, each state has its own laws for business incorporation, taxation, labor laws, and others.

That’s how complicated it gets and yes, it’s serious business.

Underperforming funnels and campaigns

Doing digital marketing — for a completely online business or for a traditional business going online — is absolutely anyone’s game. There are hundreds of theories, thousands of different ways to achieve a singular goal, and varying levels of skill sets (depending on who you hire).

No matter how you are going to get to digital marketing in general, or your paid advertising campaigns or funnels specifically, you are bound to do those based on what you think, know, feel, or the advice you get. While not all of that is bad, there are a few myths that result in ineffective funnels and campaigns that bleed money.

Here are some of the mistakes that lead to underperforming funnels and campaigns.

Overdoing design

Countless funnels sit half-finished and many funnels are underperforming because of over-insistence on design. Looks might matter but what most people forget is that looks only matter up to a certain point.

Too many businesses fuss, waste time, and raise opportunity cost worrying so much about whether or not this ad looks pretty, or whether the landing page was designed well that they freeze to the point that they don’t even launch campaigns.

You need good design coupled with great copy to make your campaigns work. Overdoing it and wasting too much time, however, makes it even harder than it should be for you.

Too many cooks

The bigger the businesses the more people you see getting involved in a campaign and the more the chances are that the campaign won’t ever work as well as it could.

Too many people and too many ideas can only choke the progress of a campaign. While this is a problem everywhere, it takes on a whole new avatar when too many people become part of a digital marketing campaign. We don’t know what it’s about online marketing, but everyone seems to be an expert.

Even if people have a false sense of expertise, their suggestions (when implemented) can be disastrous for your campaigns.

Solution? Only work with proven experts.

Marketing stack? Anything goes

The marketing stack — or the set of tools you use — can’t be taken for granted. Some of the best businesses depend on tools only after using them, working with them, and testing them out. It’s, at best, a trial and error method. A chosen stack of tools (or a combination of tools) is unique for each business.

Some SaaS marketing tools have certain features that others don’t. Some will work well for your business and others won’t. A few tools — despite the hype — aren’t even good enough to start with.

You’ll arrive at the right marketing stack only after experimentation. Use first and decide later.

Build funnels and it’s over

Too many business owners and marketers tend to think that once a working sales funnel is up and running, the job is done.

In fact, work just begins at that stage. Funnels don’t always work the way they were designed to.

You might find out that your newly-built sales funnels are underperforming. Plus, there are a hundred variables that you’d need to look into to ensure smooth running sales funnels and ad campaigns.

• Ad campaigns themselves are never static. A/B testing and optimization is continuous work (even if you want to do it weekly). Multiply testing and optimization with the number of campaigns you run and you can very well imagine why it’s full-time agency work.
• With Facebook Ads, there’s the real problem of “frequency.” High frequency of ads would mean that way too many people are looking at your ad a lot more frequently. You will have embarked on Google Adwords Ad testing too. Plus, there’s the ongoing testing of ads on all traffic sources.
• Regarding your email marketing sequences or autoresponders, is the first email message going out immediately, consistently, and fast enough? If not, you’d have to work out the kinks either in your funnel, your landing page, or the email marketing provider itself.

Your funnels can never be “set it up and forget.” Ever.

How do your funnels look? Want to share them with us?

The post Top 4 Mistakes That Lead To Underperforming Funnels And Campaigns appeared first on Done For You.

That’s not the case now. Today is the best time to be in business (unless you want to focus on an offline retail business).

Have an idea? Launch a website!

Need to validate an idea and check whether your market really needs what you have to provide? Spend $50 on Google or Facebook ad campaigns and you can find out.

Ready to start serving customers? Switch that digital marketing engine on and let it do its magic.

We know it’s easier said than done effectively. To make digital marketing work in your favor, here are some technologies available today that you should be using for your business.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

No, artificial intelligence and machine learning are not about esoteric topics like Big Data. Also, these aren’t just for the biggies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

One look at Product Hunt and you’ll see that there are many startups today providing you with the tools, applications, and everything else you need to make good use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning.

With Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, for instance, both the advertising platforms have artificial intelligence and machine learning incorporated into their advertising system to help identify the objectives of your campaign, to enable you to find the exact audience you seek, to help you focus on the right advertising metrics, and more.

Google officially launched RankBrain to make technology rank websites along with its existing algorithm.

You don’t have to become a scientist; you just have to acknowledge that good things are happening while you work hard to launch your campaigns.

Exit Intent, Geo-targeting, and Referral Detection

Think lead generation and you can’t help but think of pop-ups and slide-ins. Usage of these are much debated in marketing circles, there are absolutely a few things you shouldn’t ever do such as confirmshaming.

Yet, popups just work.

What’s even better than regular popups and slide-ins, you ask?

It’s called exit intent technology.

Popups are deployed when visitors to your website are about to leave your site. Further, other intelligent technologies are also used to help detect where your visitors come from and change the messaging accordingly.

Or there’s referral detection where systems detect the exact site that referred this visitor to your website and then messages are changed to reflect that.

Modern-day tools that help you create popups, slide-ins, on-click popups, full-page gating come with these technologies enabled. You just have to start using them and learn to use these tools better.

Retargeting

Nothing can make a difference to your paid campaigns as well as retargeting can. Do it right and you’ll surprise your competition with your lowest possible spending to get maximum results. Retargeting, despite being so effective, is rarely used. If and when it’s used, it’s never used up to its full potential.

With retargeting, you are targeting those who already visited your website (or landing pages or those who watched a video or maybe those who attended an online/offline event) with hyper-targeting campaigns specific to these visitors. These result in higher conversions at much lower costs.

Retargeting is now getting better. You now have access to cross-platform retargeting, device-specific retargeting, email retargeting, and so much more.

Marketing Automation

It’s been a while since marketing automation has been around. While most marketers and businesses are taking to it in a big way, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. Marketing automation incorporates various technologies to make it possible to automate or at least semi-automate various marketing workflows for your business.

Got a new lead? Automatic emails can be sent out, or a complete customer onboarding sequence can be launched to nurture leads.

Shopping cart abandoned? A completely automated series of emails can go out there to nudge the potential customer who didn’t finish the transaction.

Need to send reminders to let users know that they need to upgrade and that their free trial is over? Marketing automation comes to the rescue.

Marketing Stack and Smart Integrations

As a business investing in digital marketing, you are likely to work with a marketing stack (a set of marketing tools) that works for your business. Arriving at the best marketing stack is trial and error anyway.

Let’s just assume that you do have a set of marketing tools to work with.

You’d then need a way to make all these various tools work together (and also with the completely independent and third-party entities such as Facebook and Google, for instance).

Here are a few (but varying) kinds of integrations you’ll need, for instance:

Facebook Lead Ads → CRM + Email Service Provider
Regular paid traffic sources → landing pages → Email Service Provider → CRM
Organic traffic → landing pages → Email Service Provider → CRM
Popups, Opt-in forms, Slide-ins → Email Service Provider → CRM

Each of these entities work different. Your email service provider and CRM will be central to complete marketing stack but you’ll have to figure out a way to connect them all together and make it work.

What do you think of technology making its way into your everyday marketing efforts? Which of these technologies have you already embraced?

The post Profit-Making Technologies You Can’t Ignore As A Business appeared first on Done For You.

“Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.” – William Bernbach

Advertising a SaaS company, as easy as it might sound to some marketers, is a hugely cumbersome process. To make advertising work for your business you need to take care of so many things; Best practices in your industry, branding, media buying, action plans, campaign monitoring, ROI calculation and what not.

The toughest part is that you need to keep coming up with new, creative ideas on a constant basis to be on top of the changing market trends. In fact, according to the 2016 Digital Trends Report by Adobe – “more than 76% of the people believe that marketing has changed more in the past couple of years than it did over the previous fifty.”

With so much volatility floating around, it becomes inevitable for a SaaS business to make mistakes while planning or executing an advertising campaign.

If you are running a SaaS business, you need to avoid certain basic advertising mistakes that are typical to tech companies. What are those mistakes, and how do you avoid them?

Going with the ‘one size fits all’ approach

Multiple marketing channels plus same ad-campaign equals failure! That’s the story of almost every marketer’s life.

When it comes to advertising a SaaS business across different channels, the ‘one size fits all’ approach won’t work. That is because –and that’s a basic marketing principle– the advertising message needs to be adapted to serve different mediums.

In other words, you need to optimized your SaaS advertising strategies to fit:

• the typical features of each marketing channel
• the profile of the typical customers on each channel

If your marketing strategy worked on one platform it does not mean it will have the same impact on other mediums as well.

Ignoring familiarity bias

It makes sense for a SaaS business to look at the returns it gets from the money it spends on advertising.

Now, there are two ways to look at it – returns in the short run and returns in the longer run.

Some SaaS businesses fall into the trap of looking at the immediate returns, therefore, they don’t focus on creating campaigns that will either expand brand awareness or take the sales cycle into account.

What this means is that not every advertising campaign needs to have immediate conversions as a goal. Sometimes you want to have more people notice your brand, and create interest and curiosity. Other times, you do want prospects to convert, but you have to acknowledge the fact that people don’t always purchase a SaaS plan immediately; it might take them weeks or months to decide.

In order to get the maximum returns from each marketing campaign, you need to clarify your goals and expected results. If you are a SaaS startup, then you might want to create a strategic plan to spread the word about your brand. After building awareness about your business and getting the first sign-ups and paying customers, then you can use the power of familiarity bias to convert more customers through your SaaS campaigns.

In psychology, familiarity bias (heuristics) refers to the phenomenon where people opt for the more familiar options, even though these often result in less favorable outcomes than available alternatives.

Relying too much on organic traffic

Paid marketing has become the go-to option for growth marketers. With so many SaaS startups seeing the light of day, each founder wants a slice of the user base pie as quickly as possible to validate the product/market fit.

With competition soaring high in SaaS industry, you need to blend organic efforts with paid marketing in order to survive. This is quite evident from the statistics as well – nearly 70% of the CMOs suggest that they are ready to increase their spending on digital advertising. (Gartner)

If you were thinking about mastering only the organic part and leaving paid advertising for later, then it is time to change your SaaS marketing strategy.

Not leveraging the power of social proof

In an online world marred by hackers and spammers, social proof could be the savior for your business.

Close to one-third of people online look for user reviews before making a purchase. This clearly puts the value of user-generated content into the limelight.

Therefore, the advertising strategy for your SaaS company shouldn’t be limited to the content YOU create; you should have a plan for leveraging user-generated content as well.

Trust plays a massive role in getting consumers to buy a SaaS product, or any product whatsoever. To gain trust you need to be able to generate as many genuine reviews as possible for your brand.

Ask satisfied customers for a review, and share that review on your website at a prominent place. Maybe some customers are willing to shoot a quick video review? That would be even better, because you could post that review on your YouTube channel and on Facebook.

Overlooking customer retention

The probability of a reselling to an existing customer is 60-70% higher than roping in a new customer. As a matter of fact, studies reveal that 80% of your future profit will be generated from 20% of your existing customers.

Still, a lot of SaaS businesses tend to make the mistake of neglecting customers while they’re trying too hard to acquire new ones.

To reduce churn rate, you need to keep users involved. Rather than just building all your marketing campaigns around new customers, planning your advertising efforts in a way that they attend to existing customers as well must be on your radar.

Announcements, case studies, new features, benefits of your SaaS tool are some examples of content you can build to entice existing users to stick around. SaaS users want to see that you are actively improving your product, and that your customer support team is responding fast to inquiries.

Not protecting your marketing budget

Click fraud and ad fraud have become a massive problem, and many businesses are still unaware of how this problem can affect their advertising campaigns.

What click fraud means is that the traffic you’re getting from your campaign might not be real. This can ruin your marketing campaign and drain your budget completely. Read this article we wrote about sources of targeted traffic; it will help you get answers as to what you need to know when buying traffic.

To ensure success of your SaaS advertising efforts, you need to be cautious and smart about click fraud. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you stay protected against click fraud; and the best way to stay safe is to advertise through safe media like Facebook and Google.

As they say: prevention is better than cure. Invest in reliable traffic sources from the get-go to achieve the best ROI from your marketing.

Not creating a sales funnel

Not having a sales funnel is one of the top mistakes that SaaS businesses tend to make. Marketing is all about strategizing for the long-term and acting step by step to achieve your goals.

This is where the concept of sales funnels comes into the picture. By using a sequential approach to creating an orchestrated inflow of customers, who are then nurtured throughout their buyer’s journey, you can eventually succeed in your marketing goals.

Harmonizing your CTAs, connecting them to your content and then finally leveraging them to entice the buyer into your sales funnel can help your business grow at a much faster speed.

So, leverage the power of a sales funnel in order to make your marketing strategies work.

Conclusion

We have listed the top mistakes that marketers and businesses are making when promoting their SaaS services.

Advertising to grow your user base is all about amalgamating different tactics and sewing them together in one thread to drive sign-ups.

It is okay to make mistakes, but you need to learn from them and never repeat them. When advertising your SaaS company you also need to learn from the mistakes that others are making.

Need help with creating an effective inbound strategy for your SaaS business? Here at DoneForYou.com, we have helped dozens of cloud-based companies, software startups and SaaS platforms to market to their target audience, acquire more leads and grow their business. How do we do that? By devising and building customized sales funnels that work! Download our Funnel Factor report to learn more, or schedule a free strategy session call to discuss your needs with one of our marketing and sales experts.

The post Advertising Mistakes SaaS Companies Make All Too Often 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.

Now in this article, we want to get deeper into some technical aspects of creating an optimized landing page.

Some businesses are in a rush to launch paid campaigns or start sending some traffic to landing pages to start generating leads. Other businesses tend to build complicated funnels trying to reach perfection before they start driving traffic to the top of the funnel.

The palpable excitement and rush are understandable. The tendency for perfection as well. But without due diligence and a well-thought-out plan, you are likely yo end up wasting time and money.

While there are a lot of success factors that are out of your control when launching a campaign, it’s inexcusable to be clumsy with the essential aspects of a landing page that you are indeed control of.

To help you build a solid foundation for a successful lead generation campaign, and before you start changing creatives, optimizing, and engaging in on-going split testing), here’s a simple landing page checklist.

Unmissable landing page elements

Be sure to have some of those design best practices, conversion optimization hacks, and insert appropriate landing page elements:

• Use a singular form and a button (one Call to Action per page)
• Have as few form fields as possible.
• Be sure to have a clear and large headline. Learn more about writing headlines that work.
• If possible, put some real faces on the landing page (like team photos, headshots of the founding members, images of previous customers), etc.
• Add social proof in the form of client logos or testimonials or both.
• Ensure that your landing page is mobile responsive (there’s just no excuse for leaving this one out).

Collect and insert tracking tags and scripts

Depending on the traffic source, there are various tracking tags or scripts that you need to inject into your landing page code to facilitate website tracking. Website tracking, by the way, can help you monitor the behavior of the visitors to your site.

Let’s say you choose to run Facebook ads. You’ll need the base Facebook Pixel code to go on every page that visitors are likely to visit. Such pages are: the main landing page, the form lightbox modal, the thank-you page, and interstitial pages if any.

Then, you’ll have to add the “event” code of the Facebook Pixel to your “thank you” page or the page that shows up after leads sign up. this way you’ll be able to track successful conversions (opt-ins in this example).

If you choose to use Google Adwords, you’ll need to insert the Google remarketing tag. With remarketing,  you are able to run campaigns that target people who have already visited your site at least once.

Are you using third-party services such as Adroll or Perfect Audience for retargeting? You’ll then have to add these tracking pixels to your landing page code too, as advised.

For Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, and for third-party services like Adroll, you’d also want to attribute a numerical value to your leads and sales “event codes” so that you have an accurate record of leads and sales.

It also makes sense to add Google Analytics — while using UTM tracking — to track each of your landing pages so you have a holistic view of traffic being sent to your landing pages.

One URL, two versions

If you had only one landing page for your campaign, and let’s say you got a 20% conversion rate at the landing page level, how would you know this is the best result you can get? You couldn’t know.

That’s precisely why you need to run split tests for your landing pages. By doing A/B testing or split testing, you can test and compare two variations of the same page.

Every landing page will have a single URL but this URL will show different content to each visitor at random. For example, 50% of the visitors will see “CTA A” and the rest will see “CTA B.” Then you will be able to tell which CTA (and landing page variation) performed better in terms of conversion.  This is can be accomplished with A/B testing.

Start by testing a single element of your landing page (such as the headline, the CTA button, or the CTA button color, or a background image).

Gather data and make an informed decision to continue with the champion while discarding the losing versions.

Connect with your email service provider

One of the most important aspects of your sales funnels is the series of autoresponders that you’ll send out to new subscribers or segments of your email list.

Your autoresponders trigger immediately after leads sign up, and they continue to nurture your new subscribers with automated messages, like a simple welcome email, a strategic autoresponder created for sales, or a full-fledged customer onboarding series.

To set up and connect your landing pages with your email marketing platform you can either use some integration plugin or a piece of code that the platform will provide. This is a case-based scenario and the difficulty of implementing such an integration depends on the technology you choose. So please think about this factor before you decide on the exact software you will use for building landing pages and sending marketing emails.

Once you connect, sign up on your own landing page to test if everything fires up alright and that if you are receiving your email messages, notifications, etc.

Trace the path from traffic source to email

You’d want a complete picture of everything that happens in your sales funnel for every user that has your cookie in their browser. What you want to track is every aspect of the user behavior throughout their journey from the source of the click all the way to your email autoresponder, and the users’ reactions to your messages.

For instance, after a click on the ad, you’d want to check whether or not your Google Audiences is building up. You’d also want to see if your Facebook Pixel is firing correctly and is recording conversions for your Facebook and Instagram ads.

Is your landing page loading fast enough? Are all the interstitial pages and the final thank you page loading? Are your email marketing workflows triggering correctly?

Get to active optimization, after the campaign goes live

Soon after your campaign launches, you’ll start getting all sorts of feedback. Your landing pages might seem to not convert at all. Is it because have missed one of the steps on this landing page checklist? Revisit the tips we listed in this post, go right into your setup, deep dive, and fix what’s not properly configured.

You’d want to tweak headlines, copy, CTA button copy, replace images, add tracking codes or maybe work on the mobile version of your landing page.

If one of the steps on the landing page checklist is missing altogether, it is advised that you stop your campaigns and go build what’s not there.

If everything is working fine, gather enough data to fine-tune your campaigns; Get busy with optimizing, A/B testing, and using the numbers you have to optimize every stage of your sales funnel.

Taking care of these steps will ensure that you don’t miss out on any of the necessary due diligence.

How are your campaigns performing? If you’d like to talk to us about your funnels, landing pages, marketing campaigns or strategy, get on a strategy call with us. We’ll be happy to discuss how we can put together a Done For You Lead Generation System for you or help deploy a high-converting Done For You Sales Funnel.

The post Landing Page Checklist: Get Your Landing Pages Ready For Lead Generation appeared first on Done For You.

There’s no doubt about a few things that you’ll absolutely need if you are looking to generate leads and make sales (regardless of how you drive traffic to your funnels):

• You’ll need to make an offer — an enticing, exciting, valuable, relevant, and timely offer that makes your website visitors or landing page visitors want to sign up right away. Read up on our Funnel Factor report to get up to speed on funnels.
• You’ll need landing pages and funnels to make it all work. Aim for Sales Funnels Simplicity. Generically sending traffic to your website is a sin. Don’t ever get caught doing that.
• You’ll need an email service provider to help with lead magnet or offer delivery and effective, highly-engaging lead nurturing. Then, there’s the art of creating autoresponders and drip emails that work magic. Catch up with our Email marketing handbook which lays out exactly how to do this.
• Some degree of marketing automation is highly recommended.
• There are hundreds of tools and services to help you build sales funnels, email autoresponders, regular sales pages, video sales letters, marketing automation, and also for analytics. You’ll have to make choices fast and run with it (you can change anything you want later).

With that out of the way, let’s look at a few sales funnels related questions you should stop asking forever after reading this article:

Why do we need a sales funnel?

If you have a business, you need a sales funnel.

Sales funnels are the digital equivalent of everything that happens the moment a customer walks into your physical store (if you had one) and then leaves (hopefully, after purchasing).

For a physical retail store, it’s not as straightforward as one would think, is it?

Say hello to customer behavior and a mind-boggling array of possibilities when it comes to sales attribution.

Most people search, check you out on social media, read reviews — all before even entering the store.

Not all customers who enter a store buy right away — some come in just to “look around” and others are “accompanying friends and family.”

Others come in but just leave. A few others arrive and ask questions (they already did some research online) and they leave making mental notes (consciously and subconsciously) on what they’d like to buy.

Physical retail store owners would do well to collect all the information and data about all customers arriving. Doing so may enable some sort of follow up to be get back the customers who left without buying (most retailers don’t do this).

At least digitally, say with an ecommerce store, sales funnels can do all of the above, almost automatically, without you ever lifting a finger.

You have different categories: visitors, subscribers or leads, customers, and repeat customers. Then, you can also segment each of those categories based on what they are most interested in, types of products they like, and also based on specific problems they want solutions for.

Only well-crafted, intelligent, and optimized sales funnels can do this.

What’s a well-crafted, intelligent, and optimized sales funnel?

There are sales funnels and then there are sales funnels that work.

Sales funnels that truly work well don’t happen because of pure luck or because a genius marketer was behind it.

The best sales funnels are simple. Plus, the reason why they work is because a lot of work goes into the funnel — enticing offers made to targeted audiences, simplistic design, and a marketing approach that puts the customer first (and not the business).

Well-crafted, intelligent and optimized sales funnels are all that, plus they have a certain degree of marketing automation built-in. These sales funnels also make use of proper segmentation practices, split testing various elements of the funnels, and are almost always personalized.

How do you build the perfect sales funnel?

You have a few options to build a great sales funnel:

1. Build the sales funnels yourself and take the DIY sales funnel approach, with the help of tools available today.
2. Have an expert build your sales funnels, customized specifically for your business.
   • Hire an in-house team of various talents, including copywriters, designers, and marketers to build sales funnels for your business.
   • Work with an accomplished agency that specializes in making sales funnels to save on costs otherwise incurred with an in-house team.
   • Hire an assortment of freelancers, consultants, and remote staff to help build your sales funnels.

In-house teams are hard to build. If you do manage to do that, it’s ridiculously expensive to keep them all under one-roof. Unless you have deep pockets to pay for all this, it’s not an option.

Finding freelancers and consultants is a trial-and-error approach which demands time, investments, and are mostly a hit-or-miss arrangement.

Agencies, like DoneForYou, on the other hand, are a much better choice since they come with experience and they can hit the ground running.

What are the essential components of a sales funnel?

Sales funnels always start with an aggregate of your traffic sources. You could drive traffic using SEO (includes general SEO as well as guest blogging), advertising, social media, etc.

All that traffic normally points to landing pages (single or multi-page setup) to gather leads for an offer you’ll make. Landing pages are singularly-focused, highly-targeted, and distraction-free web pages with only one goal: to generate leads.

After potential visitors sign up as leads on your landing page(s), email autoresponders are triggered to welcome them or to deliver what you promised as an offer (an eBook, details about your product, a free course, etc.).

Following that first email, you’ll send out more emails — one after the other — with more information exclusively created for each of these leads (this is called “lead nurturing”).

It’s beacause of these emails that sales finally happen.

Is my sales funnel is the best it can be?

Let’s say about 1,000 visitors got to your page from a particular traffic source. About 10% of those people converted. This got you 100 leads.

Now, is 100 leads the best your sales funnels can do? No, because it can do more.

How would you know? You’ll know when you test out a few elements or components of the sales funnel. For instance, you could test:

• The Ad copy or the angles you take for ads (If you use ads as your traffic source)
• Ad images (If you use Facebook ads or Google Display Network ads as traffic sources)
• Your offers (Is 20% better than 30%? — don’t just assume)
• Landing page headlines
• Landing page Calls to Action
• Email autoresponder subject lines

Split-testing opens up the gates of opportunity, and market-driven insights allow you to make necessary changes and give your potential customers exactly what they want.

When do sales funnels fail?

Sales funnels often fail. Just because you took the trouble to setup a sales funnel doesn’t automatically guarantee success. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the failure of sales funnels, but here are a few basic ones:

• When your offer isn’t tempting enough
• The entire focus of the funnel is on “getting leads and sales” and not solving the real problem your customers have
• When you overdo sales pitches, cross-sells, and upsells — like making pitches at every stage of the funnel such as Interstitial pages, thank you pages
• Forgetting that it’s people that you are selling to
• Abusing the power of email autoresponders and trying to sell within every single email that goes out
• Ignoring the importance of split-testing all aspects of your sales funnels.
• Trying to “fix and forget” ad campaigns, sales funnels, marketing automation, or your email marketing setup

What other questions do you have for us on sales funnels? Feel free to ask us anytime!

The post 6 Reasons Why You’re Missing Out If You Don’t Have A Sales Funnel appeared first on Done For You.

When you get down to doing it, however, it can literally break your back, make your mind numb, and it can make you run in circles.

Add information overdose to this and soon you have every reason in the world to quit thinking about digital marketing.

But you can’t afford to quit. Can you? No. The answer is no.

Google search accounts for 1.2 trillion monthly searches worldwide. Your customers are all on Facebook (over 2 billion of them in total, and counting) engaging, sharing, commenting, or maybe silently checking their newsfeeds while they are on mobile (at least 80% of Facebook users are on mobile).

We see many individuals and small business owners bogged for a variety of reasons: ranging from laziness all the way to information overwhelm or just a general breakdown of the ability to make decisions and take action.

Information overload is real. It does take a lot of research to get effective digital marketing done. Also, it takes a long time to get all the moving parts working to the point where you start seeing results.

All of this is understandable.

However, information overload and distractions shouldn’t stop you from focusing on the digital marketing actions that are important and meaningful for your business.

There are many reasons why you may consider quitting, when it comes to digital marketing. Here are some of the most common excuses people make, and the reasons they are wrong.

Digital Marketing Channels? Daunting!

There are distinct channels, techniques, tactics, strategies that make digital marketing work for your business. There’s no one channel that trumps the other. To promote your brand, website, products, and services — you could possibly take an endless array of paths to reach the same goals.

The digital marketing channels you pick, the efforts you put in, and the exact pathways you’d take depend a lot on the type of business you run, your goals, resource (or lack of any), budgets (or the lack of it), and so much more.

None of that means that digital marketing has to be daunting or “undoable”.

Pick any traditional business (like retail) and you’ll end up doing more in a traditional business than an online business.

The web doesn’t make things easier, just gives a smarter way.

SEO is dead

You always hear one think or another that goes something like this: “SEO is dead.”

It’s not; it’s just changing. Everyday. For the better.

Google will keep making new updates only to make the web a better place and to reward publishers and businesses who take the trouble to create content that adds real value.

There are only a few legitimate ways to make SEO work for your business:

• Focus on exceptional content, all the time, every time. Insert a keyword or two but don’t overdo it and don’t write for search engines. Write for people instead.
• Don’t try to get links. Instead, earn those links. If you follow the previous point regularly, you’ll soon get there. You can also earn links legitimately by offering to do high-quality guest posting.
• Content curation is an exceptional way to earn links too. Make that a part of your content marketing strategy using easy to use tools like Curately.

Facebook is Evil; Google Adwords is expensive

Facebook won’t be the same anymore. Yes, Google Adwords is expensive if you don’t know what you are doing.

None of these statements should affect the work you’d need to put in, each day.

Facebook will fight “the fight” about data privacy laws and will release new features to make advertising well worth each advertising dollar spent while still respecting users’ privacy.

As more advertisers take to paid advertising on Google, a few keywords will always be more expensive than others.

When you manage your paid advertising properly (and by doing all the right things), the cost per acquisition (CPA) of your ads will come down.

You’ll spend less than your competition does and you’ll be able to get a return on your investment.

Funnels will take care of themselves

We said this before, and it bears repeating: Funnels are not “set it and forget it” miracles. They don’t work on their own without any work at all. For funnels to work, you’ll need continuous optimization and A/B testing.

You need to work on your funnels before your funnels work for you. Do the work now and then allow your sales funnels work miracles on autopilot.

Sales funnels are also not a choice; they are a mandate. They are necessary. Your business doesn’t exist if they don’t.

Marketing automation is hard

You might not be able to execute the level of automation that Amazon does but you can emulate their results, on a smaller scale, without the huge budget they expend.

You can choose a marketing stack that helps you accomplish certain levels of automation or you can have marketing automation experts or funnel specialists to build, manage, and make marketing automation work for your business.

Anything of the above things that you spend time worrying about needlessly takes time away from what you should be doing instead.

What’s stopping you from proper digital marketing execution? If you’d like to get on a scheduled strategy call, we’ll be happy to talk.

The post Digital Marketing: Don’t Let Any Of These Stop You 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.