Copywriting Archives - Done For You

Mastering the OpenAI Playground: Tips for Effective AI Experimentation

brittany@doneforyou.com — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:32:59 +0000

Mastering the OpenAI Playground: Tips and Best Practices

The OpenAI Playground lets users experiment with AI models like GPT-4. This guide covers its features, usage tips, and best practices.

Key Takeaways

The OpenAI Playground provides a user-friendly interface for exploring and customizing various AI models, making it suitable for both novices and experts in AI.
Key features such as interactive chat, model selection, and custom system prompts enable users to enhance engagement and tailor AI outputs for specific tasks.
By automating content generation and coding tasks, the OpenAI Playground significantly boosts efficiency and reduces costs for businesses, facilitating more strategic initiatives.

Understanding OpenAI Playground

The OpenAI Playground is a platform designed for experimenting with various AI models, providing advanced features to specify output formats and test different applications. Unlike traditional AI tools, OpenAI’s playground offers a comprehensive environment where users can interact with the latest versions of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and even older models like GPT-3. This makes it an indispensable resource for both novices and experts in AI exploration, allowing them to delve deeper into the functionalities of OpenAI’s models.

One of the standout features of the OpenAI Playground is its user-friendly interface, which facilitates quick iteration and immediate feedback on changes. This ease of use makes it accessible to a wide range of users, from developers and AI researchers to business professionals looking to enhance their operations through AI. The platform supports a variety of applications, including content generation, translation, and coding, making it a versatile tool for numerous tasks.

Users can write prompts and make updates in the OpenAI Playground’s intuitive interface, enabling seamless experimentation. Whether you’re looking to create marketing content, develop new software, or simply explore the capabilities of AI, the Playground provides the tools you need to innovate and succeed.

Differences Between ChatGPT and OpenAI Playground

While both ChatGPT and the OpenAI Playground are powerful AI tools, they cater to different user needs and offer distinct functionalities. ChatGPT is tailored for casual users who seek interactive conversations with AI, providing a more straightforward and user-friendly experience. On the other hand, OpenAI Playground is aimed at developers and researchers who require a more complex interface designed for extensive customization and experimentation.

One of the key differences lies in the flexibility and customization capabilities. ChatGPT operates within stricter parameters to ensure usability and safety, making it less flexible compared to the Playground. The OpenAI Playground allows users to fine-tune models and customize settings, offering a broader range of machine learning models to choose from. This makes it an ideal platform for users who need to experiment with different model parameters and settings to achieve specific outcomes.

In summary, while ChatGPT is perfect for everyday conversational tasks, the OpenAI Playground is the go-to platform for those who need to dive deeper into AI capabilities and customize their interactions extensively. Understanding these differences helps users choose the appropriate tool, maximizing productivity and creativity with AI.

Getting Started with OpenAI Playground

Accessing the OpenAI Playground is straightforward and user-friendly. Simply visit the website platform.openai.com and log in using your Google account or sign up for a new account if you’re a first-time user. After logging in, you can start testing prompts. This will allow you to explore the various AI models that are available. Remember, to fully utilize the Playground’s capabilities, you’ll need an OpenAI API key, which grants you access to the platform’s advanced features.

The initial setup process is designed to be as smooth as possible, allowing you to dive right into experimenting with OpenAI’s models. Start by entering sample prompts and observing how the models respond, which will give you a feel for the platform’s capabilities and potential applications.

This hands-on approach not only enhances your understanding of the Playground but also sparks creativity as you discover new ways to leverage AI in your projects.

Key Features of OpenAI Playground

The OpenAI Playground is packed with features that make it a powerful tool for AI experimentation and content creation. Key features include interactive chat, model selection, and custom system prompts, each designed to enhance user engagement and productivity.

Let’s delve into these features to understand how they can be leveraged to achieve specific tasks and optimize your AI interactions.

Interactive Chat

The interactive chat feature in OpenAI Playground is designed to generate natural language responses that closely mimic human conversation. This feature allows users to input queries and receive coherent, contextually relevant responses, making it an invaluable tool for exploring the capabilities of AI. Whether you’re looking to develop a chatbot, create engaging content, or simply experiment with different conversational scenarios, the interactive chat offers a dynamic and responsive interface for your needs.

By logging into the platform, users can start experimenting with the chat feature, allowing for real-time feedback and adjustments. This immediate response capability not only enhances user engagement but also provides a practical example to test and refine prompts for various applications.

Whether you’re a developer fine-tuning a chatbot or a content creator crafting compelling narratives, the interactive chat in OpenAI Playground is a versatile tool that can significantly boost your productivity and creativity.

Model Selection

Model selection is a crucial feature of the OpenAI Playground, offering users the ability to choose from various GPT models tailored to specific tasks. The model dropdown menu allows you to select the model that best fits your needs, whether you require the latest version for optimal performance or an older version for specific functionalities. This flexibility ensures that you can always find the right tool for your project, enhancing your experimentation and output quality.

Additionally, understanding the different assistant modes available, such as Assistants, Chat, and Complete, can further refine your interactions with the AI. The numbers in model names, like 16K, 32K, or 128K, represent the context length, which is crucial for tasks that require more extensive input and output.

By experimenting with different models and modes, you can tailor the AI’s performance to meet your specific requirements, making the OpenAI Playground a powerful asset for your projects.

Custom System Prompts

Crafting custom system prompts is an advanced feature that allows users to explicitly define the desired tone and style of the AI’s responses. This aspect of prompt engineering is critical for achieving specific outcomes, whether you’re looking to generate formal business communications or casual social media posts.

Custom system prompts guide the AI to produce outputs that align with your intended message and style, enhancing content relevance and effectiveness.

Practical Uses of OpenAI Playground

The OpenAI Playground is not just a tool for experimentation; it offers practical applications that can significantly enhance business operations and personal projects. Users can create tailored AI tools for specific tasks, from content generation to customer support solutions, using the Playground. The ability to enter sample prompts and see how the models respond provides a hands-on approach to understanding the platform’s capabilities and exploring its potential applications.

Businesses can particularly benefit from the Playground’s versatility, enabling them to automate routine tasks, enhance creativity in problem-solving, and improve user interaction through personalized customer support solutions.

Let’s explore some of the key practical uses of OpenAI Playground in more detail.

Content Creation

OpenAI Playground is a powerful tool for generating various business resources. It can create web copy, marketing emails, social media posts, blog articles, and internal communications. Using the Playground for tasks requiring extensive output or specific instructions allows businesses to reduce costs and streamline content production processes. The ability to create tailored prompts helps in efficiently managing repetitive tasks, saving both time and resources.

Moreover, the Playground’s rapid prototyping capabilities allow businesses to quickly test and refine ideas, accelerating the implementation of new strategies. This not only enhances creativity but also ensures that businesses can stay ahead of the competition by rapidly adapting to market changes.

AI-generated content helps businesses minimize the need for additional staff or outsourcing, leading to significant cost savings.

Audio Generation

The audio generation feature in the OpenAI Playground allows users to create voiceovers and audio content with ease. Users can select from multiple voice presets, enabling them to produce high-quality audio that suits their specific needs.

This feature is particularly useful for creating podcasts, video narrations, and other multimedia content, adding an extra layer of creativity and professionalism to your projects.

Code Assistance

For developers, the OpenAI Playground offers a robust code assistance feature that can significantly enhance productivity. The Assistants models are designed specifically for API use, enabling developers to automate tasks and generate code snippets efficiently. These models allow developers to quickly retrieve information, making it easier to access coding resources and documentation, crucial for development tasks.

Additionally, the code generation process is streamlined, providing developers with instant solutions and suggestions that can aid in various tasks within the Playground. This not only boosts efficiency but also supports coding novices by offering guidance and reducing the learning curve.

Whether you’re pasting sample code or testing new algorithms, the code assistance feature in OpenAI Playground is an invaluable tool for developers of all skill levels.

Benefits for Business Owners

Utilizing the OpenAI Playground can bring significant benefits to business owners, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs. By automating content generation tasks, businesses can streamline their workflows and focus on more strategic initiatives.

Let’s delve into the specific benefits of efficiency, productivity, and cost-effectiveness.

Efficiency and Productivity

OpenAI Playground assists in code generation, boosting efficiency for developers and aiding coding novices. The platform’s ability to provide instant code suggestions and solutions enhances coding productivity, allowing developers to progress more quickly in their tasks. Additionally, using role-based prompts helps define the tone and style of the AI’s responses, making interactions more engaging and relevant to specific job requirements.

These tools help businesses save time and resources, enabling employees to focus on more innovative and strategic tasks. The improvements in efficiency and productivity ultimately contribute to faster progress and better outcomes in various projects.

Cost-Effectiveness

Automating routine tasks through the OpenAI Playground can lead to significant cost savings for businesses. Reducing labor costs and minimizing errors enhances profitability and allows businesses to allocate resources more effectively.

Additionally, the automation capabilities allow employees to focus on more innovative tasks, driving further advancements and improvements within the organization.

Advanced Tips for Using OpenAI Playground

For users looking to get the most out of the OpenAI Playground, experimenting with different prompt structures and utilizing feedback loops can significantly enhance the quality of AI responses.

Let’s explore some advanced tips for optimizing prompts and adjusting temperature settings to achieve the best results.

Optimizing Prompts

Effective prompt engineering is key to getting the best results from the OpenAI Playground. Using clear and specific language in your prompts helps the AI understand the desired outcome better, leading to more accurate and relevant responses. Incorporating examples within prompts can further guide the AI, ensuring that it produces outputs that closely align with your expectations.

Additionally, providing specific context and instructions within prompts can significantly improve the quality and relevance of AI outputs. Refining prompts through continuous experimentation and feedback unlocks the full potential of the OpenAI Playground, achieving optimal project results.

Adjusting Temperature Settings

The temperature setting in the OpenAI Playground influences the randomness of AI outputs, allowing users to adjust the level of creativity and diversity in responses. Lowering the temperature typically leads to more focused and predictable outputs, which is useful for tasks that require precision and consistency. On the other hand, increasing the temperature fosters creativity, resulting in more varied and innovative outputs.

To master the OpenAI Playground, strategically adjusting the temperature settings based on your specific needs can help you balance predictability and creativity. This allows you to tailor the AI’s performance to suit different tasks, enhancing the overall effectiveness of your interactions with the platform.

Summary

In summary, the OpenAI Playground is a versatile and powerful platform that offers extensive customization and experimentation capabilities. By understanding its key features, such as interactive chat, model selection, and custom system prompts, users can leverage this tool to enhance their productivity, creativity, and efficiency. The Playground’s practical applications in content creation, audio generation, and code assistance highlight its potential to revolutionize various aspects of business operations.

For business owners, the benefits of using the OpenAI Playground are clear. It can significantly improve efficiency and productivity, reduce costs, and drive innovation. By mastering the advanced tips for optimizing prompts and adjusting temperature settings, users can unlock the full potential of this powerful tool. Embrace the OpenAI Playground, and let it transform the way you work and achieve your goals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the OpenAI Playground?

The OpenAI Playground is an interactive platform for experimenting with AI models like ChatGPT and GPT-4, offering tools for customizing output and testing diverse applications. It’s an excellent resource for exploring the capabilities of advanced AI technologies.

How does the OpenAI Playground differ from ChatGPT?

The OpenAI Playground provides a more complex interface for developers and researchers, allowing extensive customization and access to a wider range of models, whereas ChatGPT is designed for casual users seeking interactive conversations. This distinction makes the Playground suitable for in-depth experimentation.

How do I get started with the OpenAI Playground?

To get started with the OpenAI Playground, visit platform.openai.com and log in with your Google account or create a new one. After logging in, you can test prompts and explore AI models, but remember to obtain an OpenAI API key to maximize your experience.

What are some practical uses of the OpenAI Playground?

The OpenAI Playground is highly versatile, enabling users to create content like web copy and marketing emails, generate audio voiceovers, and assist with coding by automating tasks and generating code snippets. This makes it a valuable tool for professionals in numerous fields.

What are the benefits of using the OpenAI Playground for business owners?

Using the OpenAI Playground can significantly enhance operational efficiency and reduce costs for business owners. By automating routine tasks and providing instant solutions, it fosters increased productivity and innovation.

The post Mastering the OpenAI Playground: Tips for Effective AI Experimentation appeared first on Done For You.

The Copywriting Tip That Builds Instant Trust

brittany@doneforyou.com — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 20:47:02 +0000

The only copywriting tip you’ll ever need isn’t about clever wording or persuasive tactics—it’s about showing your audience that you understand them better than they understand themselves. When you describe their problem so clearly that they feel heard and seen, they automatically trust that you have the solution.

This psychological trigger is why the best copywriting tip doesn’t start with selling. It starts with deep understanding.

Why This Copywriting Tip Works

People don’t buy when they understand you—they buy when they feel understood. When your copy reflects their exact emotions, pain points, and desires, it creates an instant connection and positions you as the solution to their struggles.

Marketer Wyatt Woodsmall taught that if you can describe people’s problems better than they can, they’ll subconsciously believe you have the answer. This is a foundational copywriting tip that applies to every industry.

Additionally, this approach builds credibility and authority. When your audience recognizes that you understand their struggles at a deep level, they are far more likely to engage with your content, trust your recommendations, and ultimately invest in your products or services. Strong copy that speaks directly to a person’s pain points not only makes an emotional connection but also differentiates your brand from competitors who focus solely on selling features rather than understanding customer needs.

How to Apply This Copywriting Tip Effectively

1. Listen to Your Audience’s Exact Words

Great copywriting starts with listening. Pay attention to customer reviews, testimonials, and social media comments. Note the exact language they use to describe their challenges. When you use their words in your copy, it creates a strong emotional connection and makes them feel like you truly understand their struggles. This is a vital copywriting tip that ensures your message resonates.

Another effective way to gather insights is through direct conversations, such as interviews or surveys. Ask your audience about their biggest pain points and frustrations. The more detailed their responses, the better you can craft messages that resonate deeply. By mirroring their words, you make your copy feel personal and tailored specifically to them. Using this copywriting tip effectively builds stronger engagement.

Example: Instead of writing, “Struggling with time management?” use their own words:

“Do you ever feel like no matter how hard you work, your to-do list just keeps growing?”

2. Use Emotional Triggers

Another key copywriting tip is tapping into emotions. People make buying decisions based on how they feel rather than just logic. By addressing emotions like frustration, anxiety, or hope, you create a sense of urgency and connection that makes them more likely to engage with your offer.

To effectively use emotional triggers, identify the deeper emotional drivers behind your audience’s challenges. Are they feeling overwhelmed by too much information? Are they frustrated with slow progress? Once you know these emotions, you can craft copy that speaks directly to their feelings, making your message more compelling. This copywriting tip helps elevate your marketing impact.

Example: Instead of saying, “Get more leads for your business,” try:

“Tired of chasing leads that never convert? What if customers came to you, ready to buy?”

3. Paint a Clear Before-and-After Picture

Show your audience what life looks like before and after using your solution. When they can visualize the transformation, it becomes easier for them to see the value in what you offer. The contrast between their current struggles and the potential success they could achieve makes your solution more desirable. This is a highly effective copywriting tip for conversions.

A strong before-and-after story should be relatable and detailed. Instead of simply stating the benefits, illustrate them with real-world examples or success stories. This technique helps build credibility and trust, reinforcing that your solution works and can create tangible results. Leveraging this copywriting tip keeps your audience engaged.

Example:

Before: Struggling with confusing marketing strategies, feeling stuck, constantly second-guessing every decision.
After: Effortlessly attracting leads, growing your business with ease, and having complete confidence in your marketing plan.

This simple storytelling technique strengthens your message and makes your copy more persuasive.

Copywriting Mistakes to Avoid When Applying This Tip

Copywriting is a powerful tool, but even experienced marketers can make mistakes that weaken their message. Avoiding these pitfalls ensures your copy remains compelling, relevant, and effective. The key to great copy isn’t just about following the right strategies but also about eliminating the wrong ones. Let’s take a look at the most common mistakes to avoid when applying this copywriting tip.

Being Too Vague – Instead of saying “Are you tired of struggling?”, be specific: “Are you frustrated spending hours on content that no one reads?” Applying this copywriting tip makes your messaging more precise. Readers respond better when your message resonates with their personal experiences and struggles.

Jumping to the Solution Too Soon – Build trust first by demonstrating that you truly understand their problem before offering a solution. This copywriting tip ensures a stronger emotional connection. People don’t like feeling sold to immediately; they prefer knowing that the person offering a solution understands their situation deeply before presenting a fix.

Neglecting Emotional Language – Facts don’t sell. Feelings do. Ensure your copy triggers an emotional response. Implementing this copywriting tip can drastically improve engagement. People buy based on emotion and justify with logic, so your copy should aim to connect with their deepest desires, fears, and aspirations.

If you avoid these common mistakes, your copy will be more persuasive and resonate more deeply with your audience. The best copywriters constantly refine their approach, ensuring their words are clear, compelling, and emotionally engaging.

Testing and Refining This Copywriting Tip

Great copy isn’t just written—it’s tested, refined, and optimized over time. Even the most experienced copywriters never assume their first draft is perfect. Instead, they continuously analyze how their messaging resonates with their audience and make necessary adjustments to improve engagement and conversions.

One of the most effective ways to refine your copy is by paying attention to real-world data. Are people clicking your links? Are they responding emotionally to your messaging? If your copy isn’t producing the results you want, it might be time to tweak your approach based on audience insights and feedback.

Copywriting is never a one-and-done process. To improve your messaging:

Run A/B tests on different problem-focused headlines. A strong copywriting tip is to always test and optimize.
Gather feedback from your audience to see what resonates. This copywriting tip ensures your message stays relevant.
Analyze engagement metrics to refine your messaging over time. Implementing this copywriting tip keeps your copy fresh and effective.

Final Thoughts on This Copywriting Tip

Mastering this copywriting tip means shifting from selling to understanding. When your audience feels truly understood, your copy becomes a conversation they want to continue.

So next time you write, don’t start with what you’re selling. Start with how your audience feels. Describe their struggles better than they can—and they’ll trust you have the solution. Applying this copywriting tip will make your content significantly more impactful.

Your Turn: How will you apply this copywriting tip? Try rewriting one of your headlines using this approach!

FAQs About This Copywriting Tip

Q: How do I know if I’m describing the problem effectively? A: If your audience reads your copy and thinks, “Wow, this is exactly what I’ve been struggling with,” then you’ve nailed it. Use surveys and feedback to refine your messaging. This copywriting tip will improve your ability to connect with your audience.

Q: What if my audience has multiple pain points? A: Prioritize the most urgent or emotionally charged problem first. Hook them with that, then introduce secondary issues. This copywriting tip ensures a focused and effective approach.

Q: How can I get better at applying this copywriting tip? A: Practice active listening, take notes from customer interactions, and analyze high-performing copy in your niche. Continuous improvement through this copywriting tip will enhance your messaging effectiveness.

The post The Copywriting Tip That Builds Instant Trust appeared first on Done For You.

Abandon Cart Email: How to Convert Hesitant Shoppers

brittany@doneforyou.com — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:30:07 +0000

Did you know that nearly 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts before completing a purchase? That’s a staggering number of missed opportunities. But here’s the good news: abandon cart emails can help you reclaim a significant chunk of those lost sales.

If you’re not using them, you’re leaving money on the table. Let’s break down how to craft abandon cart emails that turn hesitation into conversion while delivering value your competitors can’t match.

Why Do Shoppers Abandon Carts?

To craft a winning email strategy, it’s essential to understand why people leave their carts behind:

Just Browsing: Many users add items to carts without the intent to buy.
Unexpected Costs: Shipping fees or taxes that appear late in the checkout process.
Complex Checkout: Frustrating or lengthy checkout processes drive users away.
Distractions or Forgetfulness: Life happens, and sometimes shoppers simply forget.
Trust Issues: Concerns about return policies or secure payments.
Comparison Shopping: Users often compare prices on multiple sites before buying.

Understanding these reasons allows you to address objections and craft abandon cart emails that re-engage customers effectively.

Additionally, abandoned carts often happen because users are gathering ideas and options for future purchases. They may use their cart as a placeholder for items they like but aren’t ready to commit to. Another common reason is uncertainty about product details—shoppers might be seeking more clarity on sizing, color, or specifications. Addressing these scenarios in your abandon cart emails with useful information or reassurances can make a significant difference.

Finally, the emotional state of a buyer plays a role. Sometimes, buyers experience “cart regret” when the total price, including shipping and taxes, triggers hesitation. Others might feel overwhelmed by the decision-making process, especially when purchasing higher-priced items. A strategically crafted abandon cart email that addresses these hesitations with incentives or social proof can nudge buyers toward completing the purchase.

Key Elements of a High-Performing Abandon Cart Email

An effective abandon cart email doesn’t just remind shoppers of what they left behind—it compels them to return and complete the purchase. Here’s what to include:

1. Personalized Subject Lines That Capture Attention

Examples:

“Forget something? Your cart misses you!”
“Don’t wait! Your items are almost gone.” Personalization boosts open rates and makes emails feel more engaging.

Your subject line is your first opportunity to grab attention in a crowded inbox. Beyond personalization, consider adding urgency or curiosity to pique interest. Phrases like “Hurry! Limited stock available” or “We saved your favorites—don’t let them go!” can create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) that encourages readers to act quickly. Test different approaches to find what resonates most with your audience.

2. A Visual Reminder of What They Left Behind

Include high-quality images of the products in the cart. This visual prompt can reignite their desire for the items.

A clean, visually appealing layout is essential here. Ensure the product images are large and clear, making the email easy to skim. Including additional information, like color or size options, adds context and reduces any potential doubts shoppers might have. Bonus tip: Show similar or complementary products to encourage upsells or cross-sells.

3. Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)

Your CTA should be bold and actionable. Examples:

“Complete Your Purchase”
“Get It Before It’s Gone”

Make your CTA impossible to miss by using contrasting colors and actionable language. Consider testing variations, such as “Return to Your Cart” or “Claim Your Deal Now,” to see which drives the best results.

4. Address Common Objections

Highlight return policies, customer reviews, or guarantees to build trust. If you offer free shipping, emphasize it prominently.

Your email should anticipate the shopper’s concerns. For example, if shipping costs are a known barrier, feature a banner offering free or discounted shipping. Include customer reviews or testimonials directly in the email to reinforce trust and demonstrate the value of your products.

5. Incentives to Act Quickly

Add urgency with limited-time discounts, free shipping, or exclusive bonuses. For instance:

“Complete your purchase in the next 24 hours for 10% off!”

Time-sensitive offers work well to create urgency. Consider pairing them with countdown timers in your email design to visually reinforce the limited-time nature of the deal.

6. Mobile-Optimized Design

Over 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Ensure your design looks great and loads quickly on all screens.

A responsive design isn’t just a “nice-to-have”; it’s a must. Use larger fonts, clickable buttons, and a single-column layout to improve readability and usability on smaller screens.

The Perfect Timing for Abandon Cart Emails

Timing is everything. Here’s a recommended sequence:

Email 1 (3 Hours After Abandonment): A gentle reminder about their cart.
Email 2 (24 Hours Later): Include social proof, such as reviews or testimonials.
Email 3 (48-72 Hours Later): Add urgency with a discount or free shipping.
Final Email (4-7 Days Later): A last-chance offer or a “we’re here to help” message.

Consistency and follow-up are key to boosting conversions.

The sequence you use can vary depending on your audience and industry. For example, in fast-moving industries like fashion, shorter intervals may work better, while higher-value industries like electronics might benefit from longer intervals with more nurturing. Track your results and adjust the timing to optimize performance.

It’s also worth segmenting your audience to ensure relevancy. For instance, high-value cart abandoners might receive a more aggressive sequence with premium incentives, while lower-value carts could get simpler reminders. Segmentation ensures you’re targeting customers with the right level of effort.

Advanced Strategies to Maximize Your Results

1. Use Dynamic Content

Tailor email content based on what the shopper abandoned. For example, if a customer left a jacket in their cart, include similar items or accessories.

Dynamic content goes beyond just showing abandoned items. Use personalized product recommendations based on browsing history or purchase behavior to make your emails feel more tailored. If a customer abandoned a fitness tracker, for example, suggest compatible accessories or fitness apps to complete the package.

2. Leverage Behavioral Triggers

Send personalized emails triggered by user actions. For example:

If someone revisits your site but doesn’t check out, send a tailored follow-up.

Behavioral data can also help you segment customers more effectively. For example, frequent abandoners might need different messaging compared to first-time visitors. Leverage these insights to create smarter automation flows that feel personalized at every stage.

3. Experiment with Humor or Emotion

Brands like Dollar Shave Club use witty subject lines and humorous copy to connect.

Humor can work wonders for brand recall, but make sure it aligns with your audience. Alternatively, you can use emotional appeals, such as highlighting how your product solves a problem or improves the customer’s life.

4. Test and Optimize

Split-test subject lines, email designs, and CTAs to find the best-performing combinations.

Optimization is an ongoing process. Regularly review metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to identify areas for improvement. Use A/B testing to continuously refine your approach.

Final Thoughts: Reclaim Your Lost Sales

Abandon cart emails aren’t just another marketing tool—they’re an opportunity to build trust and recover lost revenue. By addressing objections, adding urgency, and following up consistently, you can turn cart abandonment into a powerful sales driver for your business.

Ready to implement these strategies? Start crafting your abandon cart email sequence today and watch your conversions soar.

Bonus Tip: The best abandon cart emails feel like helpful nudges, not pushy sales pitches. Keep it simple, relevant, and customer-focused for maximum impact.

The post Abandon Cart Email: How to Convert Hesitant Shoppers appeared first on Done For You.

Defining Advertorial Marketing: Bridging Value and Promotion

brittany@doneforyou.com — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:30:47 +0000

In today’s crowded digital space, getting your audience’s attention is harder than ever. Banner ads are ignored, pop-ups are closed, and traditional marketing methods often miss the mark. Enter advertorial marketing, a strategy that blends the informative nature of editorial content with the persuasive power of advertising. But what exactly is advertorial marketing, and why is it such a game-changer for brands?

Let’s break it down and explore how this hybrid approach can create value for both readers and businesses.

What Is Advertorial Marketing?

At its core, advertorial marketing is the practice of creating content that looks and feels like an editorial article but is designed to promote a product, service, or brand. The term itself is a mashup of “advertisement” and “editorial,” and the key to a successful advertorial is striking the right balance between value-driven content and subtle promotion.

Unlike blatant ads that scream “buy now,” advertorials aim to educate, inform, or entertain the audience while gently guiding them toward a desired action—whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or exploring a brand’s offerings.

Key Characteristics of Advertorials:

Educational Tone: They often provide useful insights, tips, or solutions to a problem.
Seamless Integration: Advertorials align with the publication’s style, ensuring they don’t feel out of place.
Subtle Promotion: The focus is on adding value first, with the product or service naturally woven into the narrative.

Why Advertorial Marketing Works

Trust Through Value

Readers are more likely to engage with content that provides value—whether it’s answering a question, solving a problem, or offering actionable advice. By focusing on education or entertainment, advertorials build trust and credibility, making the audience more receptive to the promotional aspect.

Better Engagement

Studies show that people are more likely to read advertorials than traditional ads because they blend into the content they’re already consuming. Advertorials feel less intrusive and more organic, which keeps readers engaged longer.

Higher Conversions

When done well, advertorials can drive significant conversions. Why? Because they create a natural bridge between the reader’s interest and the solution your product or service provides.

Examples of Advertorial Marketing

Let’s bring this concept to life with a few examples:

1. Travel Industry:

The article titled “5 Keys to a Better Business Travel Experience“ published on Business Travel News highlights strategies for improving business travel while subtly promoting specific tools or services that align with these strategies. This approach ensures the content is both valuable and aligned with the sponsor’s offerings.

2. Tech Industry:

The article titled “How Embedding Technology is Revolutionizing AI and Contextual Advertising“ published on TechCrunch serves as an excellent example. This advertorial delves into how innovative embedding technology is shaping the future of advertising, aligning seamlessly with the sponsor’s expertise. Its detailed insights make it a valuable read for both tech enthusiasts and professionals looking to stay ahead.

3. Health & Wellness:

The article such as “Build Healthy Habits“ published on Healthline exemplifies how health-focused advertorials can effectively educate readers while aligning with a brand’s offerings. This piece not only provides actionable advice for creating sustainable habits but also subtly integrates a wellness program as a practical solution, making it both valuable and promotional in nature.

These examples illustrate how advertorials provide genuine value while promoting a brand in a non-pushy way.

How to Create Effective Advertorials

If you’re ready to incorporate advertorial marketing into your strategy, here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Understand Your Audience

Great advertorials start with a deep understanding of your target audience. What are their pain points? What kind of content do they enjoy? The more you know, the easier it is to craft a message that resonates.

2. Prioritize Value Over Promotion

The golden rule of advertorial marketing is this: focus on providing value first. Whether you’re offering tips, insights, or solutions, ensure the content stands on its own even without the promotional elements.

3. Choose the Right Platform

Where you publish your advertorial matters. Partner with publications or platforms that align with your target audience to maximize relevance and reach.

4. Write Like an Editor

Ensure your advertorial matches the tone, style, and format of the publication. The more seamlessly it integrates, the more credible it will feel.

5. End With a Call-to-Action (CTA)

While the promotion should be subtle, every advertorial needs a clear next step. Whether it’s “learn more,” “get started,” or “find out how,” make sure your CTA aligns with the reader’s journey.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Overtly Salesy Tone: An advertorial should never feel like a hard sell. The moment it’s too promotional, you lose the audience’s trust.
Lack of Value: If the content doesn’t educate, inform, or entertain, it’s just an ad pretending to be something more. That’s a quick way to alienate readers.
Ignoring Compliance: Be transparent about sponsored content. Disclose when a piece is paid for to maintain credibility and avoid legal issues.

Advertorials vs. Traditional Blogs: Key Differences

While advertorials and blogs share similarities, they serve different purposes. Blogs are typically educational or informational and aim to establish authority or build trust over time. Advertorials, on the other hand, are more focused on driving immediate action while still providing value.

Differences:

Intent: Blogs prioritize education; advertorials balance education with subtle promotion.
Tone: Blogs are purely editorial, whereas advertorials combine editorial style with advertising goals.
CTA: Advertorials often include a direct call-to-action, while blogs may or may not.

Expanding the Scope: Integrating Advertorials Into Your Strategy

To make the most of advertorials, integrate them into a broader content marketing strategy. Pair them with:

Email Campaigns: Use advertorials as lead magnets or nurture content.
Social Media Ads: Promote your advertorials to reach a wider audience.
Retargeting Campaigns: Drive prospects back to your website with advertorial-based ads.

Embrace the Power of Advertorial Marketing

Advertorial marketing isn’t just about blending in; it’s about standing out by providing real value in a way that connects with your audience. When executed well, it bridges the gap between advertising and storytelling, creating a win-win for both brands and readers.

As you define your marketing strategy, consider how advertorials could amplify your reach, build trust, and drive meaningful results. It’s not just about promoting a product; it’s about starting a conversation, solving problems, and creating lasting impressions.

Ready to redefine how you connect with your audience? Start crafting advertorials that don’t just inform but inspire.

FAQs About Advertorial Marketing

1. What’s the difference between an advertorial and a blog post?
While both aim to provide value, an advertorial subtly promotes a product or service, whereas a blog post is typically purely informational.

2. Are advertorials effective for all industries?
Yes! The key is tailoring the content to the audience and ensuring the promotion aligns naturally with the narrative.

3. Do advertorials need to be disclosed as ads?
Yes, transparency is crucial. Disclose paid content to maintain trust and comply with advertising regulations.

4. How long should an advertorial be?
Length depends on the platform and audience. However, aim to provide enough depth to inform and engage while staying concise.

5. What metrics should I track to measure success?
Focus on engagement metrics like time on page, click-through rates, and conversions to evaluate the impact of your advertorial.

The post Defining Advertorial Marketing: Bridging Value and Promotion appeared first on Done For You.

Content Marketing Strategies That Boost Engagement

Jason Drohn — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 14:00:35 +0000

“Content is the king.”

“It is the most important thing for business marketing today.”

“You cannot succeed in the game of marketing unless you leverage the power of content.”

All these have become more of a cliché than anything else today.

Yes, content is important for marketing. But is it enough to create world-class content?

No, certainly not. No matter how good and effective the content is, it is of no use unless spread on the right channels to boost user engagement.

Unfortunately, this is where the majority of content marketers miss the boat.

In this post, we are going to share some of the easiest content marketing tactics that will help you boost audience engagement and leverage the power of your content in the most effective manner.

So, let us take a look…

The concept of buyer personas

When writing content, you need to remember the fundamental principle – you are writing for a specific someone.

Who is this someone? Is it a teenager? A corporate officer? A middle-aged man? What are his or her preferences?

You need to build a buyer persona and then create a killer content copy based on that persona.

Unless you know the person with whom you are trying to engage, how can you draft copy that will entice him or her?

This is the reason that understating the concept of buyer personas has become the need of the hour to boost user engagement.

Some of the important factors to consider when developing buyer personas:

Demography
Age
Gender
Qualification
Area of work
Relationship status

Writing genuine content

There is a difference between writing content and writing content to engage your audience.

You might be wondering what this difference is. Well, the difference lies in whether you have a genuine interest in what you’re writing about.

Remember, your community will come to you searching for the solution to their problems. It is up to you to create valuable content that provides a solution.

Here are some of the factors that contribute to creating something that we like to call genuine content:

Should solve the reader’s problem
It Will help them get more value from your product/service
Could cheer them up, encourage or inspire them

You must focus on creating content that is able to entice the users and supplement their needs.

Are you looking for the right marketing advice? Want to become a pro at online marketing? Want to learn the art of smart content marketing? If that’s the case, you need to take a look at this tool.

Don’t look for attention – grab it!

There are two ways to grab people’s attention: write something that creates controversy or write something that your audience can easily relate to.

Creating controversy isn’t really a good idea, as you never know when it might backfire. So, the easiest way to grab people’s attention especially with your content is to focus on their most common problems.

What this means is to try to write about subjects that relate to their lives. For instance, targeting the day-to-day problems that a 9 am-5 pm employee has to face.

Now, you might ask: how will my content stand out if there is already so much content on this topic? This is where your creativity comes into play. You need to find that angle which strikes the right emotional chord with your audience.

Keep testing by writing on diverse topics until you find the one alchemy (i.e. niche) that can convert your content into gold!

Remember, if you look for attention people might become part of the herd. But if you create something that grabs their attention, you are surely going to achieve the desired results with your content!

It all begins with a good headline

It is a well-established fact that today’s generation has a relatively shorter attention span than any other generation.

So, you need to create compelling headlines that could entice the users to read the entire content.

For instance, using emotional and actionable words, like “how-to” and “5-steps” always perform better than regular titles.

In a similar way, you can always A-B test different forms of titles and see which one appeals to most of your audience.

After all, there is no point in writing content that people would not read beyond the title. So, why not create something that keeps them hooked from the word go?

Monitor, track and respond

Okay, so we are trying to create content that boosts your audience engagement. But how will you know whether your content has reached that goal?

This is where monitoring performance and keeping track of the response it is getting from the readers becomes crucial.

Using tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics and more can prove to be a blessing. You can get to know about the reaction your content is garnering from your audience and plan your future content marketing tactics accordingly.

As they say, failing to plan is like planning to fail – you cannot survive in the competition without having a good plan. Monitoring performance could be the first step towards that planning!

Conclusion

All we have to say is that creating content is the initial part of a successful content marketing strategy. You need to amalgamate it with the right distribution tricks in order to get the best results.

If you have been running around in circles looking for tips and advice on how you can create the most enticing content that could skyrocket your audience engagement, then the advice shared in this post can prove to be just the perfect thing.

So, what are you waiting for? Try these content marketing strategies and see how beneficial they turn out for you!

Content Marketing Strategies That Boost Engagement

This week we’ve been talking about content marketing strategies and how content marketing drives sales in your business, regardless of what you sell, whether it’s services, or physical products, or digital products, or e-comm, whatever. You can sell more by putting content out. We talked about some of the benefits of content marketing and some of the history of content marketing and search engine optimization on Monday. Tuesday, I shared some of the tips and tricks that you can use from your content marketing strategies. Yesterday, we talked a lot about content types including advertorials, and I showed some advertorials that we run traffic to, that other media buyers run traffic to, and why advertorials are great from a bridge page standpoint.

Today, we’re going to talk about content marketing strategies that boost engagement. These are just some simple things that you’re going to do inside your blog posts and inside your content that is going to help you get more traffic, number one, and engage with more prospects, number two. Your content is often times it’s the thing that sucks people in. It’s always content in one form or another. It might be a live stream you do, a blog post that you write,t be an advertorial that you send traffic to, and be an ebook or something that people read or a Kindle book or whatever. It’s always a piece of content.

In the absence of having them learning about you and you being up on stage, or you being out at a networking group; in the absence of you, there is content, and that is the thing that sells people into whatever it is you’re doing. That is why content is so important.

Now, my name is Jason Drohn, for those of you who don’t know who I am. Every day we get a bunch more people who are watching these live streams. I created doneforyou.com. We specialize in building sales funnels, creating offers, and doing content marketing strategies automation, and driving traffic to grow businesses online. To put it short, we help people build shit and sell shit online. Content marketing strategies are always a big part of that.

Today’s article that we’re going to be digging through is over here. I’m going to throw this up on the screen. And then of course here is the post. I’m going to drop it in the comments box. You can check it out on your own. Now, here we have this live stream up top. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet, go ahead and subscribe there. This is episode 94. We’re coming up on 100. In episode 100 I have some interesting things. We’re going to be switching some things around. Still going to be GSD Daily, but it’s just going to be indifferent tracks. I’ll let you know a little bit more about that.

Content is king.

Basically no matter how you slice it, content is king. That’s the absolute most important thing that you can be doing in your business content marketing strategies When the pandemic hit, when the crisis hit, so many people shifted their focus from ad budgets to content marketing strategies, and then they ended up discounting a lot of their products and services and everything. It’s one of the reasons why you see so much more content being pushed out right now. It’s why we started doing content, but the reverse happened for us. We started doing more content marketing strategies and then we started upping our ad budget to promote the content. That was an interesting shift. Content is the thing. It is the driver.

One thing you really, really need to stick in your head when it comes to creating content is you need to have this idea of a buyer persona. A buyer persona is really important when you’re building sales funnels, of course. You always want to write your emails, your webinars, your sales videos, all of that stuff, you want to write it to one particular person.

I have this avatar. I use it in a lot of examples. It’s exactly a boss to a degree that I used to have a long time ago now. His name is Matt. Matt runs around and basically, he’s running a $3 million shop, like a production shop. He’s the chief sales guy, the CEO, and the head ass-kicker. He’s everything. There is no executive-level other than him. It’s him and the accountant and then everybody underneath. He’s too busy to be growing his business any other way, too busy to learn, and never read a book.

Actually, he’s just so caught up in reacting all the time, that’s how he runs his business. This is literally the person that I write to, this Matt. Every single time I’m writing a local B2B sales letter or email or blog post, if I want to hit that person then I write for Matt.

It really helps you focus your writing and your content. Even this week, we’re talking about content marketing strategies. Content marketing strategies, I have a persona in my head. I have a person who I’m talking to when I’m recording this video. It’s a different person than last week when last week we covered … SEO? Yeah, we covered SEO. Yeah. I don’t remember. We covered something last week.

Target that Buyer Persona

It’s always a different person. I’m always talking to somebody different. It’s important when you’re creating content to target that buyer persona and target that person who is most apt to listen to the message and hear it. Every week for me is different because each of the weekly focus changes and in your business it’s going to be the same. You’re going to have a buyer persona. You’re probably going to have one, but you might have three.

I was on the phone with a client the other day and they have three buyer personas. They have grandmas, and then they have moms, then they have daughters, like age groups. It’s really three personas. It’s three different styles of writing. Unless you write for the mom and you write it so that you still talk about the family, in which case the mom makes the buying decision for the other two. In that sense, you’re still a one buyer persona, but you’re adding in a couple of other ones into the mix and you’re talking about grandma and you’re talking about daughter to the mom. It’s just important to organize them in your brain when you’re creating content. And speak to one person. You’re not speaking to a group, you’re not speaking to everyone; you’re speaking to one person. That’s the idea behind buyer personas.

Demographics and Psychographics

You can get really deep into the woods between demographics and psychographics too. Demographics are going to be:

age
gender
qualifications
income
where they live

Your psychographics:

feelings
emotions
dreams
fears
desires

Your buyer persona is a combination of the two and that’s who we’re really writing for. We can target demographics in ads. We can target age, we can target gender, we can target all of that kind of stuff. Psychographics is always the emotional triggers that we’re hitting within the ad copy itself. Between the two of them, they end up working out pretty well. That’s your persona is the person in the middle of that.

Writing Genuine Content

Now writing genuine content … We went out to dinner with a friend on Friday, a friend/client. Basically, we were just talking about sales and sales on the phone. He does a lot of stuff. We were talking about how sales are just real solutions. If you have a solution to a problem, then you’re always going to be able to sell it. He’s a damn good sales guy.

At the end of the day, writing genuine content is about framing solutions for people. These are going to be simple, quick solutions that somebody can get immediate value from within your content and be able to take something away very, very quickly just by even scrolling through a post and then just learning something or whatever. There are lots of different ways to frame content, but everything should be solution-based, especially when that content is framing up a product.

Like we talked about yesterday about the advertorials. If you have a blog post that is promoting a thing … The whole idea of the blog post is to talk about the eight things you can do with a two by four. And then what you’re doing is you want to sell a toolkit with maybe, I don’t know, a hammer and a screwdriver or whatever, from that to blog post. The whole goal of the blog post is to push them into that solution, into that toolkit. The content that you write is not going to be any different. You’re trying to find a very, very, very small, like a little, little tiny sliver of a problem, deliver a solution to that, and then move them into your offer. That’s what every single piece of content should be.

Writing better content is really just about framing up better solutions.

1. Good Headline

Now the big part is it all starts with a good headline. When you have your persona and you have your content, and then you’re going out and you’re putting it in front of people, so when you’re posting it on social media, you’re running paid traffic to your blog posts, like an advertorial would, all of that stuff then … which is all best practice. We’ve talked about it in some of our previous podcasts about creating celebrities. You’re creating content and then running traffic to the content and then the people who watch so much of that content, end up then seeing your next ad. It’s stuff we do all the time. You’re putting that content out to be consumed actively not waiting for somebody to click through or waiting for it to get indexed in Google and then see it. Basically, you’re actively promoting it.

It really all begins with a good headline. If the headline sucks, the headline of the blog post doesn’t work, then nobody’s going to click it. Nobody’s going to read it. We have a little headline optimizer tool that I’m going to show you. I’ve shown it in previous episodes, but I want to bring it back up. At the end of the day, you really just want to monitor your performance.

2. Monitor your website visitors using Google Analytics

Take a look at Google analytics. Make sure that people are landing on the webpage, staying on the webpage, reading the webpage, how they’re moving through your website, how they’re tracking from blog post to sales page, or whatever, all of that stuff is really an exercise in analytics. So being very attuned and accustomed to Google Analytics is going to be the best way to figure out whether your content is doing what it should be doing. Of course, you can do split testing tools and heat maps and all kinds of other crazy wiz-bang stuff that we should get into. Not this week, but maybe next week we will. It all starts with the content because content brings traffic.

Now, the tool that I want to show you is this headline optimizer tool. You can see it here. I’m just going to make this a little bigger on the screen so that you can check this out. You might not be able to read it, but it’ll be close enough. This is called Thrive Headline Optimizer Tool. Let’s go just look at it.

Thrive Headline Optimizer

This is part of the Thrive plugin suite. Really, really nice. It’s really, really good software. I don’t know. It’s one of these, but anyway. Basically what it lets you do is it lets you run tests. You can split test the headline of any blog post that is on your website. I’ve been using this tool for probably four or five months now, and I’ve seen a marked improvement in website traffic because more people are reading headlines that they like. Our headlines are now more clickable. What they’re doing is they’re going in and reading and all that stuff.

Every time we post a blog post, we always post four variations of that subject line. We have no attachment to any of the variations. All we’re trying to do is we’re trying to maximize clicks through that, whether it’s in Google, whether it’s in related posts, or whatever. Now, if we scroll down here, we will see that all of these articles have subject line split tests in them. We have the date started, July 22nd [inaudible 00:14:05] started July 21st. We do these every blog post that is now published we do a split test on.

Now, all of these are posts. These are the number of views here, so this column. Engagements and engagement rate; basically what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to maximize the engagement rate based on the headline. I usually just let it run until it has 75 or 80 engagements. Here’s one that has 62. Here’s one that has 373. Let’s see. Here’s one that has 143. We’re pretty diligent about logging in and T activating the ones that cross those thresholds. I can’t remember when the last time we did this.

Basically, I’m just going to go in here and I’m going to open up to this guy, which has had 143 views and 38 engagements. And then I’m going to check out this one, which had 90 views. Actually, that’s not a good one because it doesn’t look like it has had any engagements. There’s this one, which is 373 and 146 engagements. And then here’s one; 47 views, eight engagements. We’re going to take a look at this one, too.

Basically, this software just runs in the background. All it’s doing is split testing different subject lines. You can have as many subject lines as you want in here. Our rule of thumb is to have four or five. What happens is you get a graph like this. Our original headline is to create a lead funnel that generates leads 24/7. This one looks like we have a percentage improvement of negative 27.61. That did not win.

Our chance to be original is only 16%. We actually lost conversion on this particular one and all of the tests. We didn’t beat our control. The control is the winner and then what we’ll do is we’ll re-setup the test and then see if we can beat our control again. We start a new test, try to beat the control. But at the end of the day, we might not ever find something that beats the control there.

Now check out this one. This one was the one that had zero engagement. We’re not going to do that one. Then there’s this one, SAS KPIs, how to grow sales by tracking the right metrics. That’s the primary blog post title. We have two additional tests here. One of them is SAS KPIs, tracking the right metrics on your website and grow your sales, and then we have SAS KPIs, how to have successful sales. The winner surprisingly is this yellow one. It just barely overtook the red one.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to stop this test. We are going to choose the winner. That’s going to lock in the winning subject line. And then if we want to retest, we can always just start up a new test and try to beat the control again. We’re constantly working on finding the better headlines for our blog posts, and it does not even work. We’re just setting it up, letting the test run, and then we’re going from there.

This one looks like it all sucks except for that top one. We’re going to stop this test and we’re going to choose the winner. That first one is going to be the winner. The rest of them didn’t even get any clicks. I think that’s the last example here.

That’s a couple of different looks at how to run a headline analyzer tool and go from there. Let’s see. I think that’s about it for this article too. Those are just some quick tips on how to boost your engagement from your blog posts, write better content. Tomorrow we’re going to wrap everything up with content. If you have any thoughts, questions, anything related to how content marketing strategies work, how to get your stuff ranked in search engines, how to run traffic to your websites, building a sales funnel that converts, email marketing automation, anything goes to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little application and then book a time on the calendar that’s going to pop up right afterward, and the team will get on the phone with you and walk you through everything.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all, just go to doneforyou.com, hit that little chat box in the lower right-hand corner. It’s going to pop up with some different options you can go through and drop through the chat here, or just ask there and we’ll have somebody reach back out ASAP. Let me know if you have any questions.

Get This Sales Funnel Custom Built >> Click Here!

The post Content Marketing Strategies That Boost Engagement appeared first on Done For You.

What Are The Best Sales Headlines To Boost Website Conversion

Jason Drohn — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 14:00:25 +0000

Find Out How To Sell More Online! Click Here >>

Good copy starts by writing (and or finding) the best sales headlines and building on top of them. It's the difference between selling a lot of stuff and not.

Most people think of a sales funnel as a collection of pages. In actuality, a sales funnel ALWAYS starts with a headline. Sales funnels are a whole lot more than just a collection of pages. The copy is on those pages: the headlines, subheadlines, the video, features, benefits, bullets, and everything else. All of it is what drives sales. It isn't just the pages, layout, or how pages are set up or structured. That stuff matters a whole lot less than what you would think.

What matters is how people engage with the page.

How they engage with the page is through the copy that is on the page. Now, we will talk about how to write the best sales headlines. I will walk through the different ways that headlines can be used. Headlines can be used for email subject lines, blog post titles, and sales letter headlines.

Good copy is a good copy and can be used in many different areas.

It's all just a form or a function of this idea of how to write the best sales headlines. That's what we're going to talk about.

For Starters: The Top 25 Best Sales Headlines in the History of Marketing

Sales headlines are the first impression your potential customers have of your offer. They are crucial in grabbing attention and persuading people to read more. A well-crafted headline can distinguish between someone clicking through to your website or ignoring it altogether.

Over the years, there have been countless sales headlines that have stood the time test. These headlines are memorable, persuasive, and effective in driving conversions.

Here are 25 of the best sales headlines in the history of marketing:

"The $64,000 Question" (1950s game show)

Opens in a new window www.pbs.org
"Think Small" (Volkswagen Beetle)

Opens in a new window www.aaaa.org
"Where's the beef?" (Wendy's)

Opens in a new window jasonblog.tw
"They're Gr-r-great!" (Kellogg's Frosted Flakes)

Opens in a new window www.amazon.com
"Melts in your mouth, not in your hand" (M&M's)

Opens in a new window www.reddit.com
"Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is!" (Alka-Seltzer)

Opens in a new window www.amazon.com
"Diamonds are a girl's best friend" (De Beers)

Opens in a new window www.luxuryacademy.co.uk
"Breakfast of champions" (Wheaties)

Opens in a new window www.aaaa.org
"Just do it" (Nike)

Opens in a new window whcconsulting.blogspot.com
"Got milk?" (California Milk Processor Board)

Opens in a new window www.jabamay.com
"Can you hear me now?" (Verizon)

Opens in a new window www.usatoday.com
"Where do you want to go today?" (Microsoft)

Opens in a new window vimeo.com
"Because you're worth it" (L'Oréal)

Opens in a new window www.lorealparisusa.com
"The ultimate driving machine" (BMW)

Opens in a new window howbritseesit.wordpress.com
"Think different" (Apple)

Opens in a new window en.wikipedia.org
"Have it your way" (Burger King)

Opens in a new window www.pinterest.com
"Snap, crackle, and pop" (Rice Krispies)

Opens in a new windowwww.amazon.com
"A diamond is forever" (De Beers)

Opens in a new window www.forevermark.com
"The cola with a bite" (Pepsi)

Opens in a new window www.wideopencountry.com
"The real thing" (Coca-Cola)

Opens in a new window www.creativereview.co.uk
"Reach out and touch someone" (AT&T)

Opens in a new window clickamericana.com
"I'm lovin' it" (McDonald's)

Opens in a new window zh.wikipedia.org
"Obey your thirst" (Sprite)

Opens in a new window www.amazon.com
"Because you can be anything" (L'Oréal)

Opens in a new window www.amazon.com
"The world is your oyster" (American Express)

Opens in a new window medium.com

These headlines are all effective because they are:

Clear and concise: They get to the point quickly and easily understand.
Benefit-oriented: They focus on the product or service's benefits to the customer.
Intriguing: They pique the reader's curiosity and make them want to learn more.
Unique: They stand out from the competition and make a lasting impression.

How To Write Headlines

Now, today, I want to talk a little about how to write the best sales headlines and show some split-tested examples. There are some straightforward ways to get good at copy or writing copy. You have to put the effort and work into it, which sucks, but it is what it is.

If you want to be a master of your craft, you want to sell a lot of shit online; you must do the work.

figure out some of the buyer's psychology of what people want to buy,
what makes them buy,
what are their triggers

How to write headlines is the easiest way to start to pinpoint that. For instance, the best sales headlines are very to the point. They have a compelling message and a compelling offer. Usually, they have a little bit of urgency, and they convey a benefit in them. One headline encapsulates the entire message of a blog post, a sales letter, and the whole thing. But besides, it also serves as the jumping-off point when somebody reads it.

They read the headline, which helps them understand the offer, page, and email. In addition, it also gets them to read the following line. That following line is usually a subheadline or the opening paragraph or whatever. That paragraph gets them to read the following line or section, which brings them to read the next one down the page.

When you're looking at sales letter-like stuff, we use some screen capture tools and stuff. It records a video of somebody watching a sales video, managing a sales page, or scrolling through a sales page. Most people read the headlines, then return and read the subheadlines. Then, they find the sections that they get into. They read those sections down to the buy button.

They're kind of like, they scroll the page, and then they go back up to the top, and they scroll the page, and then ... They're back and forth, back and forth before they decide to buy it. Oddly enough, it's even more prevalent right now in the pandemic; people are sporadically going through sales pages; they're not looking at sales pages formulaically like they have in the past; they were kind of like, up and down, up and down, up and down, "Oh, I'm going to buy." Then they buy, and then the same thing for the upsell, the up and down, up and down.

1. Hint it to some curiosity

It's interesting how our psyche has changed because of the pandemic and the crisis. At the end of the day, you want to hint at some curiosity about how to write the best sales headlines. Your interest wants to propel, to give some urgency. You want to make sure your headline is as believable as possible. If you can use numbers, numbers are great. But they also engage the logical side of the brain away from the emotional side of the brain.

2. Avoid hype

You want to avoid advertising, which is everywhere right now.

3. Use humor

If you can use humor, make sure to use humor. I am not a very humorous copywriter; some people are in. As I'm saying this, I'm thinking of the Harmon brother's video ads. They're very clever, they're funny as shit. That's what makes them so unbelievably viral.

People want to share them despite them being advertisements. If you can tie humor into it, then that always helps.

4. Add Pre headline, subheadline

Like a qualifying statement, a pre-headline can sometimes precede your main headline. Some of the stuff we use is like a headline, turn clicks into customers, then there might be a pre-headline for coaches or consultants or a sub-headline underneath that qualifies them slightly more.

We use pre-, headlines, and subheadlines to nail our target prospect or demographic. That way, they know that they should continue reading, or if we're offering something for sale, like a lead magnet, we usually try to put the price of the thing and how to write headlines so that they can immediately tune out or tune in, depending on what they're interested in.

5. Make it personal

You want to ensure they know they're being communicated to. In your sales copy, use words like you, make it personal to them, and make it actionable, so everything about the headline.

Copywriting

First, I wanted to share some of my copywriting where I learned copywriting. I didn't necessarily go through any extensive course, but the copy is one thing you must know by doing. There's no other way; you can go through periods, listen to audio programs, buy, go through Udemy courses, and learn what good copywriting is, and it might take years or decades to figure it out.

It's quicker to write the copy and test it live with real people, real websites, real traffic, and see what converts and what doesn't.

Way back in the day, I had a website called Marketing Hacks. One of the top blog posts on this website was a post on slogans; it was like the 30 best slogans.

We have thousands of visitors a day looking up slogans, best slogans, unique slogans, and company slogans; like all of these keyword phrases, we're driving traffic directly to this blog post. And I was like, "Oh my God." This was ten years ago. Oh my God, this is such a great opportunity to create a course on slogans." I created a slogans course, like a six- or seven-module system. I think I priced it for $67 or $27 or something like that.

When I started writing copying, I wrote some long-form copy; this was before sales videos were invented. I wrote some long-form sales copy, then began tracking conversions; it wasn't even conversions; it clicked. Four hundred people came to the sales page, and I'm like, well, shit, I didn't sell anything.

Then you tweak the copy again, wait for another two or 300 visitors, and don't sell anything. And then you squeeze the manuscript again, and then you get one sale after three or 400 visitors. Then, you tweak the document again, and you get three deals. Mind you, we are 1200 visitors into this tweaking process, but we're starting to get some sales. So now, with paid traffic, you can do that much quicker.

Testing To Find The Best Sales Headlines

You can get the traffic, the views, the lead, whatever, to test your conversion process quickly. But you have to learn by doing and writing, so you'll learn how to write headlines by trying other headline variations and figuring out what works and what doesn't.

There's one way that I am absolutely in love with for testing headlines quickly. Last week, we talked about visual website optimizer. This way is a whole lot simpler, so there's a plugin that I like called Thrive Headline Optimizer. Let me start here now; this is a blog post, so you can use headlines differently.

If you know how to write headlines, you can test how to write headlines obviously in your sales copy. You can also test your headlines as:

blog posts subjects
email subject lines

You can see where I am getting most of my opens. If I get a lot of opens with this particular email subject line, it must be a great subject line. If I get a lot of blog post interactions from this separate subject line, then it must be a great subject line.

Most like Buzzfeed and all these like super, super crazy trafficked websites, they'll have as many as 25 or 30 subject tests that they run, and then whichever one wins, wins, and then they just let it go, and then that thing is just feeding traffic crazy forever.

Thrive Headline Optimizer

They test everything, and it's an essential part of their work. This is a piece of software called the Thrive Headline Optimizer. It is part of the Thrive Plugin Pack and is my favorite tool for finding the best sales headlines. This is a paid tool; you get a leads tool, and it's lovely, but this particular one is not this page.

Thrive Headline Optimizer is the tool we will be playing with. I found this thing a few months ago, and we've been getting some crazy organic traffic. I credit a lot of it to this plugin, not all of it because we're doing live streams; we're doing a lot of new cool stuff. I credit quite a bit of it to this, but not all.

This headline optimizer works in every blog post you write; you can split-test the subject line. Currently, well, today, I mean, you can see that we had 16 views of the split test subject lines. Now, I have already done this test with 25 blog posts; if we go and we're going to look at the rows per page, these are all of our completed tests.

Content with completed tests: I will look at some of these. Here's one example: how to use data analytics to unlock sales online. That was the winning variation; we can start another test from here, but let's look at the results of the last test. Here you see what we got in total ... It doesn't show how many difficulties we have, but we ran six different subject lines for this blog post. And you can see how they ended up charting out.

We had one that sucked, it was terrible. How to use data analytics to unlock sales? It got no engagements, no content views, nothing. Then, the next one was this dark green one, so this was how you use data to improve sales and conversions. That was a total engagement rate of 42%, which was our control.

Well, now, if you look at some of the winners, the winner was how to use data analytics to unlock sales online. And then the one book below used data analytics to improve online sales. This tells you that it's letting you split-test many different subject lines, and then it goes through and tests them all head to head.

It's testing all of them to tell you which one works. And you can see, we can beat the original 99.5 and 99.97, 99.99. We chose This green one as the winner: how to use data analytics to unlock sales online? That one is boring, but it still shows that more people will respond to certain headlines.

I could use that headline in an ad or an email subject line because I already know it will resonate better than many other combinations for that particular keyword phrase. Let's look at a different one, so there was one here. We've got all kinds of traffic. What's that one, three features from Instagram, Instagram live video, we're going to look at this one, this one got a lot of traffic, it always gets a lot of traffic.

Our winning variation right now is three features: get your free traffic from Instagram, which is odd because there's a misspelling. I mean, it should be you, your free traffic. Here, we've tested a lot of different variations; we tested three features: get your free traffic from Instagram so that one has a 100% chance to beat the original.

Then, we have three free features that get you unlimited traffic from Instagram. And that one had 99.37%. You can see that both of these ended up neck and neck. The red one, which is the one with the misspelling, actually won. That is the one that is currently live on the website, but with this tool, all you have to do is look at an older blog post, and I'm going to show you how to set this up.

We will go to all posts, and then I will find one that my team hasn't set up a headline test for. This one is being tested; these are all being tested; here's one: tricks to effective sales pipeline management. This was the last one I did, so we will go through how to write headlines test using this Thrive Headline Optimizer.

Tricks to effective sales pipeline management, there's an important thing here. The keyword phrase we're trying to rank for is sales pipeline management. We want to ensure that that thing is in every keyword phrase we're working with. Here, under our Yoast SEO plugin, sales pipeline management is the keyword phrase we're looking to optimize for.

Setting up the Split Test

We will add a new headline to set up that split test. We're just going to add three variations of this. Sales pipeline management, how to effectively crack sales. Now we're going to set up another variation, top tips to effectively tracking sales pipeline management, and ... Usually, I throw like a winger in; my last interpretation usually is just kind of like a Hail Mary; maybe it'll work, perhaps it won't.

As sales pipeline management work, find out here. Now, we have three different variations of this test. As soon as we hit update, it will throw that in that Thrive Headline Optimizer plugin. Then it's going to start to round robining those subject lines. We're going to check back in a week or two.

Usually, about a hundred views, we're going to check back and see which subject lines won. We will also check which one's suck. If there is a clear winner already, then we will activate that clear winner. We'll lock that in, and then we usually retest.

Usually, we'll do another test and see if we can beat that winner again. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't, but we're always trying to find a new control with our headlines. How to write headlines, whether it's a sales page headline, whether it is a blog post headline or an email subject line, we always try to find that new control, and then we go from there.

For Questions and Guide

Suppose you have any questions at all. If you want to schedule an action plan, call my team. We will walk through sales copy, sales funnels, and email traffic. Just go to doneforyou.com/start. Book a call with us; we'll happily create an action plan for you. If you have any questions for future episodes, go to doneforyou.com/blog.

Find Out How To Sell More Online! Click Here >>

The post What Are The Best Sales Headlines To Boost Website Conversion appeared first on Done For You.

How To Write A Copy That Sells

Jason Drohn — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 14:00:19 +0000

Today what we’re going to talk about is writing copy that sells – namely writing sales letters and sales videos. Here’s the reason why, so last week we talked a lot about lead generation. We talked a lot about lead funnels and bringing people into your world so that you’re able to market to them through email, through automation, through all of those ways that we tried to market to them.

This convo will be loosely based on this article on writing sales letters that convert…

Especially when you can’t meet with somebody face to face. My specialty really is in helping companies create inbound marketing flows, inbound marketing channels. You don’t ever have to do cold calling, you don’t ever have to do cold email if you have the right automated system that is bringing people to you day in and day out. That’s the idea of an automated inbound marketing sales funnel.

At the end of the day, that’s what we want. We want people to come in and give us their email addresses, and fill in an application or buy something or whatever. What we’re going to talk about today is this idea of sales copy.

This is an article that we wrote quite a couple of years ago, but basically, this is kind of going to be the basis of what we’re going to talk about today. So the first thing I want to cover is our sales assets. What we do when we are creating sales material, sales content, it comes as a number. It comes in a number of different shapes and sizes. The first is any written word that you write needs to have some sort of sales psychology and sales connotation to it. It has to.

You have to sell people, so your emails should be written in a way to move somebody closer to the thing you want them to do, which is buying something from you. Now your emails, your web pages, your landing pages, everything is written to insight an action. If it’s not written to insight in action, then it has no place being on your website because, at the end of the day, you were here to generate revenue. People come to your website looking for solutions for their problems. I mean, that’s literally what business is.

You have to move people in the direction of buying something from you. So that’s what your website does. Now, every page on your website needs to be written so that it is moving somebody closer to making a purchase decision.

However, there are a couple of pieces that are exceptionally important in this process. Anything sales-related, anything attached to a buy button, and add-to-cart button is super, super important. Writing copy that sells is a process – It needs to be architected in a way that basically makes people move through the sales copy and ultimately towards a purchase decision.

The webinars, sales videos, sales videos for your sales pages, and writing sales copy are what we call sales assets, sales material. Every single sales funnel has one of those assets. You literally cannot sell anything without having some piece of sales copy. You can’t just throw up a buy button and say, “Well, here’s a buy button. Maybe click it, maybe don’t, I don’t care. Whatever.” I mean, you’re not going to sell shit. That’s as simple as it is.

How does it work?

If you are promoting something that is $1,000 or more, a service, a product, a digital product, whatever, then you need to have a webinar. That webinar needs to move somebody through the buying cycle, through the buyer’s journey from being introduced to you and learning about you to delivering some content or value. Then ultimately, to buy something at the end, to transition into a sale.

If that sale is highly complex or highly expensive, then it needs to be sold on a sales call. If it is not complex or not expensive, then you can sell it from an add-to-cart button. So that’s the flow of a webinar.

Now the webinar needs to be 50 or 60 slides. Generally, if you have a very busy target market, then it’s going to be something that you can kind of shorten because people are busy. So they sign up, they sign up, they attend, whatever. So at the end of the day though, they move through this buyer’s journey online. Now on a sales video, so if it’s under a thousand dollars, then typically you need a couple of sales videos. You need a couple of ways to go about the sales process.

Sales videos

The sales videos on the sales page, need to be shorter. So oftentimes you’re going to find sales videos when you’re selling a book, when you’re selling a free plus shipping offer, when you’re selling something lower tickets and easier to understand, digital product, a couple of hundred bucks, a hundred bucks, $47, $12, whatever, it doesn’t matter.

But when it’s easy to understand and when it’s a lower ticket, then the sales video itself is kind of this little mini self-contained salesperson that is literally just chilling there waiting to sell people all fricking day long. That’s its goal. That’s what a sales video does. Now, sales videos, between four to six minutes is ideal. Now some people are like, “Whoa, but my videos are only 60 seconds,” whatever, makes them longer.

They need to go through, you need to go through a buyer’s journey and there’s a couple of things that you need to understand in terms of writing copy. The first is you need to know your audience, writing copy that sells, whether it’s writing a sales video or whether it’s writing a webinar.

You have to know who it is you’re marketing to. So you need to know what their fears are. You need to know what problem they are looking to solve, their motivations are and why they are seeking a solution. Now, this is never, ever, ever, ever more important than it is right now because everybody is scared.

Everybody has these deep-seated emotions. Everybody is wondering what the fuck to do tomorrow, and next week, and the next month, and how their situation, their problem, now, it’s blown to this whole other magnitude because they are working from their house, because they are fearful of losing their job, because of all of these other things.

Your target market is different. You know your target market. I mean, your target market, not only do they have these problems that they’re seeking solutions through, but they also have this, now that there’s another, there’s an added filter, which is Coronavirus, which is a fear, which is doubts and they always have those.

But now it’s just kind of blown through a whole nother magnitude. So knowing your audience, now you have to put that new frame on for your audience and say, “What does that person need? What do they need in order to understand how I am of value and how I’m able to benefit them right now. That’s who your audience is. You also need to know your channels. This is one of the things that you know, I really get on so much because Facebook, and Google, and all of the other ad platforms that we use, Google Search, all of the verticals that people come through.

Now think about your offer and those verticals when you’re understanding how people are finding you. All right, so here’s an example. Facebook. Facebook is an interruption-based marketing method. When somebody sees your ad, you are literally interrupting them from what they are doing. The hope is that your ad gives value to their day somehow or that your interest targeting, when you set up your ad is good enough, is close enough that they are actually entering.

You’re entering into the conversation that is going on in their brain. Do you know what I mean? Let’s say you’re promoting I don’t know, a 3D printer, let’s say because I have one sitting right here. Let’s say you’re promoting a 3D printer. Well the 3D printer that you put the ad on Facebook, obviously somebody who was interested in that 3D printer, they are techs.

They like 3D printing, IT and they like all of these other things. But when they’re scrolling through their newsfeed, listen, checking out all their family stuff, seeing who’s safe, seeing whatever. Then they see this ad for a 3D printer move up. You were interrupting, your 3D printer ad is interrupting them in the flow that they are in. It’s an interruption-based marketing method.

You actually, have to understand that you are going to be interrupting them so that you can create the ad that will effectively pre-frame your 3D printer so that people, when they click through the ad are going to buy your thing. So it’s a different way of understanding your verticals.

Now, compare that to Google. So Google, they are literally going to Google and typing in the search box, 3D printer comparison or best 3D printer or buy 3D printer now or two-day shipping 3D printer because they need to build respirators or whatever. They are looking for very, very specific, something 3D printing-related very, very specifically.

You know that that person is coming in. They are already pre-framed for what it is you’re buying. They’re already looking for it. They’re literally just looking for you to solve their problem or at least help them solve their problem. So that is the difference.

Google is search-based, Facebook is interruption-based, Pinterest interruption-base. So many of these social media channels are interruption-based. Amazon is search-based because people go to Amazon. Amazon is the number three search engine in the world for physical products. They go to Amazon actually looking for physical products, so they are looking to buy something. So search-based. So you need to understand your channels in order to work with them.

Now email traffic is interruption-based but they already opted in. So it’s more helpful than social because social, you just have an interest. With email, if they already opted in, then you know what they’re into. One of the things that we do in a lot of our sales funnels is we do surveys and we do chatbots so that we segment people into the buckets that they are most interested in.

We deliver the email marketing and deliver the marketing based on the buckets they’re in. So we get super granular as far as what we serve up based on what they want. Then content marketing is just an additional arm because people generally, they go from like a Google search engine to a blog post or content.

Then from there, you move, they move through your sales funnel. Now we’ve talked a little bit about this video sales letter versus a traditional sales letter. Your video sales letter a while ago, many, many years ago. The video sales letters created were created by a guy named John Benson. John Benson, basically he took the long copy sales approach, writing long copy sales letters.

He flipped it on its side. Then you end up going sideways. The whole reason of a video sales letter is so you control when the offer is going to be made. So typically with when writing copy that’s long… The long sales copy and sales letters… What happens is you start at the top here. I’m going to use my little blog post here as an example. You start at the top, you read the headlines. So tactical tips for writing copy that sells.

Your sales typically, your sales letters, if you watch a screen recording of how somebody interacts with the sales letter, they do this. They start at the top and then go here. Also, they read this sub-headline. They go here and read this sub-headline, maybe look at the image. Then they usually read the third one or sometimes they don’t. Then they go like this, all the way to the bottom and then they scroll up to see what the price is.

Now, this is a blog post, so there’s no price. They scroll up, they look for an add to cart button, see how much it is. Then they go down and look at the PS. So, in this case, our related articles are going to be our PS. They look at the PS. Typically all long-form sales letters kind of ended with a PS because it was a sales letter.

They read the PS, and then if they were intrigued by the offer, they would scroll all the way back up. Then they would read, they would go through line by line. How sales letters are engineered or how they were was a paragraph. You would have your paragraph and then sub-headline. Then every, so basically your headlines, the primary job of your headline was to get you to then read the subheadline.

The goal of the subheadline was to get you to read the next paragraph, which is usually the first body copy. So in that way, sales letters were engineered to get you reading all the way down the page, all the way.

There was all kinds of ways, there are all kinds of writing copy that uses the headlines to summarize the sales copy and then move them. So that if they’re reading kind of fast and just doing headlines, then they’re able to see what’s going on. So let’s see, maybe froze up here, might’ve overextended the platform a little bit.

But anyway, here, let me. Oh, there we go. All right, so it looks like I’m back on mine. I froze for a row. I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure if you guys got to see any of that. But anyway, so headline, subheadlines moving down the sales copy. So all in all, a nice way to get things done. Now, I’m going to flip back over here and then we’re going to flip back here. Okay, cool. So I think we’re good. I might’ve been a software glitch or it might’ve been, I don’t know, whatever.

Sales video, writing copy for sales, is meant to get you moving down the sales page so that you were. So you move ultimately all the way down into the add to cart button, to the buy button. Then from there, you’re able to purchase. Now sales videos came along so that every video was entered slide by slide by slide by slide. This strong call to action would be one slide. Then this line, oops. Then this line is one slide and then this line is one slide. We’re going to go find a sales video. Let’s see. This is a sales video on a black background. I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to hear this. All right, there we go. Let’s hit the little volume button.

Diversify your traffic chances with something long-term. If so, let me introduce you to a strategy that will send you 300% more leads than traditional outbound methods.

I’m not sure if you can hear that. But this is a true more traditional sales letter. Writing copy in video form, and then performing that video sales letter is a slide by slide by slide process. It’s a black background and white letters here. It’s actually on this page. So let me just replay this a little bit.

Or are you looking to diversify your traffic channels with something multiterm? If so, let me introduce you to a strategy that will send you 300% more leads than traditional.

Now, so that’s a true, more traditional video sales letter. There is no like fully qualified graphics in this one or not fully qualified graphics. There’s no like full-motion graphics in here. Whereas like on our sales funnel page, there is more. There’s an actual full-motion video in here. Let’s see, so this started as a sales video of a video sales letter.

Then I kind of dubbed in myself and then 50 pounds heavier. Then I dubbed in a B roll video on top of that. So through a lot of testing, we actually kind of proof for the most case, in most situations, the sales videos that start with the VSL and then you throw in there. There are simple PowerPoint-based presentations. After you get done writing a copy for the presentation, you just slide, and then you just slide by slide by slide by slide, just read and read and read. Then from there you, you add in B roll on top of it or you add in like a talking human. Then it adds to the conversion. It adds to the number of people who are watching that sales video.

That has worked out really, really, really well a, from a conversion standpoint. I think mostly because people, get bored easily. Literally, if you’re just watching slide by slide by slide, it’s just like really?

Okay. You couldn’t try harder than that? I mean nowadays it’s like we all have stronger cameras in our pockets better cameras in our pockets than when video sales letters first came out six years ago or seven or eight years ago or whatever, longer than that, might’ve been 10 now. PowerPoint screen recording was about as good as we were going to do. It was funny, Sebastian was running around here with like an iPhone 3. I turned it in, I charged it up and gave it to him. The screen is like this big, it’s so small. So it’s just crazy. So writing copy… Video sales letters versus traditional sales letters, you want to have a video sales letter, it’s going to increase conversions. There’s actually a blog post and a video on how to actually create video sales letters on Done For You.

Let me see if I can, let’s see if I can just find it real quick. You can drop a link in here. So yeah, what is a video sales letter? Look at that. So I’m posting this, what is a VSL? Okay. So I just dropped that to everybody so you don’t have to go looking for it. Did it get out? Yeah, it went everywhere. It even went to YouTube that second time. Very cool. So let’s see. Your headline should be the most compelling part. So headlines are always the first thing we test in sales videos.

Always, always, always the first thing we split test as a headline. So that’s super important. Personalized content also works nicely, sometimes with the marketing, with marketing automation, so depending on the platform that you are on, like Ontraport or there are a couple of WordPress plugins that can actually dynamically add somebody’s first name or last name into it.

NOTE: If you’d like a deep dive into writing sales copy that converts, and building entire funnels around it, check out our Funnel Formula Course!

You can add dates, you can add certain contents and certain things based on who was actually watching or who was looking at the contents. Also, you also as the product owner, as the business owner, want to share your own personal stories. You want to share some things that give you humanity I guess.

They show just your personal side. I mean, at the end of the day, that’s kind of the big thing about social media is just being real, being honest. So use your words carefully. Then make sure to include benefits and calls to action.

The benefits are really pretty, benefits in your sales video. So one of the best tricks that I learned when it comes to having features and benefits is you always want to. This camera sucks. You always want to make sure that every qualifying statement has a so. Do you see? Your feature and benefit, your feature is always going to be the thing before so, and your benefits going to be the thing after so. For instance, I say so all the time. I think it’s because I’m a copywriter, it’s just how it works. See? Then when you call attention to it, you’re like, “What the fuck?”

But anyway, I was going to say it again. We launched an ebook called the Funnel Factor over the weekend. And it was just something that I had been working on and finally got around to it. Then we basically took this 19-page ebook that had four funnels in it and we expanded it to 274 pages. So if you go to … I’m sure you’re going to see an ad for it because we’ve had ads in emails and all of that other stuff up.

The 270-page funnel factor ebook, so you can get better at building your own sales funnels, so feature 274-page ebook. The benefit is you can get better at running your own sales funnels, the cutting edge automated webinar funnel format that we use to launch clients so you can sell your high ticket programs and products on-demand, whatever, or the six to eight-page lead magnet strategy we pioneered.

You can attract more people onto your lead mat, whatever. So you have feature, so benefit. It’s nice and compact that way. Literally, every single feature needs to have a so, or else it is not a feature and benefit, it’s just a feature. Features don’t connect with your end-users. So you want to make sure that you include a so everywhere. So include the benefits.

Strong calls to action. Now, this, the call to action is the thing that I find most … So many people just kind of glossing through and skipping out on it because it’s uncomfortable and weird. So the call to action changes depending on how expensive or how complex your product is, your sales videos, your webinars, whatever. Each of them is going to have a call to action. Your landing pages are going to have a call to action. If you have a low-ticket product, the call to action is literally always going to click the button below to add your item to the shopping cart. It’s always going to be the call to action. But there are lots of calls to action, so if you remember, we talked about micro-actions in a podcast.

Every single time that you want somebody to do anything, you have to make a call to action. So if you want to have them watch a video, you have to make the call to action. Click here to watch the video. If you want them to download your podcast, click here to download your podcast. If you want them to download a lead magnet or buy anything or book a call or whatever, you always have to get them to have some sort of a call to action. You need to make that call to action to them. So the two biggest calls to action that we use that are for revenue are of course add to cart or click to book a strategy session or click to book an action plan call or a discovery call or whatever. So that is kind of our fully qualified lead format.

The call to action on your sales video is either going to click the button below to add this widget to your shopping cart. Click the button below to add to the cart, click the button below to get started now or whatever, or it is going to click the button below to book a strategy session on my call or on my calendar. So that’s it. That’s really all there is to it.

Transitioning to the call to action is actually pretty easy. On a webinar, you recap the content. Even in a sales video, recap the content and then you put a stick in the sand and say, this is the transition. This is how we’re going to move from where we were the content to where we’re going, which is going to be selling you some shit.

Once we put the stick in the sand and then we transition into that content action. The transition is usually something like if you’re an enterprising business owner who has something of value to offer to the world, click the button below and get my super duper awesome digital video package for $997. There’s a 30-day free trial or a 30-day money-back guarantee or whatever.

I mean obviously, it’s going to be engineered more than that. As for writing copy – I don’t write quite the way that maybe some other people can. I can type it like crazy, which involves editing and backspaces. So your call to action needs to be apparent. It needs to do something and it needs to move people in the right direction. So never stop split testing your sales pages is going to be the next piece.

Your sales letters, whether it’s a sales video, whether it’s a webinar, whether it’s webinar registration, whatever. Never ever, ever stop split testing your sales letters. They are paramount in the success of your business. It will grow and transform and everything with your business.

If you split test your headline first and you have five or six different headlines that you’re trying, then it will work out. Then you’re going to find a winner. Well, generally what you do is you move on to the next thing. You split test the next thing. How we do it is we test headlines and then we test sub-headlines. Then we test images and buttons. Buttons are a big one, so a button being green or a button being orange. We’ve even tried red and black.

Red and black don’t ever work. So don’t, don’t do those. But red or orange and green, both solid button colors, will outperform each other depending on the, on the case. Headlines, sub-headlines, buttons, images if there’s no video. If there is video, it’s going to be headline, video,sub-headline, buttons typically. So that’s our testing procedure.

As soon as you go through the whole thing, you redo it, you test the headlines again, then you test. So you go through when you never ever stop testing the sales letters, the sales pages. One of the reasons why you never stop is because you never actually get the winner. There are landing pages that I have literally tested. So this landing page, let’s see if I can find it real quick.

It’s not always writing copy either… Sometimes split testing other things about a page is what will drive conversions.

Which window do I have up? Okay, cool. So sources is it? This landing page type right here. Oh, so this is that funnel, the 274-page book I was talking about that I just rereleased. It’s free. SYu can go ahead and download it. This sales page, I’ve literally tested 37 times. Everything from buttons to this background, sub-headline to these sub-headlines to these. This is always the format that wins. The last test that I did, I actually increased this font size to font size 18 and it tested a couple of percents better. But this format works tremendously well. Am I? Oops, you’re not seeing my screen again. There it is. So this format, now, this is where that ebook is.

Let me just throw it in here so you can check it out. So here’s the ebook. This ebook is an absolute monster, so definitely download it if you are the least bit interested in selling more shit online. So that’s the funnel factory book. But this landing page, I’ve split tested, as I said, I’ve split tested, Navbar, no Navbar logo, no logo, logo, sub-headlines, headlines, images. I even had like the little 3D graphic image and this one tested better than that. So not this particular one, but generally the flat images test better anymore. So just something to think about.

Now I’m split testing your winning sales letter. So that brings us to the end of this blog post. You’re winning a sales letter, writing copy that converts is the thing that works. I mean literally, that’s really about all it is. The sales letter that you have that is … You writing copy that converts more people than not that is going to be the sales letter that you continue to test and continue to try to refine and do better and everything else.

That’s the idea of writing copy that sells. So your sales copy should never be done. You should always be writing copy variations and testing them against the best versions of your sales letters. It should never be finished. You should always try to do better than what’s up there. Even if that means only testing to a very small group of people, so 10% or 20% of the traffic that is hitting your webpage, then goes off into this new sales video.

They buy or they don’t buy it. That way you’re not, you’re not killing your main core business by testing. By testing this new thing. You are very simply testing with just a small portion of the traffic that is, that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The more and more and more split tests that you do, the longer or the more dialed in your sales letter is going to be.

It’s not just the page, you want to split test the sales copy, you want to split test the webinar. The one thing I will say about the webinars is you want to make sure to have enough people go through it. You can’t have a hundred to 150 people go through a webinar and then call it bad or call it even good. With a webinar, there’s a substantial amount of time and energy and work that goes into it.

The webinar itself, like we use Wistia so that you can see the video metrics, how people drop off of a webinar. If there is a lull around minute 14 or whatever, then if there’s a lull around minute 14, then you know that you said something wrong on the webinar too. They’re just not able to, maybe they disagreed with it or whatever. They ended up logging off.

Adam just wrote in with a comment, “If I’m going to test, do I need separate ads or can I have a redirect for 10% of the traffic somehow?” So, there are split testing tools that you can have a redirect.

One of the ones that we use is Inspect Lit, which does screen recording and split testing. The screen recording might be a little odd for you because you’re a lawyer. So it might be … Check this out. The other one we like is VWO, which is split testing software. Here. I wasn’t sharing my screen again. So VWO, very, very nice split testing software. What this does is it lets you … There are two different types of split tests, AB split tests. So the AB split tests, you have two pages. You split the test side by side. You can say 95% goes to one and 5% goes to the other. Writing copy for the split tests? Sometimes all you need to do is change out a headline or subheadline!

Then if the 5% wins, then you can redirect all traffic to 5%. Then you can start another split test, split test B. Inspect Lit does the same. It does AB testing, but you will also get the addition of screen recording software. Screen recording is super nice if you just want to see how somebody interacts with a page.

It actually takes a screen recording of how people are moving through it. So these are the two tools that we like. VWO, Inspect Lit. The other one doesn’t do split testing but is super, super nice for just analytics-wise Hot Jar. So Hot Jar is, they do screen recordings, they do heat maps, they do even like this cool sale funnel flow so you can see people as they move through the sales funnel. So does that help? Cool.

Automate Your Sales Process >> Click Here!

The post How To Write A Copy That Sells appeared first on Done For You.

Best Strategies in Automated Selling

Jason Drohn — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 14:00:47 +0000

In today’s presentation, we’re going to talk about four sales funnel strategies that will help automate your sales online. Starting from relatively unsophisticated and low front-end product sales funnels, all the way up to higher-end sales funnel strategies like coaching or consulting or masterminds or whatever. So just to kind of reiterate some of the ground rules from the stuff we did yesterday.

The idea of this live stream is pretty simple, it’s to keep you actionable and moving forward no matter what is happening outside your house, or your office, or your doors, or whatever. It’s to give you the tools you need to move forward. And you can go ahead check-in, and just leave a question, and then I will try to answer it on the next show.

Everything we talk about in this Livestream is stuff that we do. You know, stuff we do for clients, or it’s stuff that we help clients with. A lot of marketing, a lot of sales, a lot of paid traffic. We don’t really do any SEO, but I mean internally we do SEO, ad we know of those SEO strategies.

If it lives online, we probably have dealt with it in the past. And the purpose is really just to answer the stuff, the most burning question that is going to get you over the next hurdle so that you can continue moving. You know, selling your stuff online, moving your business online, transitioning online.

There will be swearing. I said this yesterday and I don’t think I swore at all, but GSD stands for Get Shit Done. Let’s see. And if you need anything at all, just go to doneforyou.com, I’ll drop my contacts in. There’s a chat box in the lower right-hand corner, so just connect with me there and we’ll kind of get started.

We are going to talk about sales funnel strategies. So there’s basically two different ways to create automated sales funnel strategies, or there are two different areas, really. I mean, so the two points that is going to differentiate what kind of sales funnel that you are offering. The first is the price.

If you have a high ticket product, if it’s something over a thousand dollars or something that is a longer contract, then your sales methodology, your sales system, your sales framework basically needs to bond, or it needs to connect with that prospect on a deeper level than something that is, let’s say a digital course or an ebook or something simple, you know, a physical product, whatever.

The other side is complexity. So if your thing is highly complex, then, of course, you’re going to need to explain it better for a prospect. And I actually have a little, I wrote this out, you’re going to see this in a lead magnet coming up, but let’s see right there. So basically your price and your complexity are on two different axes. And what that means is that the higher your price is, the more you need to have a personal high touch interaction with them.

If you’re selling a coaching product, or a consulting product, or a mastermind, or something that is highly complex and higher priced, then you’re going to need to sell it on a sales call. And the best way to basically move somebody from just learning about who you are to signing up for a sales call is to basically position it on the automated webinar.

You go through the webinar, you generate the lead because of the webinar, you bond with the prospect on that webinar, and then your call to action on the webinar is to jump on a consultative coaching call, an action plan called, a strategy session, however, you want to term it. You’re going to be getting on the phone with this person for 30-35 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever and pitching on the phone. And it might be a one call close, it might be two or three or four calls, you know, with an invoice and all of that other stuff. But you’re still going to be pitching on the phone.

This is where your salespeople come in, phone teams come in, all of that stuff. But basically what you’re doing is you’re taking your inbound leads, your inbound processes, they’re coming in, they’re attending a webinar. On the webinar, they are learning about you. They are learning something. They have a couple of aha moments, and they’re taking away some sort of good valuable content.

The transition for the pitch at the end is to sign up for a call with you. So that’s how you sell and automate in pitch, high ticket programs, high ticket products, high ticket consulting, whatever. And it’s not just high ticket, it’s also the complex stuff.

If you have a $50,000 mastermind, then, of course, you are going to need to relate that mastermind with your prospect in order for them to buy it. It’s not something you can just drop a sales letter, throw up a sales letter and say, “Here,” you know, set up your payment terms and then you’re part of the group. You know, obviously, you’re going to need to connect your offer with that person. And that is done online. Or that is done on the phone.

In the next phase, actually, I’m going to switch over to my screen here. And I have a little… Let’s see, see if I can pull this up. I did it yesterday, so let’s see if I can do it again. So I’m going to share my screen, and we’re going to click this guy. All right, so you should be seeing my screen right now.

I went through, kind of drew up these things, drew up these presentations, and they’re on my iPad. So we’re going to kick through these things live and you should be seeing them okay, you should be seeing them on the screen right now. So, there we go. All right, so four automated selling strategies, you like it?

The first one is the webinar sales funnel. And what we have here is the base architecture for that webinar sales funnel strategy. So whenever we’re looking at building stuff, you know from a price standpoint, the higher ticket products, and the more complexity means we’re going to need to get that lead from the webinar.

I’m just going to draw on this thing, see how this works out. So social traffic would be Facebook and LinkedIn, and then we have our re-targeted traffic. This is going to be a company that we use is called, AdRoll, adroll.com. And then we have PPC, which is Google. And then we have blog traffic and this is going to be all of your content marketing. Blogging, SEO, all of that stuff.

Basically, all of that is going to feed into this free lead magnet, usually. All right, we just lost our feed there. So all of that is going to feed into… I hit the back arrow, I’m left-handed, so I’m not real good at this just yet.

So all that is going to feed into a free report, or an ebook, or chapters or whatever. You know, basically this an advertorial, even we use here. But basically this, a lot of times it’s just going to give somebody the immediate gratification of whatever it is we’re looking to give them. It’s going to send them to the webinar registration page.

We also run traffic directly to the webinar registration page, where they sign up. Now once they’re on the webinar, then the webinar does three things really, really, really well. So it does lead generation, it also does bonding. It does bonding for you. So you’re able to relate to folks, you’re able to relate to people who are coming in, and then it sells better than pretty much anything else.

Selling from a conversion standpoint is way higher than any sales video that you’re going to put together. So on the webinar, the call to action here. The call to action is really, there are two different ways to kind of cut up the call to action. If you’re high ticket, and highly complex, then this is going to be going to a strategy session. And if you are high ticket and there isn’t a lot of complexity, so if it’s a digital course or whatever, it’s going to be going to an add to cart button, ATC. Add to cart button.

On the call to action, you’re either going to be going through a strategy session or an add to cart button, and then whoever buys is going to be triggered into the fulfillment sequence. And then you have lots of little things down below. We have emails to basically move them through the sales funnel strategy into the next action. So if somebody signs up for the webinar but then doesn’t take action, they don’t do the thing that we want them to do, which would be the strategy session or the add to cart, then we try to get them to do that through email marketing.

We’re always moving them to the next phase. So that is how we put together these automated webinar sales funnels. Now we’re going to kick back over to me, and we’re going to see, there we go. We’re going to kick back over here. All right. Now, we’re going to stop sharing our screen. We’re going to start sharing with me again. All right, perfect.

Automated webinars, that’s how we do automated webinars, basically walking through the entire system. Now the next kind of automated webinar funnel is if you have a price, a moderate price, so a price of let’s say a digital course that’s $597, $997, you know, even $1,997 so something between like $500 and $2,000, then it’s too expensive to sell on like a straight-up sales video, sales page.

You know, it’s just too expensive. You know, somebody’s not going to watch a 20 or 30-minute video and then spend $1,000 on a course without knowing who you are, without any kind of bonding, unless they were really warm unless they’re coming from a warm list and they know who you are, what you do, what you stand for, what your business is, they know your brand, then they might drop $1,000 after just one single solitary video.

So what we do is we put together these multi-video launch sequences, and Jeff Walker came up with a product launch formula like 14 years ago, or 10 years, something. He’s done a lot of launches with it. And we have put these multi-video launch sequences in place for a number of clients.

Basically, how this product launch system works is you have three videos, and each of those videos is between eight and 12 minutes long, and then they move from video one to video two to video three, and then ultimately to the pitch video, which is video four usually. Sometimes there’s an automated webinar in it. But what it does is it kind of systematically moves prospects through the sales cycle quickly on autopilot, and it alleviates the need for a sales call, usually.

Although sometimes people do kind of put the sales calls in towards the end of the buying cycle for those who are in process, but they’re just not, they haven’t jumped yet. So we’ve seen it, we’ve done it, you know, that kind of thing in the past and it’s worked out pretty well. So let’s kick over into the screen share here, and we are going to look at that.

This one is a little bit bigger, as you can see. So here we have the expanded architecture of the product launch formula. So if we just go back here, product launch funnel. Then our expanded architecture, I got some Facebook traffic, re-targeted the email list. Solo ads we do here and there, affiliates sometimes, but, you know, basically when somebody is going to be sending your product promo out, and they get paid a commission.

Other traffic is basically anybody else. But our big ones are Facebook traffic, re-targeted traffic, and email list. Product launches work really, really well when you have some sort of data when you have an email list already. So these, typically they go to a free report, everything kicks into a free report or some sort of a landing page, which then gives them access to the rest of this content.

If done well, these videos are positioned like a mini-course or a mini class. So video one goes through, then it sends some email, just switched my colors there, and then it kicks into video two. Video two kicks into video three, video three kicks into the launch video or the sales video. Now oftentimes you will see on the bottom of this launch video and the subsequent ones, there is what is called a waiting list. Oops. So the waiting list.I keep doing that. We’re going to draw.

The waiting list down here first is a front in line to the sales video when the sales video launches. And oftentimes you’ll actually see the waiting list. The waiting list will trigger this video to drop early, and then it will just kind of slingshot these folks all the way through. So they’ll go from launch video two, to launch video three, to launch sales video.

Sometimes if you do it right, you can actually compress this buying cycle into hours or even days. Like we’ve done this through a weekend. This email sequence, it goes out one, goes out email two, goes out email three. So we go launch video one, and then this goes out day one, and then this reminder goes out day two, and this reminder goes out day three, and then day four is when this one goes live. Your launch video basically moves people through. But with the waiting list, you can kick them through this series nice and quick.

Now some of the expanded ways, you know, some of the additional things that people do, they’ll do like a Q&A webinar here, there’ll be an offer close. So the product launch will actually close on a specific day, which is nice because then you get that last-minute pop of urgency.

When the sales video goes live, so I’m just going to change colors here. When the sales video goes live, you get a bunch of sales, probably 25 to 30% of your sales are going to come in that first day. And then the remaining 25 or 30% are going to come in that last day, sometimes even 50% and the rest of them are kind of going to be dripped through here. So most of your sales are going to come in the first and the last day.

Then when we set these up for clients, we always say, “Okay, now we just generated a huge list through affiliates or through paid traffic or whatever. So what else can we sell them?” Here’s affiliate offer one, affiliate offer two, three and four, and then you know, you go down your content marketing list.

That’s how these funnels typically work out. So we’re going to kick back to the camera again. All right, so we’re going to stop sharing our screen and here we are again and my camera did something funny. So that any better? Testing one, two. Maybe, maybe. All right. Either way, it doesn’t matter.

All right, so that is the product launch funnel. And then the last funnel, and kind of the, it’s not the most generic, but the one we end up tweaking the most is a video sales letter funnel or a sales video funnel.

This is your low price funnel but is also low complexity. So a membership or free trial for a software, a book, a free plus shipping book you know, anything that is usually below a couple hundred bucks. Then what we do is we just have a sales video and the sales video has an add to cart right underneath. And then from there, they go into usually an upsell sequence.

It makes it really nice, it makes it really flexible. There’s lots of different stuff that you can do with it. All in all, it’s just a nice funnel for mixing and matching and doing some other stuff. We’re going to kick back over into the screen, and we’re going to see what else we got here.

We have one of our sales funnels. This is a fully qualified lead sales funnel, which we’re going to talk about quickly. Then we have our free plus shipping VSL funnel, and then we have our VSL sales funnel with upsells.

VSL sales funnel with upsells, we’re going to kick into this guy. Generally, we have Facebook traffic or Instagram traffic. It goes into some sort of a landing page or an advertorial. If we have an email list, we’ll also use an email list. We’ll use retargeting lists if some website stuff is already up. If we’re already getting traffic to our website, then we’ll target that. We’ll use that and then retarget those people into the front side of the sales funnel.

We always go through some sort of a landing page or an advertorial, usually just to simply pre-frame the offer. If you look at any big media buyers, they’re using an advertorial in some way. A lot of the times because the offer can switch and the advertorial doesn’t… The offer can switch. So here’s an example. Let’s say you’re promoting a supplement, that supplement.

You know, if you’re promoting a supplement as a CPA, as a CPA affiliate, then you are running traffic through a landing page or an advertorial. Then if that offer goes away, you can always switch it out, so it’s just a link on a webpage and there are 7 million diet pills, so you can literally just switch, swap it out to a different diet pill, and then you’re up and running again. So you don’t sacrifice your business model and your traffic and your revenue and all that other stuff.

That’s one of the reasons why advertorials work really well. The other thing they do is a well-written advertorial that actually helps the sales video convert higher. Even though this is kind of a bridge, it’s a bridge between like here and then the sales video. It will pre-frame a buyer so that the people who click through are predisposed to buy more. That’s the idea behind this landing page or advertorials.

Sometimes the landing page is a lead magnet, a report, a video even, you know, but sometimes it’ll be nothing and we end up just teasing whatever’s in the sales video and say, “Hey,” you know, “Click here, fill in the opt-in box and we’re going to show you three secrets to lose weight fast,” or something. So not that, because that would never get approved anywhere, but you know what I mean.

The sales video, then once they buy, they go through upselling one, and then they go upsell two, upsell three, down sell one, down sell two, whatever. And then they go into fulfillment and then ultimately they end up in like a member’s fulfillment email sequence, or a buyer’s fulfillment email sequence, whatever. And then we have marketing automation emails that help move them through the process as they go. So all-in-all, nice simple flow. And this sales funnel strategy works in a variety of different scenarios.

This is a different one that we actually use. So this is a free plus shipping VSL funnel. Same kind of thing. You know, the difference here is that we run paid traffic to sometimes an advertorial, but mostly to a sales video that is a free plus shipping offer. The free plus shipping offer normally has like an eight or 9% conversion, which means eight or 9% of people who are going through are seeing upsell one, and then this upsell, you know, there are lots of different ways to price these upsells.

But, you know, typically the first upsell might be $37, the second one might be $97, the third one might be $297, whatever. So many of different ways to do that. And then the one that we like a lot, that we’ve been building a lot of lately, is this free qualified lead VSL funnel, or fully qualified lead VSL funnel. It same kind of scenario, but you’ll notice this is a fully qualified lead VSL promo page.

We still run paid traffic, email list, re-targeted traffic into an advertorial sometimes, or this fully qualified lead VSL. And what this is, is basically it’s a simple page that is a video, and then we have a conditional logic form down below. That conditional logic form depending on what fields you add in, expands, and then it also sends traffic to a variety of different places.

This might be provider one, provider two, provider three, or it might be offered one, offer two, offer three. One of the things that we do with these oftentimes is different SKUs, different product lines, whatever. We can also run marketing automation based on what they select here. So this might be like in our Done For You case, sales funnels, it might be ad management, might be content marketing.

We can start sending the emails that are most likely to get this person to take action. So that’s the idea behind these fully qualified lead sales funnels. We’ve run this particular format for mortgage brokers. We have run it for real estate pros, we’ve run it for any kind of service organization. Works tremendously well.

NOTE: We’ve got a full blown course on how to build sales funnels here!

In fact, Done For You is entirely built using this model as of right now. You know basically working with providers and staff. I think that’s all about the sales funnel strategies that we had. So we had our webinar sales funnel, we had our launch sales funnel, we had a free quote, fully qualified leads, and all of that stuff. So we’re good there.

All right, so I think we’re going to stop sharing our screen now, and then we screw it up again. We may have screwed it up. So we’ve got five minutes left. And just to answer some of the questions that have come in through the presentation. So first of all, your coaching, consulting, mastermind kind of offers, do you need to have a sales call? Yes, you do.

Unfortunately, relating your offer to the end-user to your prospect is going to be key in closing the deals. Your webinar is the highest converting sales medium there is. Having a webinar that pitches a strategy session or some sort of a similar call to action. That is going to be paramount in selling your high-end thing. It beats the hell out of going business development reps who are calling. They’re cold calling, you’re buying lists, you’re opening them a phone book. Then kicking through all of the leads you can find.

With this model, all interested parties raise their hand and say, “Yes, I want what you do.”. They attend a webinar. As long as they’re good with webinars, they like the webinar. They like you, they like the content, there’s been a couple of aha moments. Then they’re going to sign up as a lead for the sales call, for the strategy session.

From there, it’s up to you to relate your offer to them, to close them. It’s going to take some practice. I get it. You can do sales scripts and phone scripts and all that other stuff. At the end of the day, you need to be approachable, relatable, and you need to work them through your offer.

Now the other scenarios, your product launch formula and product launch funnel, your VSL funnel. Those are very automated methods of sales. BAt the end of the day, everything comes back to the sales funnel and the copy of the material itself. The emails that are going out, the sales copy that’s going out, like all that stuff. You know your product launch videos, they need to be on point.

Your VSL needs to be on point because if those automated videos, if there’s anything about those videos that they don’t like, they very simply won’t buy because then, I mean it’s not like you can jump in and say, “Hey wait, wait, wait, you know,” and try to save the sale because they’re just gone. You can save the sale using conversational chat now, or chatbots or there are some things that you can do to save those sales sometimes, which is actually probably a pretty cool topic for another video. The conversational chat piece.

By and large, these four types of sales funnel strategies are going to get you moving in the direction you want to. Basically, move your client acquisition, your lead process online, your sales process online. If there’s anything that we can do, just go to doneforyou.com, fill in the forms, click the button, there’s a little chat version on the right-hand side.

Here we go, let’s see what this does. If you’d like a custom action plan put together for your business, click here. That was pretty cool. I set up another one here too. To learn more about launching one of these sales funnels go to doneforyou.com. I will talk to you soon. I’ll talk to you tomorrow at 10:00 AM the same place, same time, and if there’s anything I can do, just let me know. All right.

Automate Your Sales Process >> Click Here!

The post Best Strategies in Automated Selling appeared first on Done For You.

SaaS Email Marketing Tips That Generate Great Subscription Revenue

Jason Drohn — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 17:55:54 +0000

Watch The Video >>

If you thought SaaS email marketing has become a thing of the past, think again. According to statistics – for every $1 spent on email marketing companies the ROI comes out to be $38!

You can see for yourself why email marketing should still be part of your business marketing strategy. But just in case you are unsure of how to utilize the power of email marketing for your business we are going to share some simple tips on the topic.

Let us get straight to the win-win SaaS marketing tips you need to grow your business...

Use the power of words

It is quite obvious that when we are talking about emails we are talking about written content, and, this is what you need to focus on. Creating powerful emails requires more than just using clever words, it requires expertise.

Do not simply go with a predefined template when creating a SaaS email marketing campaign for a new product because it’s a bit too obvious for the readers to figure out. It leaves the impression that you don’t value them because you didn't even take the time to write the email. Instead, try to personalize your email marketing campaigns so that the users feel valued.

Be short, concise, and crisp when drafting your email messages. Rather than putting long stories, stick to what needs to be said in the minimum possible words. Let the email do the magic!

If you’d like help crafting your email copy, make sure you check out Scriptly’s Autoresponder Engine. There are 28+ complete autoresponder campaigns already loaded up for you there, and you can start for free! With 72 days worth of email messages already inside Scriptly, you will never run out of ideas for your SaaS email marketing campaigns.

Set the frequency right

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make with their SaaS email marketing endeavor is bombarding the customer with the same boring emails, over and over. They shoot out too many emails without any plan or strategy and end up losing the customer forever because they overwhelmed them.

If you don’t want to be part of that league you need to set the frequency of emails right. For instance, sending one email per day is considered to be the best in terms of getting the users to act on the emails.

Therefore, it should be obvious that you need to create the right campaigns and automation that'll fire up your email marketing for SaaS growth, in a way that entices the customer to read them, rather than letting the emails go in the spam folder and then deleting them.

A/B test

One easy way to figure out what has proven to be the best strategy for you in terms of SaaS email strategy and email marketing can be A/B testing different email campaigns. A simple change in the subject line could save you thousands of dollars by increasing the click-through rate.

Test for colors, graphics, subject line content and whatever design elements you can change in order to figure out the right combination of things that work for your SaaS business. After all, at the end of the day it is putting together all these elements of an email that are going to be needed to create an impactful result.

It’s not just about using the right words – you need to stick to the right word length as well; over-lengthy and extensively promotional emails have become obsolete. You need to create actionable emails with minimum content and the right blend of graphics so that it captures the eye of the users. A rule of thumb to stick to is to keep the length of the email under 130 words. This has been tested to be the most effective word count.

P.S. – don’t forget to use the right call to action words in the email to make it enticing.

Follow up

Not following up with customers, but instead assuming they aren't interested, is a huge mistake businesses are making with their email marketing campaigns.

A gentle reminder that you are here to solve their problem can be the best way to swoop them over towards your business. Rather than leaving them in the middle of the sales cycle, continue to follow up with them with different emails that guide them on the sales path.

Keep popping up in their inbox with reasons they should be enticed towards your product/service. This will serve as a reminder that you are there to solve their problem, and you never know when they might turn out to become your most loyal customer.

But by all means, consider the importance of timing when sending follow up emails.

The most successful time is to wait at least 7 days in between emails. But never fear, you can A/B test that as well to see which timeframe works out for your business the best.

Automate

Ready to walk the extra mile? Use email marketing automation to put your follow up emails and drip campaigns on autopilot.

Effective email marketing for SaaS companies is all about sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

With the right email marketing automation software, not only can you do email marketing for SaaS companies 24/7 without having a dedicated person to do it, but also you can customize your email blasts to take into account the customer segment or stage of the buyer's journey.

If you’d like a hand in getting an automated email campaign or a sales funnel set up, schedule a call and we can work through it!

Proofread thoroughly

Poorly written content leaves the worst impression; it shows your lack of commitment towards the customer. That is NOT the impression you want to leave.

This is the reason you need to make it a point that the email is thoroughly proof-read before it is being sent to the customers. You cannot afford to make any silly grammatical or logical errors in the content of the email; you cannot afford to leave a bad impression.

At the end of the day, it’s all about making a spectacular first impression. You cannot expect an email with mistakes in it to make a good impression, but you can bet on it driving potential customers away.

Keep experimenting

Simply put, email marketing is all about trying to come up with new ways to garner more sales. In order to achieve optimal sales with email marketing, it is imperative to keep coming up with innovative ways and new email marketing ideas to wow your customers.

Continue to experiment and you may find that idea which might prove to be the best time and resource investment you could ever make. After all, it is only by experimenting with different styles that you will be able to find the right combination that works best for you.

Before you go, remember that…

Remember, there are more than 2 billion active email users throughout the world, a large chunk of which may already be interested in your niche. By using the power of words and creating an impactful email marketing strategy for your SaaS business, you can eventually sell your product efficiently, entice potential customers and take your business sales to the next level.

But for that to happen, you need to focus on email marketing as your go-to option. Are you ready to do that? If the answer is a yes (and there is no reason for it to be anything else), then get going with the creation of content; write your emails in a way that you will make the customer fall in love with your SaaS business!

Watch The Video >>

Video transcript:

Today I want to talk about email marketing tips for SAAS businesses or email marketing strategies for SAAS businesses.

Now, SAAS is a very different animal than what a lot of people realize. And we have launched six SAAS offers for ourselves internally, and then we've launched many for clients.

It's just a different wheelhouse than digital products or coaching offers or consulting.

The business model in digital products, coaching, consulting, all of that is basically you're selling promises, you're selling features and benefits.

When someone is buying this course, joining a coaching program, signing up for this mastermind, they are going to be able to transform their life into x, y, and z.

With SAAS. you're basically selling solutions.

So the solution, therefore, is you're able to do this faster, cheaper, quicker, you know, less, with less headaches, you know. So you're selling those features and benefits you're not you're not necessarily selling or promising those end results, what you're selling access is what you're selling.

So your email, just these, these take on a different tone. I mean, depending on what you're selling, you're you're using an automated webinar, you're using demo calls, you're using, you know, sales pages that have a 14 day free trial or a seven day free trial, you might be selling annual.

So there's a lot of different ways that you can go about selling, you know, but the language that you're going to use in email marketing, you want to always step them through the funnel, step them through your funnel. So when you know everything is kind of getting them to take that next action.

They hit your website, then they opt-in for a demo, they opt-in for a free report, they're becoming a lead. And the only thing you get is their email address. So what the next action that we want them to do, we want them to then take a step, take the next step with our company, we want them to show up to book a call, you know, in our calendar, we want them to apply to become a member or a customer, all of the email needs to be geared towards those things.

We want them to take the next step, once they sign up for the demo call and actually attend the demo.

Then we want you know, the email messages to reflect actually becoming, you know, a paid customer after the 14 day trial after the 30 day trial, whatever, you know, or if they are, you know, they're in the software, they're in the platform.

We want to send them videos and send them reminders and send them training and tutorials on how to get the most out of the software online. on, you know, all of the onboarding things that they need to be aware of, in order to, you know, take make best use of the software.

The interesting thing was asked to is because it's a monthly business model, usually your email should be coinciding with their rebuilds, you know, so you need to deliver some serious value.

If you have a 14 day trial, you need to deliver serious value on day 12. And day 13. You know, so because they're opening their email, they might be logging in.

They know, they probably have written it down in their calendar when the trial is up, and they've probably written down in their calendar when their first rebill is going to be a couple days before. If you notice, if you like, questioned the support department. You almost every single SAAS company we've worked with about 28 days into the rebuild two days, two days before the rebuild. Except to go, then they get a flurry of unsubscribe on subscription requests or cancel requests.

It doesn't seem like that because everybody's rebuilding it a different day. But when you actually look at it, you know, everybody is always dropping off, you know, with two days or one day left of the rebill. So in, you know, I don't, in my calendar, have recurring reminders of when I'm going to get billed for things, but I know a lot of customers do that.

So give value whenever you're about to rebuild them. Some of the other you know, some of the other ideas, thoughts, split test, your email split test your subject lines, the biggest, the biggest driver of email is the subject lines themselves.

So you want to make sure that those so you're split-testing subject lines, they're opening those subject lines, you want to have good solid follow up campaigns whenever we work with a client, we always pre-plan the first 30 days of email that's going to go out to a client, depending on what they do, you know, so how do we get them to go from a prospect to like a demo lead to a paying buyer?

And then how do we keep them, you know, in the mix long term, so it's something you're going to want to think about.

Automation is also something you're going to want to do. One of the best ways to automate is is based on URL pageviews.

So if somebody goes to a page, like let's say they log into your software dashboard, well, then they should be removed from all prospect campaigns and put into your onboarding campaign immediately. You know, or if they sign up as a member, if they sign up for a coach for a call, you want to remove them from all prospect oriented campaigns because they've progressed past that level.

So always think of the hierarchy that is sales in your email. You want to proofread emails I mean that's I make all kinds of mistakes with my emails but whatever and then make sure you keep experimenting, you know so those are some of the quick tips on in quick sales psychology and strategy you know things when it comes to email marketing for SAAS platforms.

If you have any questions at all go to https://doneforyou.com/start/, fill out that little form, schedule a call with me and I'd be happy to go through and put together an action plan on your you know, for your business, and I'll talk to you soon.

The post SaaS Email Marketing Tips That Generate Great Subscription Revenue appeared first on Done For You.

Understanding VSLs: A Comprehensive Guide to Video Sales Letters

Jason Drohn — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 12:06:41 +0000

Get A Custom Video Sales Letter! Click Here! >>

Introduction: Why VSL's Matter In Digital Marketing

Welcome to this post, where we're diving into the critical topic of Video Sales Letters, also known as VSLs. If you're scratching your head wondering, "What is a VSL?", don't worry. This comprehensive guide will break it down for you, and you'll soon understand why VSLs are a game-changer in any sales funnel.

The Genesis of VSL: A Brief History

Years ago, John Benson made the term "VSL" famous, often called the godfather of video sales letters. He was the one who transformed long-form sales copy into a compelling video format. It worked so well because it forced visitors to listen to the whole pitch before arriving at the offer.

What is a VSL? A Definition

A Video Sales Letter (VSL) is a video that walks viewers through a sales pitch using specific sales psychology techniques. Unlike traditional long-form sales copy, it's presented in video format, capturing attention and ensuring higher conversion rates.

Anatomy of a VSL

A typical VSL page comprises several vital elements. Firstly, a strong headline is crucial as it's usually the first thing tested in sales funnels. The VSL itself is a structured sales copy turned into a PowerPoint presentation. You write a long-form sales script and convert that into a slide-by-slide presentation, often accompanied by a voiceover.

Tools for Creating a VSL

Software like ScreenFlow or Camtasia is commonly used to record these presentations. The recorded video is edited and exported to become your final Video Sales Letter. If you want to add flair, B-roll or full-motion graphics can also be included.

Monitoring & Tracking

Once your VSL is ready, it's typically embedded on a page using a private video service like Vimeo Pro or Wistia rather than platforms like YouTube. These services offer valuable statistics, helping you understand viewer engagement and identifying areas for improvement.

The Importance of "Add to Cart" Button Timing

Traditionally, the "add to cart" button would appear only after the pitch had been made. However, with changing browser capabilities affecting autoplay features, the "add to cart" button is sometimes visible throughout the video. This can be A/B tested to see what resonates with your audience.

Variations & Split Testing

VSLs are versatile and can be used in various settings, from selling digital products to gathering entirely qualified leads for sales calls. You can also test VSLs with or without accompanying sales copy to determine which performs better.

Conclusion: Are VSLs For You?

In essence, VSLs are an incredibly effective way to pitch your product or service, breaking away from the traditional long-form sales copy. Whether it's a pure text-based VSL or one that includes full-motion graphics, the opportunities for testing and optimization are endless.

Take The Next Step

If you're ready to integrate VSLs into your sales funnel, click here to learn about our Funnel Formula program. Schedule an Action Plan with us today for a personalized sales funnel strategy that includes VSLs, upsells, and more!

Find Out How To Sell More Online! Click Here >>

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today. Now, I realized not too long ago that I have; we talk about sales and sales funnels a lot, but have a video or any detailed explanation about what a video sales letter is or a VSL for short. We use VSLs all the time in almost everything on almost every funnel.

You have seen a million VSLs from me. A VSL is a video that works through a particular sales psychology and is presented as opposed to long-form sales copy. No years ago, John Benson was the godfather of video sales letters. He took long-form sales copy and turned it into this video format, and it worked so well back in the day because it forced a visitor to listen to the entire pitch before they got to the actual offer.

And then the offer dropped in minute 12 or minute 15; if John Benson was like 46, he had a super long video sales letter appealing, the request would fall, there would be a cute button, people would take action on that offer, and then ultimately, it had an incredible conversion rate as compared to written copy. So, in this snippet, you will learn about video sales letters, and I pulled it out of our Funnel Fo formula course. So, let's listen to this, and then we'll come back and summarize everything.

So, the first is a video sales letter or a VSL page video sales letter. It is a video presentation; every screen has one line of text, and the person reading declines. We will slide by slide by slide. We will best convert the video sales letter into a long-form sales format. That year, it used to be long-form sales letters that worked well, then video sales with these hybrid video sales letters with some option graphics tended to convert even better. So, I let a prospect focus on the content on the screen, but the c, action up o, oron with some B roll, action shots, or some full-motion video. S is a lot of that stuff.

So your VSL page is the sales letter page, and it is a sales pt with one VSL on it, one sales video, and some very characteristic elements. It has a powerful headline. So, the headline is usually one of the things that we test vigorously in our sales funnels. The video sales letter is a scripted sales copy turned into a PowerPoint presentation. We create them as we go through, and we write a long sales form, a prolonged sales script, and then turn that into a PowerPoint presentation where every new line in the sales script is a new PowerPoint slide.

Then, that video is recorded as a voiceover. It's very similar to what we're doing recording these. So, we use ScreenFlow or Camtasia. We've already talked about those. We use one of those two pieces of software and record the screen as we verbally recite this sales video. Then, we edit and export it, becoming our video sales letter. If we add B roll shots on top of it, we add it after the fact.

And then, the video is embedded on a page. Usually, that video is embedded with a private video service like wistia.com or Vimeo Pro so that the sales video doesn't end up; I mean, it's not on YouTube, but more importantly, Vimeo Pro and Wistia have some great stats. So, you can see how much of the video somebody watches and find out where it's trailing off, or if at minute 13 a lot of people are leaving, then there's probably something that needs to be fixed in the video.

Then, underneath that video isn't appearing, add to cart button. So, once the pitch is made, then the add to cart button shows up underneath. Now, on some pages, we always make the add to cart button show up. And other times, we make it appear. Years ago, it was like every add-to-cart button seemed. That's just kind of standard. That's just how it worked. But now, videos often aren't auto-playing like they used to because of the browser. Some browsers will autoplay the video but not start the audio, or some won't autoplay the video. So, we've had to make some adjustments there.

So, often, the add to cart button does show up underneath the video as soon as the video loads. But if we can force the button to appear, we do that, too. And how it usually works is a sales video might be eight minutes or six minutes or 12 minutes long, and the call to action, like, let's say, on a 12-minute video, might hit about minute eight. So, when somebody watches enough of the video to beat the call to action, click the button below to buy your copy. Then, the add to cart button shows up underneath the video, and a prospect clicks it, goes to the order form, and purchases. But there's no pitch until they see the call to action. They don't know that they're there to purchase anything. They're there to watch a video.

Sometimes, these video sales letters are supported with a copy. Sometimes, there's a copy down the page, or there's a copy somewhere else on the page, and sometimes they're not. So, we always test them both. We'll try a video sales letter without a copy and test a video sales letter with a copy on occasion to see which one wins. Typically, the video sales letter without copy wins, but something with copy will occasionally beat the one without.

All right. So, video sales letters, we use them for selling digital products, we use them for selling memberships, for selling free plus shipping offers, for selling anything, courses, some physical effects, fully qualified leads, fully qualified lead sales funnels where we're trying to get somebody to give us their name, email address, phone number, all that stuff for a sales call. We use them all the time. Now, as you heard in the video, there are purely text-based VSLs, and there are VSLs with full-motion graphics and videos. Often, as B roll, sometimes it is videos like this, like talking head videos.

So, you can split-test video sales letters in many ways. But the premise is the same. You start with a sales script, create the PowerPoint video, and then overlay shots on top of that. So, if you want to learn how to incorporate these video sales letters into your sales funnel and build a sales funnel from scratch, click here to learn about our Funnel Formula program.

If you would like us to sit down and architect a sales funnel for you, including VSLs, upsells, etc., click here to schedule an Action Plan with us!

The post Understanding VSLs: A Comprehensive Guide to Video Sales Letters appeared first on Done For You.

Customer Avatars: Simple Trick For Writing Great Copy

Jason Drohn — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 16:43:15 +0000

Need Sales Funnel Help? Click Here! >>

TRANSCRIPT: Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drohn. It always amazes me that more people don't talk about this, but one of the things that I learned when I first started writing copy was naming your audience. So, when you pick out your target market, you go through, they need to make this much money, and they do this and they have this many kids and they go to church, and they drive this car, and they live this place, and they work in this industry, these are the hours they work and all that stuff. Basically, you put together the person in your mind who you're marketing to.

But that person never actually is real to you when you're writing, unless you make them real. So one of the things that I do, and a lot of other great copywriters do, is they actually give this person a name. So this clip is taken out of our Funnel Formula course, and we're going to go through the target market in naming somebody. And then we're going to come back and summarize it after we're all done.

From a sales standpoint, it's what we do. We try to tell stories and we try to create, something for our target market, for our end-user, that gets them putting themselves in the story. Because ultimately, if they put themselves in the story, then they're going to buy your product. It's why if you get somebody to drive a vehicle and you are a car salesman, for the most part, you got a sale in the bag. You just got to figure out the price.

So the neuro coupling piece is what activates when we're talking to our target market. And, we have that target market in mind, and we're writing our sales messages or ad copy directly for them. So that my friend, is why your target market matters. It's what you need to do to find your target market. Go through, figure out who you're targeting, the demographics, and the psychographics of them. Give them a name, and then every time you write anything to this person, then just think, think in you're in your brain, "I am writing for Bob, or Ben, or Buddy, or Martha, or whatever." Just in your head, just say, "What do they need to know in order to make a decision?" And then, write that stuff down.

All right, so that naming piece, naming your target market is one of the most powerful strategies that I know as a copywriter. If you aren't writing to someone, then you're writing to no one. I have written thousands of webinars, and sales letters, and probably tens of thousands of emails over the years, and I know that whenever I'm sitting down, no matter what client I am writing for, whether it's myself, whether it is one of our many ad management clients, or whatever, I know that when I sit down to write something for someone or for myself, then I need to write to a person.

So, years ago when I was selling a lot of local marketing courses and stuff, I wrote to this guy named Mike. So, Mike was a local business owner who was completely clueless when it came to the internet. He was running around, doing his day job, barking orders at his people, at his team. The head and primary salesperson, the president of the company, just kind of an idiot, but he was always the person that I wrote to. And it worked out really, really well, because I was able to relate to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people just like Mike. So, we sold a lot of product to people like Mike. You know what I mean?

Now, when I'm writing for myself, I have a different avatar. When I'm writing for clients, I have a different avatar. And I'm always writing to that one person. Because if I can talk to that one person, then I'm okay. Then I know that I've hit the nail on the head. I know that my copy is going to resonate with them, and they are going to be sucked in. They're going to put themselves in that place.

So, it's been one of the primary guiding copywriting strategies that I have put in place. I'm hoping it is for you too. If you want to learn about writing copy and building sales funnels for your business, click here. On that page, you'll learn about one of our courses called Funnel Formula. And there is an entire section on writing copy in there. There's also an entire section on what we call Content-Based Assets, which are the types of sales mediums and sales material that you need in order to successfully sell someone.

If you would like to talk about us putting together a sales funnel, or us designing a sales funnel of you, click here to book a call!

The post Customer Avatars: Simple Trick For Writing Great Copy appeared first on Done For You.

Copy Is The Key To Conversions In Your Sales Funnel

Jason Drohn — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 19:12:23 +0000

Schedule A Sales Funnel Action Plan Call >>

TRANSCRIPT: Hey, what's up is Jason, in today's video, we're going to talk about well, we're going to talk about sales funnels, but we're going to talk about copy. Here's the thing about sales funnels is everybody thinks that you need a sales funnel. Well, everybody knows you need a sales funnel at this point. Four or five years ago, sales funnels where this new thing, this new concept, that people were trying to understand to break into this digital marketing space. Now, sales funnels are relatively easily understood. There are pieces of software out there that makes building a sales funnel as easy as possible. You just line up your pages and boom, boom, boom, boom, and you have a sales funnel. The thing about that is, the sales funnel itself, the page structure, the page layout, the pages, they don't actually do the selling at all.

Yes, there are psychological things, sales psychological things that you do, like headlines and body copy and sales videos and VSLs and order forms and orange buttons or green buttons or split testing buttons. There are all these little psychological things that happen, but none of it actually matters until you get copy on the page, copy that is uniquely written to position your product to your prospect, to your end-user, and getting them to buy into it. Getting them to the point where you have their attention, where you have their interest, where you've piqued their desire and they are willing to take action with you. That is what sales copy does. You can have the worst sales funnel in the entire world, but if you have the copy right, you're going to make money. But if you don't have a copy right, you might have the best-architected sales funnel in the world, but if you don't have the copyright, it's not going to work because you're not selling the right person, you're not selling your service, selling your product.

That is the issue. This why sales funnels don't exist without copy and why every sales funnel has sales videos, has webinars, has email copy, has email automation, all of those things. This is a small little clip that we pulled out of funnel formula to give you a little bit of a peek behind the scenes of the sales copy piece and the importance in sales funnels. Everything in the sales funnel comes down to the copy.

There are so many sales funnel building programs and page building programs and stuff that make building sales funnels easy. But at the end of the day, if you cannot write copy, if you can't write sales copy or video sales letters or long-form sales letters or webinars or email copy, if you cannot write copy, then you cannot sell because everything requires a sales script, to some degree. Now you can do a video, a full-motion video of you selling, but at the end of the day, you still need the email copy. You still need the features and benefits written out. You still need all of that stuff in order to actually sell your thing. So all of that is copy.

All right, so after that clip, we go through and we talk all about sales funnels. We talk about content-based assets. We talk about writing, copy, writing excruciating... We go through each of the components of a sales video. We go through all of the webinars, the slide by slide, by slide, what needs to go on the slides. That's all in Funnel Formula.

If you'd like us to put together your sales funnel for you, click here to schedule a call and we'll put together an Action Plan for you!

The post Copy Is The Key To Conversions In Your Sales Funnel appeared first on Done For You.

7 Smart Ways To Thrive In Content Marketing On A Budget

Jason Drohn — Thu, 16 May 2019 12:14:50 +0000

Who doesn’t want to do effective content marketing on a budget? Content is the heart of modern marketing. There are a lot of benefits that a business can reap through quality and well-marketed content.

Such benefits are: top search engine rankings, increased website traffic, improved lead generation and conversion processes, and better customer engagement.

And, these content marketing benefits are true for B2C as well as B2B product and services.

According to Statista, content marketing revenue was reached 32.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, up from 28 billion a year earlier. Why? Mainly, because businesses, whether big, medium or small, have started to take content marketing seriously.

They recognize that intrusive ads and in-your-face marketing are less effective than they used to be in attracting and converting customers.

Channels like social media give customers the ability to reject poor to average content in favor of transparent, friendly and engaging content. So, if you are confident about the quality of your content, the challenge lies in reaching the right audiences that are present on such advertising channels.

No wonder that the most successful B2B and B2C marketers allocate 40% and 26% of their total marketing budget respectively to market content (Content Marketing Institute). While content marketing budget is not an issue for big and even medium-size businesses, it may pose an obstacle to startups and small companies.

However, anyone can minimize the budget without compromising content marketing quality.

Here are seven tried and tested ways to create high-quality content marketing campaigns on a budget.

1. Evaluate everything

No marketing campaign can begin without self-evaluation. You must do a reality check of what do you have at present and what do you expect in the future. By doing so, you would save yourself from allocating an unnecessarily large content marketing budget at the start itself.

Start by evaluating:

Goals: Decide monthly, six-monthly and yearly revenue goals. Then, decide how many social media subscribers, email subscribers, new sign-ups etc you target to achieve within the first week or month of starting content marketing.
Current Situation: Do you already have content posted on the internet? If yes, assess how it is performing, what are the content gaps, does it feature in the search engine results and so on.
Resources: What tools and technologies do you have in hand? Do you need to hire more people? Do you need in-house content creators or freelancers or unique talents for different varieties of content?

2. Research a lot

This step actually falls into the content creation stage of the entire marketing process. It is because if you don’t research well to create precise, informative, unique and engaging content, marketing it would push your spending to the drain.

So, what you need to research to keep your content marketing efforts on budget?

Keywords: Use all great keyword research tools to feed your content with the precisely searchable queries. It would not only bring the content on the top of the search engine results, but would also create channels for the targeted audiences to find it. In fact, optimal keyword usage can reduce your marketing efforts significantly.
Audiences: Know your content viewers, their needs and expectations and where do they look for the content. If your content is not marketed for the ‘right’ kind of audience, it would prove to be a costly affair.
Competition: In order to be unique and better than your rivals, you need to keep a watch on the content they generate. It would not only inspire you for better marketing efforts, but also save you from being repetitive.

3. Choose the best

A number of choices you make in the process of content marketing can dramatically influence the outcomes and put your budget in the right direction. Keep your eyes open when you choose:

Content-Type: While the old content types continue to be popular, many new ones are creating the right buzz as well. For example, social media posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, illustrations and interactive content (like quiz and survey) are currently the hot trends and you must cash on them.

Image Source: blog.bufferapp.com

Publishers: Why to waste money posting your content on low-traffic and low-authority platforms. Rather, choose sites and blogs that are ranking high and are popular and reliable among consistent viewers.
Marketing Channels: Are you distributing your content on the right channels? Apart from the buzzing social media networks, focus on online community channels like Quora. The well-known audiovisual content channels too must feature in the list. After all, these are the places where the online audiences extensively hang out.

4. Quality over quantity

If you focus more on creating and marketing content in quantity, your marketing budget is sure to dry up soon. Instead, concentrate on providing quality that would not only keep a check on the budget, but would exploit the benefits in long terms. How to do it?

Amazing Content: Don’t mind paying higher to create top-quality content that would be shared again and again. Such articles, blogs, and social media posts enjoy a long life and never go outdated.
Post Frequency: Don’t bombard the marketing channels with content. Once you start engaging the audiences, promise them no more than 3-4 posts a week. It would keep them on the toe waiting for your quality content and would also utilize the budget optimally. Use tools like content marketing calendar to keep the track.

Image Source: contentmarketinginstitute.com

Cash on the ‘Performing’ Content: Consider that one of your blogs garners huge number of views and comments. Now, don’t mind paying to get it published on the paid platforms as it is bound to bring in more traffic to your site.

5. Review to save

Image Source: neilpatel.com

Analyzing and reviewing the marketed content not only improves its performance but also cuts down the unnecessary spending. In this context, you can also rely on the golden 80:20 rule.

The 80% of success would come from the 20% of the total marketing efforts you put in. In order to highlight these best 20% efforts, you must indulge in the process of content reviewing. The tools like Google Analytics would track down the performance of your content, allowing you to:

Measure Popularity: How many times the content has been viewed? Out of the platforms where you marketed your content, which one has generated the more number of views, comments and leads? How many times the content has been shared? And, so on.
Choose the Best: By periodically measuring the performance, you would have a clear idea about things like the best content types, the best channels and platforms and also the interests and expectations of the readers.
Modify and Save: Obviously, you would modify your marketing strategy, focusing more on the best-performing ones and letting go the least-performing ones. In the end, you would have the best marketing knowledge and considerably saved budget.

6. Reuse… smartly

Image Source: blog.hootsuite.com

Reuse, repurpose and recycle are the popular terms associated with environmental conservation. Surprisingly, these are also applicable to the discussion of how to market content in the budget. This process can start at the very beginning of content creation. Find out how:

Create Evergreen Content: Rather than creating content which is time critical, opt for evergreen content which would hold the weight in the many years to come as well. If it is a quality content and gets popular, you can republish it on other platforms for the new viewers.
Convert the Content: Articles can be converted into blogs, blogs in to social media posts, posts into videos and videos into infographics. Smartly, you can maintain the content’s mettle, but change its presentation and face to use it again and for the sole purpose of viewer engagement.
Update the Content: Even if you can’t do without writing time-critical content, take out time to review it and update it to meet the changed scenarios. The efforts would be minimal and the budget would be saved.

However, make sure you stick to the rule of creating unique content and note the mere copies of the existing ones.

7. Keep scope for the future

Don’t be strict when you plan a budget for content marketing. You can follow each of the above strategies to utilize the allocated budget wisely. But then, there is nothing fixed when it comes to marketing for business. For example, what if you need to target a completely new batch of audiences where your existing content is not of much use. Here are some great tips:

Start With What’s Essential: For a new business, you just need to try and test the content marketing strategies. At this point of time, start with the minimal budget and keep on adding to it with the passage of time. In this way, your future marketing budget requirements would be met conveniently.
Market According to Demand: If you want to cater to your audience only during a season or a particular time of the year, why spend uselessly on content marketing throughout the year? Keep the campaign passive during off-seasons and accelerate its pace just before and during the peak times.
Room for Changing Trends: As new trends and forms of content are being discovered, be ready to adopt them. For this, keep your content marketing budget reserved to welcome these changes.

As content marketing is never going to lose its worth, your business deserves to make the best out of it. You have just learned how a small budget can also accomplish respectable benefits, provided you align it with quality smartly. You can thrive in content marketing on a budget even if your business is small or just starting out.

The post 7 Smart Ways To Thrive In Content Marketing On A Budget appeared first on Done For You.

What They Don’t Teach You At The School Of Inbound Marketing

Jason Drohn — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 07:21:10 +0000

Sorry, but there isn’t really a school of inbound marketing.

In fact, there are many schools starting with the likes of Hubspot, Moz, Wistia, Marketo, and several others.

We are great fans and we learn a great deal from each of those authoritative sites (each of them, a school in its own right).

Inbound marketing isn’t hard by itself. There are just a few specific channels or pathways (if you want to call it that) that you’d have to work on (not including full-fledged sales funnels, paid advertising strategies, and marketing automation to a large extent).

Blogging, at an established frequency, on topics that are useful for your target audiences
Adding to your original publishing efforts above, you could also add other forms of content marketing such as Content Curation, repurposing content, and creating slide decks. You may also look at producing infographics, videos, and podcasts.
Amplifying what you publish on social media, on top of regular interactions, micro interactions, and sharing what your business stands for.
Collecting, building, and managing an email list to enable you to nurture your subscribers with an intention of turning them into lifelong subscribers. Nowadays, you even have access to automated and simple email marketing, without you having to do any heavy lifting.

When you do all of the above, consistently enough, for a long period of time, you’ll get to close to working on your brand building efforts.

But it’s easier said than done. We can write a couple of paragraphs on it, and you’ll read it. It takes a lot more to actually make all this work for your business.

That’s because we all miss out on the hard school of knocks. The inbound marketing school failed to tell us about the rolling beads of sweat, the backbreaking job or continuously producing high-quality content, and the terrifying odds of failing despite doing all that you do have to do — since all this is just about marketing for your business; it’s still doesn’t have anything to do with:

Whether or not your idea is validated?
Is there a demand for your service or product?
Do you have the tenacity and the endurance to “go to market” and stay there?

All that’s for business strategy. Sorry for digressing.

Coming back to just inbound marketing and what the inbound marketing school of business didn’t teach you, here are a few things you forget:

Inbound marketing takes the most valuable resource: Time

You could raise all the capital in the world. Have investors make a beeline to fund your business. Throw all the money at advertising you want.
You could still get all that money back.

You won’t get the time back.

Inbound marketing — a mix of everything you do to attract, retain, and convert casual readers and visitors into paying customers — takes time.

A lot of time.

So much time that most businesses actually give up even before they see any results at all (and this isn’t true just for businesses; it also applies to casual bloggers, YouTubers, and everyone else who wants to depend on “organic growth”).

Alex Dunn of BlueLeadz predicts that it’d take your business at least 6 months before you can correlate your inbound marketing efforts to actual Return on Investment. This is assuming that you are doing everything right, firing away on all cylinders.

In some rare cases, you’ll see faster results. The more competitive your Industry is (and the more inbound marketing your competitors do), the longer it’ll take you to gain traction, invoke trust, and generate leads or make sales happen.

Consistency is the name of the game

Most businesses, if and when they are sold on the power of inbound marketing, do start to put in the work.

For a few months. Maybe even for two to three years. Then, it all stops.

Inbound marketing efforts stop when business owners can’t keep up with the “content production”, when content producing teams take a break, or when businesses can’t find competent writers, video production teams, or other vendors or partners.

Inbound marketing initiates audiences that get hungry for more content in all its formats.

If you stop delivering, you are quickly forgotten.

When you create high-quality content consistently, you are putting in the work to influence your audience on an ongoing basis.

We are humans, and we need constant nurturing to get anything done. John Hall, Author of the book Top of Mind writes:

With consistent, engaging content, you can hit touch points on your audience members’ online journeys, build connections with them, and position your brand to be top-of-mind when they think of their most trusted and liked resources.

To get consistent with your inbound marketing, here are a few tips:

Create an editorial calendar, and get comfortable with it. That calendar needs stellar execution. Using WordPress? Use this WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin . Or use Co-Schedule. Maybe just Trello? Kevan Lee of Buffer goes into great detail about content calendars and you should check it out.
Be smart about content creation. You don’t have to actually “produce” everything yourself. You can also reproduce what you already have. Repurpose your content into other formats. Also, add content curation into the mix using smart tools like Curately.
Make yourself a superhuman content producer (if you work by yourself), but aim to get help along the way. Build a super team.

It’s not just about content creation. Make content distribution a priority; not an afterthought.

SEO isn’t what you thought it is

Just type in “SEO is dead” or “Is SEO dead?” on Google and you’ll see this:

That has to tell you something, eh?

Inbound marketing isn’t just SEO.

There’s no such thing called SEO writing.

If you focus on extinct concepts such as “keyword density”, and to ensure adding “keywords at the beginning of the title, the end of the first paragraph, and at least 3 times in the body of the blog post”, it’s guaranteed that you won’t produce good content that real humans will get value out of.

Look around you — the blogs you read, the forums you hang out at, and anywhere else really. There’s all this talk about how Important SEO is and that you’d need to this and that.

In reality, SEO is all about high-quality content. Consistently. All the time. For years on end.

In fact, here’s an incredible article on SEO from the beginning – to the present day.

For most businesses, writing years worth of high-quality content is too much of an ask (thanks to limited time, resources, budgets, manpower, and skills).

So, they’ll look for smart SEO tools. They’ll look for shortcuts. They’ll want to bank on SEO specialists who are already having it hard enough with nothing to show for directory submissions and “link building”.

We aren’t saying SEO is dead or that link building doesn’t work, or that guest posting is a waste of time.

Just don’t go about doing SEO, link building, guest posting, blogging, content marketing, and on-Page SEO as if Google Search results page is the only source of traffic in the world.

Inbound marketing needs commitment, consistency, the right approach to content creation, and endurance on the part of marketers and businesses to see it all through.

If you need help with strategy, execution, and to find the right path for inbound marketing along with building sales funnels and marketing automation, our team is on standby to help guide you along. Just hop on a scheduled call, and we’ll take it from there.

Are you going to stay committed?

The post What They Don’t Teach You At The School Of Inbound Marketing appeared first on Done For You.

5 Easy Ways To Write Great Content That Google Will Love

Jason Drohn — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:10:56 +0000

Every marketer knows content is King! The niche you ply your trade-in doesn’t matter. When visitors come to your site, they want great content. Great content will enlighten, educate or entertain your website visitors.

If you create compelling content, these prospectors will find the gold on your website and join your mailing list, buy your products, and keep coming back for more!

Google, the arbiter of great content, keeps raising the standard. Content that was acceptable 10 years ago no longer passes muster. The copy and paste methods, stuffed with keywords to game the system, no longer gain traction. RankBrain, Google’s algorithm-learning software, has artificial intelligence!

RankBrain can check content for style, syntax, and uniqueness. This clever code can second guess what searchers are looking for, and display the best result. It’s like having your English teacher looking over your shoulder!

Resistance is futile against the ubiquitous influence of RankBrain. So how do we raise our game and respond to the challenge set by Google?

Here are five ways to create great content that Google, and your website visitors, will love:

1. First things first: Start with a powerful headline

Headlines are the most significant part of any piece of great content. Without a powerful headline, your target audience will not read your article. There is much content on the internet competing for attention.

After placing a keyword in the search bar, the searcher will skim 80% of the headlines. Then settle for a headline that jumps off the screen. To convert surfers into readers, you must have a persuasive headline.

A great headline should make a bold statement and create a sense of urgency. David Ogilvy, the renowned advertising man used to draft his headlines over one hundred times before it satisfied him. For more help in crafting a compelling headline check out the following websites:

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a free tool. It helps you hone your headline until you achieve a good score.
Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer offers free headline analysis results.

2. Find and use the best keywords

Keywords are still very important in your content. That’s because they are the words that your prospective visitors will use to get to your content. It is important to use keywords sparingly. Keywords should take up to 2% of your article but you can use relevant synonyms and related phrases. The Google algorithm scans your content for context.

Ask yourself these questions:

What keywords and phrases do your target audience use?
What will searchers put in the search box that will direct them to your website?
What keywords do your competitors use?
What keywords work well in your niche?

The following tips will help you find the correct keywords for your content. Unsurprisingly Google is a good place to start.

Google search box

We have mentioned how Google will try to second guess what a searcher is looking for. The auto-complete feature in the search box is a great place to start.

For example, if you enter ‘cash flow’

The drop-down menu will offer the following suggestions:

Cash flow forecast
Cash flow statement
Cash flow template
Cash flow analysis

That’s plenty of keywords you can use in your content.

On the Google SERPs

While still on the search results page look at the area below the top 10 searches and find other ideas under the subheading “searches related to cash flow” and you will find:

Why is cash flow important?
Cash flow example
How to calculate cash flow
Cash flow formula
Cash flow v profit

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free tool that will give you hundreds of suggestions.

Your competitors’ websites

You can use a free tool like Spyfu to check the keywords on any website.

There are many other keyword tools to help you get the right balance to your content. Here’s an article we wrote about how to conduct keyword research the right way using simple tools.

3. Repurpose content

What does repurposing content mean? When you take a written article and use that content to create a slideshow, you have repurposed the content.

A few examples of repurposing are:

Convert an article into an audio MP3 file: use Audacity.
Convert a slideshow into a video (you can do this from within PowerPoint).
Turn several articles into an ebook. Watch this video to learn how to create ebooks that your audience will love.
Convert a YouTube video into a blog post using screen grabs of the video. Try it with this free tool YouTube Screen Shot.
Convert a blog post into an infographic: use Canva.

Why repurpose content? You can repurpose your own content or that of other people. Repurposing gives you access to a large volume of material. You can spread your ideas around the internet using a variety of channels. The pieces of content can direct visitors or viewers back to your website or sales page. You can use YouTube, Pinterest, article directories, SlideShare and many more platforms.

When you repurpose other people’s content, you can change or update it. Whenever you repurpose someone else’s content, acknowledge the original source.

4. Curate content

Curated content is not a new idea. Years ago printed newsletters on say, finance, running a business, or keeping fit, collated material from different sources. It was then published for their subscribers. It was easy for the readers as they did not need to spend days searching through a variety of publications to look for answers.

The internet exists to share ideas. And a well-curated page attracts many visitors because it is a good user experience as far as it concerns the search engines. “But is curating content the same as duplicating content?” I hear you ask? No, it isn’t! An excellent curated page is well worth the visitor’s time and is great content that Google loves.

How much of an article should you curate? Most informed bloggers suggest that 50% is a good balance. A well-curated page acknowledges the source of its content and offers its opinion or reviews on the subject.

To attribute an article, you can include the backlink in the context of the curated content. For example: “Rob Brown said in his article here that the way to create great content is to use different media”.

There are many free tools that can help you with content curation, three of the best are Buzzsumo, Feedly and Pocket. Find more content curation tools here.

Need more fresh content sources and article ideas for your blog? Try Curately, the ultimate tool to craft valuable content fast. With Curately, you will have an endless supply of fresh content that will get you more web traffic, leads and sales. Visit Curately.org to learn more.

5. To create better content, love what you do

As you can see from the content above, you may need to learn new skills. You can learn to work on MP3 files with Audacity by simply trying it. The same with YouTube. Create a YouTube channel for your work and link it to your website. You can learn new skills by searching how-to videos on YouTube or go to the WikiHow page where you can learn to do anything.

To create content that Google will love, you need to love to create content. Learn your craft, keep it simple, learn new techniques, create content every day, and love what you do.

Bonus tip: Write daily

Anyone can be a better writer, and anyone can write great content that their readers and Google will love. Use these tips, and remember: The best way to compose better content is to write often or every day, if possible.

Make writing a consistent element of your everyday routine, and you’ll start writing great content in no time.
Like anything else, practice makes perfect. It’s important to hone your article writing skills just as you would when learning to play a sport or an instrument.

Schedule writing time in your weekly calendar, and it will quickly become a habit. Follow our tips, and you will be amazed at how fast you’ll be able to write great content that Google will love!

The post 5 Easy Ways To Write Great Content That Google Will Love appeared first on Done For You.

6 Marketing Tools That Will Change Your Business

Jason Drohn — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 08:57:36 +0000

Identifying the right marketing technology (Martech) tools for your needs is not an easy endeavor, but it’s an important one. Having the right marketing stack is basic to a successful online business because your choice of tools will affect your processes, team communication, marketing and customer experience.

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.

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:

Data and analytics with Statly
Customer surveys with Askly
Sales copy and sales material creation with Scriptly
Content creation with Curately
Online scheduling with TimeSlots
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.

How To Amplify Your Content Strategy (And Make It Interesting)

Jason Drohn — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 16:08:33 +0000

Are you wading through the morass of content on the Internet looking for information, tips, and insights on how to do content marketing better? Do you want to make sure that your digital marketing efforts pay off, and to ensure that the time spent on your content strategy brings you hungry customers who can’t seem to get enough of your content?

As you read this, it’s only getting harder to be found online, to gain traction, and to generate leads. It’s getting harder to get the average web-dwelling, Instagram-happy, and Facebook-addicted customers to pay any attention to what you produce on a daily basis.

While it’s getting harder, it’s certainly not impossible to create buzz, get noticed, build your own tribe, and to generate qualified leads.

You know that your sales funnels can be set up in a way that nurtures leads automatically. This will ultimately lead to sales. If you need help building custom sales funnels for your business, get our Funnel Blueprint video series.

Chances are that most of the content you create for your funnels will not make the kind of impact it should; that is usually because of a few things forgotten. Here’s what you need to do to make your content sweat:

1. You have a voice. Use it.

If you thought that it’s only Anthony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk who have a voice while others are constantly being drowned out, you are completely wrong. Let’s go back a few steps for once:

We are all unique.
Our way of saying (and writing) things is different from one another.
People want to hear from other people, not machines (at least, we aren’t there yet).
You know what you know. Others want to know what you know.
Everyone wants to get from point A to point B. If you can show people how it’s done, you win.

Your content strategy doesn’t have to bore when it comes from your heart. You might be saying the same thing that your competition is but what’ll stand out is your voice. Your voice will come through your blog content, podcasts, videos, and social media updates.

You have a voice and you should use it for communication. If you think you don’t have a voice, you haven’t heard yourself properly yet.

2. Find creative angles

Creativity isn’t just about wall paintings, art, and illustrations. It’s also about how you happen to wing two different things together and still make sense. It’s about picking up an idea from one popular content piece online and twisting that idea to create a different content piece that’s relevant to your niche.

Next time you try to cook up a blog post title, try to think of how you could pull out information from a completely irrelevant and different source to use it in your content strategy. Or get others’ opinions on what works (in your niche) and give it your own twist.

Your voice, combined with your insights, and the creative angle you pick is the formula you need to produce content that always works.

3. Hook, Line, and Sinker

Let’s just assume that you are going to follow point one and two above. Even then, it’s hard to keep your visitors engaged with your content.

You have another card in your content strategy deck that you can use to strengthen the stickiness factor of your content.

It’s called Hook, Line, and Sinker.

First, you hook your readers and this is where powerful headlines work their best. You’d then, make your visitors follow a structured path to ensure that they keep reading.

At some point, you’ll give (whatever your headline promised) it away.

The Hook, Line, Sinker method works across industries, for all niches. You just have to be prepared enough to use it and then benefit from it.

4. Curate to convert

Quick question: Assuming you want to get serious about content marketing, what’s fast, easy, bring you links, boost your SEO, and allows you to produce content like a machine?

The answer: Content Curation!

You don’t have to create content all the time (it’s just an inefficient way of doing content marketing). You could also do content curation which is much easier to accomplish than creating content. Curating content is also a great way to link out to various sources and in turn getting linked to.

With tools like Curately and others, content curation can be fast and efficient. Content curation is a must-have for your content strategy while allowing yourself to also create listicles, repurpose old content, and so much more.

How does your content marketing playbook look like, right now?

The post How To Amplify Your Content Strategy (And Make It Interesting) appeared first on Done For You.

Maximize Your Sales Impact: The Best Call to Action Phrases to Use Right Now!

Jason Drohn — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 13:59:41 +0000

Find Out How To Sell More Online! Click Here >>

In the dynamic world of direct response marketing, the 'Call to Action' (CTA) is not just a part of the content; it's the heartbeat of your marketing message. The turning point transforms a reader, viewer, or listener into a lead or customer. Understanding and leveraging the best call-to-action phrases can significantly impact your campaign's effectiveness.

Understanding the Call to Action in Direct Response Marketing

A Call to Action in direct response marketing is an explicit instruction designed to provoke an immediate response from the target audience. This could be downloading a guide, signing up for a newsletter, purchasing, or any other desired action. The strength of a CTA lies in its ability to guide the audience toward taking a specific step, making it an indispensable tool for marketers.

The Role of CTAs in Marketing Strategies

In marketing, CTAs are pivotal in guiding prospects through the sales funnel. From initial awareness to the point of purchase, CTAs act as signposts directing customers on what to do next. Without effective CTAs, even the most captivating and well-crafted marketing messages can fall flat, failing to convert interest into Action.

Crafting the Best Call to Action Phrases (Examples Below!)

The effectiveness of a Call to Action hinges on the phrase used. The best call-to-action words are clear, urgent, and resonate with the audience. They should create a sense of urgency or offer something so compelling that the audience must act immediately.

Tips for Creating Effective CTAs

Be Clear and Concise: The CTA should be straightforward, leaving no room for ambiguity about what the audience should do next.
Create Urgency: Phrases like "Limited Time Offer" or "Act Now" prompt immediate Action.
Use Action-Oriented Verbs: Start your CTA with verbs like 'Download,' 'Subscribe,' 'Join,' or 'Buy.'
Provide Value: Determine what benefits the user will get by taking Action, such as 'Get Your Free Ebook' or 'Start Your Free Trial.'

Examples of the Best Call to Action Phrases

"Buy Now - Limited Offer": This phrase creates a sense of urgency and scarcity.
"Subscribe Today for Exclusive Tips": This CTA offers exclusive value, encouraging subscriptions.
"Join Now and Start Saving": This phrase promises immediate benefits.
"Download Your Free Guide": Offers something valuable for free, a powerful incentive for many users.
"Get Started with Your Free Trial": Invites users to experience a service without any initial investment.

Integrating CTAs into Your Marketing Content

The placement and presentation of your Call to Action are as important as the phrase itself. CTAs should be prominently displayed and easy to find. Whether in an email, landing page, or blog post, they should stand out visually and contextually with the content surrounding them.

Visual and Contextual Considerations for CTAs

Contrasting Colors: Use colors that stand out and align with your brand.
Strategic Placement: Place CTAs where they are most likely to be seen and acted upon.
Consistent Messaging: Ensure that the CTA aligns with the overall message of your content.

The Best Call To Action Phrases For You To Use!

Call-to-action phrases have existed since the inception of online sales, but just as the internet has drastically changed since then, so have the most efficient CTA practices.

It is common for businesses to think that the easiest way to optimize their CTA is to tweak some colors on their landing page, add a few buttons with snazzy text, and call it good.

But Calls to Action and Call to Action phrases are much more than that.

With CTAs experiencing diverse click-through rates depending on location, business category, page location, and more, it should be no surprise that guiding your customers along their buying path with CTAs is a delicate art. Picking the perfect combination of text, colors, style, and energy to fit your business is crucial.

Don’t worry; We have 10 CTA examples and phrases to help you succeed.

“Get Started”

“Get Started” is easily one of the most popular CTA that you’ll see, no matter what category the business is in.

The simple reason behind this is that it works well. It suggests to your visitors that it will be simple for them to progress through using your product and that the best is yet to come after they click. View it on Prezi’s site.

“Sign up Free”

“Sign up Free” or “Free Sign Up” hits the ground running, informing your customers precisely what they can expect when they click through.

You’re promising they can begin their experience without paying, which will surely increase your conversion rate. Purple combines this tip and our number one tip on their landing page.

“Book a Demo” or “View Demo”

“Book a Demo” or “View Demo” is certainly more geared towards sales-focused business funnels, but it can also cleverly be applied to various businesses. Offering an actual consultation with real people can increase your conversion rate because you allow people to feel like humans in an overwhelmingly digital world.

Although they serve similar purposes, inviting people to “Book a Demo” is a far friendlier way of saying “contact sales.” See it in Action at Zendesk.

“Learn More”

“Learn More” is an ideal Call to Action phrase when your product might need a bit more explanation than you can comfortably fit on your landing page, whether because of an extensive subscription plan or a complicated product concept.

Either way, allowing your customers to learn more in a commitment-free fashion will lead to more conversion than forcing your visitors to sign up for more information.

Bonus tip - “Learn More” can also be used as a CTA phrase on pop-ups since it is clunky to provide more than a few sentences of information on these mini-advertisements.

“Add to Bag” and “Add to Cart”

“Add to Bag” and “Add to Cart” are straightforward ways to encourage visitors to buy your product. Yes, they are straightforward and cut right to the chase, but is this a bad thing?

Depending on your product, your business style, and how the visitor ended up at your page, an “Add to Cart” button could lead directly to a sale and skip all the in-between of the buying process.

“Buy Now”

“Buy Now,” like “Add to Bag,” can skip the process that usually goes into buying. If pulled off correctly and the customer is given a chance to immediately buy the product through a simple cart/payment system after clicking the button, the results can be overwhelmingly positive.

Check out DeathWishCoffee, and notice how quickly you can go from “first-time visitor” to “customer” in a few clicks.

“Schedule a ____”

“Schedule a ____” is nearly the opposite of “Buy Now.” Although it feels similar to “Book a Demo,” this strategy is most effective for service-based businesses. Using this CTA helps them along their path since it can be tricky to get a solid commitment from potential customers until they’ve learned more about your business.

This CTA style flourishes for specific types of businesses, typically ones with an online presence but selling their goods/services in person, such as gyms, spas, salons, etc.

The last three tips or call-to-action phrases of this call-to-action list will focus more on style, which is worth mentioning because sometimes the effectiveness of your CTA depends on more than the words.

CTA example: Netflix

Netflix delivers on all fronts with their “WATCH ANYWHERE. CANCEL ANYTIME.” Call To Action, and that statement, coupled with their “Join Free for a Month” offer, will put almost anyone at ease. But look at their landing page and notice the color scheme.

Notice how the Netflix logo is the same color as the join button, and everything else is more muted? This isn’t by accident, and coloring CTA buttons the same as the logo makes it extremely easy for users to know where to click; it also automatically draws attention to itself in the best way possible.

CTA example: Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club presents a different type of landing page, using some of the same key elements that Netflix uses (such as color synchronization between brand and CTA buttons) but also incorporating short, high-quality videos that auto-play in the background.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and Dollar Shave Club delivers their entire sales pitch in a video less than 8 seconds long. Please pay attention to their language and notice how it is genuinely crafted to match their expected clientele.

CTA example: OkCupid

A smooth experience, from start to finish, will ensure that your customers don’t abandon their funnel. OkCupid hits the mark from the landing page, through their forms, and to completion with quirky, exciting language, pleasant images, and soothing colors.

They don’t overwhelm the visitor but instead invite them on a fun journey, guiding them gently by the hand until they’ve made it all the way through.

Call To Action Phrases And Examples: Putting it all together...

You may be curious how to put it all together. There is no easy answer, but help is always available if you have any questions.

Remember that keywords and Call to Action phrases are tried and tested with proven results: try, now, free, save, start/stop, me/my/you/your.

Combine these with the ideas that make your business unique, create a friendly atmosphere to welcome visitors, and don’t overwhelm them.

As always, please get in touch with us with questions about Call to Action phrases, landing pages, or sales funnels.

Are you complicating your sales funnels at a time when it’s only getting more challenging to generate leads online?

Find Out How To Sell More Online! Click Here >>

The post Maximize Your Sales Impact: The Best Call to Action Phrases to Use Right Now! appeared first on Done For You.

Content Curation Software: Content Marketing Made Simple With Curately

Jason Drohn — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 13:12:44 +0000

If you are reading this, you must have already heard about Curately — our content curation software.

While it’s true that it’s a software built for content curation, you can do a lot more than just curate content with Curately.

With Curately, you can find your content sources, assemble your content by just dragging and dropping it into place, add finishing touches to your content, and then distribute.

Easy peasy, right?

Five different ways to use Curately

But there’s more you can do with Curately: Tools are only as good as you use them and Curately can do a lot more than what it’s intended to do.

Here are the different ways you can succeed with content marketing with Curately:

1. Content curation, obviously!

In a content curation adoption survey, it’s been found that 95% of marketers reveal that they’ve curated content in a six-month window. More than 85% of those businesses and marketers state that thought leadership is the primary reason for content curation.

It goes without saying that this was the primary reason why Curately was built:

to help you identify, organize, and curate content fast and easy.

It was built so that you spend much less time on content curation, systemize your content marketing strategy, and start generating traffic to your website (or funnels).

With all the content that you’ll also generate tons of goodwill and open up potential windows of opportunity for getting linked in return.

But that’s not enough, is it? So, it leads us to…

2. Content creator outreach

To succeed with content marketing, content isn’t enough today. You’d need to know, associate, and celebrate your relationships.

But isn’t that extra work? Yes, it is.

You can easily identify and create an entire database of people you’d like to know and network with to later help scale up your guest blogging opportunities, link building opportunities, and more.

One of the basic features within Curately is the ability to “locate and assemble” major publications, bloggers, influencers, and other content sources.

By doing that though, you aren’t just assembling and arranging content; you can also find out who publishes the content: bloggers, editors, writers, and publishers, and maintain a running rolodex of real people that you can network with.

When you assemble a piece of content that you want to include in your content curation, reach out to the blog, publication, or business that produced the content and let them know.

With Curately, all that work is now that much easier.

3. Research and outbound links

Doing a fair amount of research is usually a must before you write blog posts. The more research you do, the more depth your blog posts get and the more credible they are.

But the big question is this: How do you make sure you have the right kind of research available for all those topics you create blog posts on?

Normally, you can’t be too sure.

That’s where “reading” comes into play. Everyone who writes also reads, a lot. Now, while you read every day, you come across all sorts of research, studies, surveys, infographics on relevant topics, etc.

Curately is also a great way to locate all these sources of information, facts, and opinions made by others.

By using the same features within Curately, you can have a bookmarker, content organizer, and note-taking software — all rolled into one.

4. Create listicles and blog posts

Content curation is usually a dedicated effort to identify, arrange, and create for your readers to gain benefit from. When you do content curation and publish content, you normally aim for large pieces of content or huge lists of resources (on every conceivable topic).

Listicles or list-based blog posts are a popular post type and they are also the reason why Buzzfeed and the likes are popular.

List-type blog posts are easy for readers to consume and they look fantastic, any way you look at them.

With your basic content curation process in place — and helped by Curately — you can also create list-type blog posts much more easily than if you were to do it all as most folks do.

5. Curately, the content repurposing engine

You know that repurposing content is a legitimate way of using your brand assets and existing content to create other formats.

In fact, according to Kristen McCormick of ThriveHive, repurposing gives you a chance to redeem your old or non-performing content, provides more backlinking opportunities, diversifies your time or effort, and helps diversify your content.

For instance, a list-type blog post full of stats and data can become a great starting point for an infographic.

An opinionated blog post can also be good material for a video.

Instead of just using Curately for finding new content produced by others, you can also use it as a content repurposing engine.

Maintain a list of your own content inside Curately, mix and match your older content with newer pieces of content to create a new content piece altogether, collect and share old content in new blog posts when it makes sense, and much more.

Content marketing made simple with Curately

How do you plan to use Curately, our content curation software? We’ll be curious to know.

Are you ready to get started? Click here to see Curately in action.

The post Content Curation Software: Content Marketing Made Simple With Curately appeared first on Done For You.

7 Headline Types That Get Clicks

Jason Drohn — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 10:45:29 +0000

It’s incredibly hard to write headlines that can bring in the money (or traffic). Even for the best of the copywriters in the world, there’s no magic bullet; it’s all about writing up drafts and then testing them out to find the headline type that gets most clicks.

To help you find the most magnetic headlines, there are tools like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer and the good old one Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer from The Advanced Marketing Institute.

Much like a DSLR without a tripod, your sales funnels just won’t work without a proper impetus. Without proper, targeted, well-written, and purposeful headlines it’s almost impossible to attract organic top-of-the-funnel traffic.

Even professional copywriters find it hard to craft a powerful headline. Some headlines are better than others. However, there are certain types of headlines or headline formulas that are proven to get more clicks.

With all these types of headlines, a few things are common: they have personality, and they have elements of uniqueness, curiosity, and are generally interesting.

Here’s our selection of 7 headline types that get clicks.

1. Ask questions

When you ask questions in a headline, you are grabbing attention. You pique interest. You make your visitors or readers stop and think.

But beware: asking any random question won’t do (especially not for your headline). According to Brian Clark of Copyblogger,

“The true rule is that you should never use a question that the prospective reader can answer with a no. If you ask that type of question, you’ve just failed… because you gave people a reason not to read your content.”

The right kind of a question in a headline is the kind of question to which your readers normally won’t have an answer for. At least, they are aware that you might have an answer that might be different from the one they have on their mind.

2. Numbers make for great headlines

In case you haven’t noticed, the title of this post is a number-based headline.

Numbers are the quintessential web snack. People love to gobble up list posts for that precise reason and there are numbers to provide just how effective headlines with numbers are.

According to a Conductor Survey, headlines with numbers turned out to be the clearest, most-clicked, and most-effective.

Here’s how you can easily use numbers within your headlines:

54 Resources On [ Your Niche] You Should Print And Laminate
145 Tips To Make Your Website Load Faster Than It Takes to Open A Browser
How To Boost Your Organic Traffic By 340% in 3 Months Flat

3. Stay understated, or shoot for the stars

Most people would think that using Superlatives like “best”, “fantastic”, “smartest”, and “perfect” would make the headlines more attractive.

Data, however, suggests otherwise and clearly points to visitors preferring to click on rather understated headlines than the ones with a truckload of superlatives.

According to Nathan Safran of Moz, thanks to the Conductor Survey above, the headlines with fewer superlatives were clicked on most often. Interestingly, 25% of respondents preferred the last headline, that was packed with 4 superlatives.

The 27 Ways to Train a Dog (0 superlatives)
The 27 Best Ways to Train a Dog (1 superlatives)
The 27 Best Ways Ever to Train a Dog (2 superlatives)
The 27 Best Ways Ever to Train a Perfect Dog (3 superlatives)
The 27 Best and Smartest Ways Ever to Train a Perfect Dog (4 superlatives)

In the headline examples above, 51% of the respondents of the survey liked the understated approach, preferring to click headlines with 0-1 superlatives.

4. “Make my life easier” headlines

It’s just human nature that we all look for shortcuts. Or, maybe not shortcuts really but relatively easier ways to do things. This applies to everything in life.

Now that blog posts, ads, and pretty much most content online is written to primarily “solve” problems, your headlines will appeal more when you can make their life easier.

Ryan Scott calls these headlines “Make my life easier” headlines and they are appealing for exactly that reason.

The Easy Way to [Insert Something Hard to Do here]
How To Do [Something Important] In [Shorter Time Frame] Instead of [The longer time frame]

5. Make it fast, now

We all want things yesterday. We can’t wait. Patience is not a common virtue and no one gets hurt if you can “do something” way “faster” than usual.

Implement that into your headlines and you’ll have people clicking through to see just how to get something faster or sooner.

Here are some examples:

The Quickest Way to Make your First $100 Dollars Online
The Incredibly Fast Way To Get Ranked On Google

6. Use the non-obvious

If you go south when everyone else is going north, you are bound to be noticed. That’s just how it works.

It also works with headlines.

Say something that’s not usual, you’ll pique curiosity, amusement, or even pure shock. But that works great for headlines.

Here are a few examples:

Using Facebook? It’s Making You So Unbelievably Dumb
Content Marketing? That’s For Children. Here’s What Adults Should Do
Going Digital Is The New Norm? You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

7. Backed by science or proof or experience

Even if something was covered by some other blog or publication, you can still write about it if you have something to say about it. You could pick up what almost everyone knows and still give it a unique twist depending on what you’d end up writing on.

On that note, if you write anything backed by science or proof or your own experience (with results to show), you have a good headline in the making.

Examples? Here you go:

14 Remedies to [The problem], Backed by Science
17 Ways to Beat Higher Advertising Costs (Proof from Real Campaigns Inside)
What 12 Years of Doing SEO Really Taught Me?

If you spend time on writing blog posts and doing content marketing, you should be spending even more time on choosing the most effective headline types. Because headlines are that important.

What kind of headline types do you use for your blog posts, content marketing, and more?

Want to take “luck” out of the equation?

Pick up our free guide to the 100 most opened subject lines.

Discover which subject lines ‘get the open,’ complete with open rates and click-through percentages, so you compare your own results…

Also provided in the report is a spreadsheet of all of the subject lines, so you can sort them as you want… Just click here to download it!

The post 7 Headline Types That Get Clicks appeared first on Done For You.

How To Become An Influencer In Your Industry

Jason Drohn — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 13:28:17 +0000

Influencer marketing pays. And, it pays a lot! But how can you become an influencer?

If you run a business, then you will have certainly heard about the power of influencer marketing, and the great ROI it brings along.

Wouldn’t it be really amazing if you could become an influencer yourself?

After all, why pay someone else to market your business, when you can influence other people’s decision with your subject matter expertise?

But how do you do it?

This post will help you get the answer to this pivotal question.

Let’s take a look at how you can become an influencer in your industry.

1. Find your feet

You cannot just go around blabbering stuff on random topics.

To become an influencer in your industry you need to, first and foremost, identify a target niche.

Once you have that figured out, it becomes easy to create content targeting that specific niche. Remember, you cannot have everyone as your target audience.

The secret to becoming a successful influencer in today’s world lies in finding yourself a niche where people can recognize and connect to what you are saying.

So, find your feet in a niche by identifying the audience you want to target and then move forward to the next step – creating powerful content!

2. Make noise

Now you have it figured out which niche to target. What next?

CONTENT!!!

This is the one-word answer to your question.

Make your presence felt in the niche that you have chosen – the best way to do this is by creating and distributing a lot of free, useful and compelling content so that people cannot ignore your presence.

Look at all the influencers out there in their respective niches, and you will see that they all have one thing in common – powerful content.

They are the masters when it comes to creating engaging content.

In order to reach at a level where people can identify you and your brand, you need to take a few pages from their book and create content that shows your expertise on the subject matter.

3. Invest time

Stop spending your time, start investing it – this is the rule of thumb for influencer marketing.

As an influencer, you need to make the most of whatever time you have in hand.

Start by investing your time in reading as much as possible about your specific niche whenever you can.

Read not only about your niche, but also about things related to your industry – you can read books, online articles, and whatever else you can find that is relevant.

Reading will help you become well versed with the knowledge that you could not have otherwise gained.

It is better to know and learn from others’ mistakes, than to make them on your own.

Reading is as close as you can get to practical knowledge – so make sure you invest ample time reading content related to your niche.

And it does not end with just reading, quite the contrary. Implement the knowledge you have gained by reading, share it with people in your niche to establish your expertise, encouraging them to gravitate towards you for future information.

Remember – the smartest person in the class always used to get the most attention during studying time? Think of the niche as your class, and to become an influencer you have to become the smartest one in the class by showcasing your knowledge – as simple as that!

4. Use the power of connecting

We live in a connected world. As cliché as it might sound, the fact of the matter is that influencing is all about connecting with people.

As the saying goes:

influence is our inner ability to lift people up to our perspectives.

– Unknown

To become an influencer, connect with people already powerful in the industry.

Participate in events, forums, and meetups, and wherever you can find an audience from your niche, get involved.

Make full use of social media to showcase your knowledge and connect with people – offer them help to solve their problems, give expert advice and use the power of connectivity to your advantage.

This is how you can make them recognize your brand amidst all the noise that’s already spread in the market.

Remember – people look for real human advice. They don’t want another chatbot or reading manual to solve their problem.

Social media and the power of connecting give you a great opportunity to provide people the human touch they are searching for.

Based on the knowledge you have acquired through investing your time, give them expert advice which actually solves their problem. Through this, you can easily become the influencer you yearn to become.

5. Don’t rush

Most important of all – instill the virtue of patience into your personality.

Influencers are not made overnight.

As the famous quote by Lionel Messi goes:

It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success.

You cannot become great by doing something once in a while.

Patience, persistence, and perseverance are the three characteristics that differentiate great people from ordinary ones.

Anyone can create something good once in a while, but only those who produce great content and offer exceptional advice every time have an impact on their industry.

The choice is entirely yours – whether you want to be remembered as a one-hit wonder or become someone who is looked upon with respect in their community!

For instance, check out this amazing video course on Sales Funnel https://doneforyou.com/series/funnel-blueprint-video-series-lander/ created by Done For You. It might have taken some time to create, but the knowledge and the impact it makes on the viewer can convert them into your loyal followers. That’s how the power of connecting works!

Final words

Remember, focus and persistence are the keys to becoming an influencer; everything else comes at later stages.

If you have the confidence, the knowledge, and the power to keep coming up with something useful for the audience in your niche, with time you will start getting noticed and grow in stature as a subject matter expert.

Once you start getting noticed, this is when you know you are moving in the right direction towards your aspirations of becoming an influencer.

There are plenty of influencer success stories floating around in the market. Wouldn’t it be great if you could also become part of that list?

Go ahead and practice the steps mentioned here and you can start to climb the ladder of influencer marketing without any struggle!

Good luck and all the best to you!

The post How To Become An Influencer In Your Industry appeared first on Done For You.

How To Choose The Best Social Media Platform For Your Business

Jason Drohn — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 13:56:16 +0000

Running a business these days is a lot like playing a game of soccer. You need to be always up and running in the field to score the goal, which in this case is to reach your target audience and win them over. The best way to do it is by connecting with your audience.

This is where the power of social media marketing comes into the picture.

However, with so many social media marketing channels around it can be quite a tough task for you to figure out which platform to focus your efforts. After all, you cannot become a prodigy with all the social media platforms overnight.

To help you in this task, we are going to share some tips on how to choose the best social media platform for your business. For clarity, we will present them to you one by one.

Go with the numbers

Image Credit: Hootsuite.com

When we say numbers we don’t just mean the platform with the highest number of users. What we are actually trying to say is that you need to invest a little time researching your niche and figuring out where the audience from your business niche is most active.

For instance, a food business can easily capture a greater audience by directly targeting Instagram users with beautiful pictures.

You need to understand the business dynamics and then plan a way to find the best suitable platform where you can weave the magic of your influence.

PS – of course, it is important to find a social media platform with a maximum number of users, but you need to be a little smarter than just that!

Look what the competitors are doing

Every business has a big dog!

You don’t need to copy that big player, but what you can do instead is to try and emulate what that big player has been doing, and succeeding with, in the market.

In simpler words, find the biggest players in your niche and then follow the social media channels they are targeting. Create a social media marketing plan built around the platforms on which those industry giants are active.

This will save you with a lot of research. And, at the same time, build confidence because something that has worked for them could easily work for you (if done right).

What else can you ask for?

It’s not about your business, it’s about the audience

Image Credit: techcrunch.com

When you talk about social media marketing, one thing is pretty clear – the old school trick to praise the business and claim to be the best simply does not work.

In today’s tech-savvy world it’s all about striking the right chord with the audience. Therefore, you need to be where they are and feed them what they want to see.

So, what is the easiest way to figure out what is best? Run split tests with different forms of content.

Create videos, visuals, and articles, and spread them on different social media platforms to see which performs the best. Once you have an idea about the platform where your content is most effective, you can easily build a plan and capitalize on your findings.

It is always good to test a strategy and then feed the audience with something they’ll love, rather than walking down a dead end road without paying heed to ‘what’s next.’

After all, today’s business is all about the customer and not about the business itself.

Focus on many, but target only one

While today’s competitive world demands a business to be a jack of all trades, the harsh truth is that your business cannot be a master in everything. Spreading yourself too thin is dangerous, but focusing on less and being the best at those things is smart.

You need to, therefore, make your presence felt online on diverse social media platforms, if only in a symbolic manner. And at the same time, you should target only one channel as your potential gold mine, giving that channel your full attention.

Why? There’s a catch here.

Once you have a solid community on one channel, it becomes quite easy to spread your grasp across multiple channels. After all, now you have the social media proof needed to earn credibility. In fact, experience from one social media channel could easily be converted into fruitful seeds for another platform.

It is always a smart idea to begin with one platform as a target. Once you are able to achieve desirable success on that channel, you can simply move on to the next and work to repeat that success.

How to choose the best social media platform? Be in trend!

Image Credit: Hootsuite.com

The last bit of advice that we have for you is to never miss out on the latest trend in the market.

For instance, if we talk about the current market scenario, video marketing is making the biggest waves in the ocean. Rather than being adamant and sticking to your old tricks of social media promotions you need to quickly adapt to this change and come up with content that’s focus on the current trend.

There are plenty of examples in the past, where businesses who did not maintain a steady pace with the changing trends and ended up being lost in the crowd.

Therefore, it is important to have a target plan in mind but that plan should be flexible enough to adapt and evolve according to the changing market trends. Or else, you could end up becoming a lost name in the ever growing ocean of social media.

Never stop looking for advice

You may have heard it before and you’ll hear it again, a business should learn from everything that surrounds it, because to stop learning is to admit defeat. You just need to have a keen vision to find out what’s important to learn and what isn’t.

Never stop learning, and never stop looking for advice. Always stay updated on what the industry experts are saying, and pay attention to the predictions they are making because that is the only way to stay a step ahead in the game.

Rather than being just stubborn and sticking with one method, be flexible to change with the times.

Find a social media platform that works well in your business niche, then get together with your best strategists and create a flexible plan that can win your customers over!

Sounds quite easy, right? Implement the advice for the best social media platforms for marketing, and you may be surprised to see how it works out for yourself!

The post How To Choose The Best Social Media Platform For Your Business appeared first on Done For You.

How To Create Content That Converts

Jason Drohn — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 13:38:30 +0000

Even in the age of new marketing channels, like YouTube, Facebook Live and Instagram, the ability to write engaging content on your site is still the reigning King. If you want to create successful campaigns that will feed quality leads to your sales funnel, you need to have quality content on your website.

What is good content anyway?

But what exactly do we mean by “good content”… Well, think of it like this: The reason why a business would publish content is to attract the right leads and convert them into customers. Makes sense, right? So, good content needs to serve that goal which is twofold.

First off, you want your web copy to attract organic traffic from Google and other search engines;

Secondly, because that content will be the first point of contact with your business, you want it to be valuable for the reader, and eventually, convince them to try out your product or service. Good content is content that converts.

How to create content that converts

Now, how do you craft content that captivates the reader and converts them into a lead or, even better, a customer?

Long gone are the days when a short blog post would do the trick. There’s too much competition among companies that offer the same products. Each piece of content competes with hundreds if not thousands of others.

Furthermore, your goal though should be to create content that can be found in Google Search. No matter how much value you’ve put into your article, if no one can find it, then it’s less effective. In this context, the first element of a well-written article is keywords.

Keywords are important and need to be the pillar of your content creation strategy. Successful content that converts requires some effort and careful thinking before you actually start writing. In fact, you need to do know exactly what keyword and buyer persona you’re targeting if you want to funnel traffic to your website for the long-term.

After you’ve figured that out, your concern should be how to write good copy that will catch the user’s attention and keep their eyes glued to their screens.

Creating content is easy! What about good content?

We can all agree that creating content is easy. Anyone with a half-decent command of the English language can write a post. But not everyone can craft interesting and engaging content, and not to mention content that converts. In fact, creating truly enticing content that is both search-engine optimized AND that has an impact on your ideal customer is hard work — even for copywriters.

Why? Simply put, you need to satisfy a bot and a human being by creating content that ranks well and converts readers into leads or prospects. And although Google’s algorithm can be predictable to some extent, human emotions and behaviors are far from it.

Best tips for creating content that converts

As you start to create high-converting web copy, keep these points in mind:

Writing sales letters is both an art and a science.
Quality, as we defined it in this post, is more important than quantity.
Always write copy with your customer in mind.
Writing for your readers is more important than writing for SEO. However, you need to keep both parties happy.
Your copy should be captivating, mind-boggling or entertaining.
Use stories or case studies or examples to help people relate directly to the topic.
Your content should address the reader’s questions, give practical tools and demonstrate your authority.
Also, your content should be engaging and have people react to it in a given way, such as commenting or sharing the post. If nothing else, people should at least want to read more of what you have to say.
Use a straightforward layout. Nobody likes clutter, so keep in mind that “clean and organized” works best.
Last but not least, each piece of content on your site should entice the reader to take a pre-planned action, like subscribe to your newsletter or sign up for a free webinar.

What type of content converts better?

In order to discover what type of content converts well, you need to work your way backwards. Identify exactly who you want to attract as a customer and what they care about. Do extensive keyword research to find out about any pressing questions they might have which you’re not aware of.

Additionally, check out your competition to find out what kind of content they’re publishing. Look for content that ranks well in the search engines or content that becomes viral on social media. Find out what they’re doing, and do it better! You could write your own spin on the issue and include or throw more light on the topic from a different angle. Take notes as you do your market research so you can keep track of any ideas that might spring up.

Another easy way to create better content than your competitors is to explore the comments below a popular article. Also, look at comments for the same post on social media. This type of direct reader feedback can be a goldmine of knowledge and will help to shape the value-packed content you create.

Readers’ feedback would tell you exactly what additional information you should include in your own article if you were to hit all the points a reader might expect to see.

This is especially true if you see the same type of comments multiple times. Taking note of how often you come across a particular pain point or comment will help prepare an epic post.

By studying your competitors’ content, focusing on the comments it receives, and on the level of distribution it gets through sharing on social media, you will have a better understanding about the type of content that would be most appealing to your average prospect.

Finally, when you sit down to write sales letters or any type of web copy, make sure your content is well-structured and is easy to read and apply. Add different forms of visual elements, like images, videos or infographics. Easy-to-follow and pleasant content will make your visitors want to stick around much longer.

And a parting piece of advice…

It is essential to publish the type of content that you would personally enjoy and share, but you must also make sure this content is right for your target market. That’s why it is important to research extensively before you start writing.

Have you run out of ideas for content that converts? Do you want to craft blog posts in minutes, not days? Do you want readers to keep coming back for more? This tool might be the solution you’ve been looking for. Curately will help you create content that converts.

The post How To Create Content That Converts appeared first on Done For You.

How to Create Content for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Jason Drohn — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 20:09:14 +0000

“If you want to score a goal, you have to hit the target.” – Fabio Capello

The ultimate target of your content marketing strategies is to entice the a prospect throughout the buyers journey so that you can ultimately convert him into a customer, whether you’re selling products or services…

And, writing content that can work out at every stage of the journey requires expertise and a well developed customer avatar.

Today, we are going to talk about some simple tricks that can help you create powerful content for every stage of buyer’s journey.

Stage 1 – Awareness

A buyer has a problem, and he or she is looking for a solution to that problem.

This is the initial stage of the buyer’s journey, and during this stage, the buyer is open to all the options available in the market. The buyer is in the initial researching stage, looking for options that can help him bring an end to the problem he is facing.

So, during this phase, the content must –

First of all, show them that you understand their problem and what they are going through
Secondly, show that you have a solution to their problem
Thirdly, reflect your expertise in the field

(NOTE: Well written sales letters follow a similar content strategy, in a more condensed format)

The most common forms of content that you need to target during this phase include

Website content
Blogs and articles
Social media posts
Research reports
EBooks
White papers

And, almost every other thing that makes the potential buyer’s aware of your capabilities. If it’s material that sits at the front side of your sales funnel, it should be structured to raise awareness to your brand.

Don’t forget, 81% of all the buyers rely on online research before making a purchase. You need to target this figure and create content that entices buyers to move further down the sales funnel.

“To discover which sales funnel type to use in your business, click here to download the Funnel Factor Report!"

Stage 2 – Consideration

Once the buyer has moved from the awareness stage to the second stage i.e. consideration, he now has a clear idea of what he needs and starts to consider the various options that best fit his needs.

Your prospect now has a list of names and brands that offer solutions – of which your business is one.

At this point, your prospect starts evaluating the pros and cons of various providers and brands, and is trying to figure out which is the best investment for them.

Hence at this stage, you need to focus on the forms of content that fulfill their need for more information; particularly targeting how your business is better than the others in the market.

This requires you to create content forms such as

Comparison charts and infographics
Expert guides
Video content

Stage 3 – Decision making

Once the buyer has moved down the funnel further and has gathered information about various brands, comparing them, he will now be more interested in learning more about the brand he has chosen. At this point, your prospect is looking for content that reflects your authenticity and expertise as a business.

You need to feed the buyer with content that is more brand-centric, and highlight the key features and benefit that you will bring to the buyer if he chooses you.

Some of the most common forms of content targeting this stage of buyer’s journey encompass –

Use cases
Expert guides
Case studies
Tutorial videos
Testimonials

And all other forms of content which can build confidence in the buyer’s mind that he or she is making the right decision by choosing your business. This type of content is more centered on the fact that people who were stuck in a similar situation as the buyer right now have already used your product and services, and have reaped great results. It works as a confidence booster that they are at the right place to find the solution for their problem!

Talking about brands that you can research in terms of offering powerful content during the decision-making stage, Kissmetrics has to be one of the first names in the list followed by Hubspot.

With smart use of statistics in their content, they eventually sway a user’s decision away quite easily – something all businesses can learn from them!

“Check out this workshop on turning cold traffic into sales, moving prospects automatically through your buying process. Click here to register for free!"

Stage 4 – Retention

Now that you have enticed the buyer to make the purchase, does this mean the buyer’s journey is over?

No, certainly not!

This is a mistake almost every business makes – they forget that buying is really only the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

You need to continue feeding him with content that builds an long relationship and creates brand loyalty. This is again where powerful content comes into the picture. Content forms to target during this phase of buyer’s journey include –

Newsletters
Product guides
Product update emails
Greeting emails
Newsletters and event forms

Basically, anything that keeps the buyer’s engaged and aware of the fact your business is striving continuously to make their life better.

It’s all about keeping the buyer hooked up

The most basic thing about creating compelling content is to keep the buyer hooked up throughout the journey.

Pointing them to the right content at the right time becomes the key. Understanding your buyer’s needs and then feeding him content that addresses those needs can be the difference between successful and not-so-successful marketing.

“Here’s an expert video series that will help you understand the intricacies of the sales funnel and how you can target the buyer at different stages of their journey... Click here to get started for free!”

Businesses that manage to understand the buyer’s journey and target them with the right content at the right time can make a fortune… And it all starts with understanding the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

If you’d like us to put together an action plan specific to your offer and the buyer’s journey that’s already taking place, make sure to schedule a free call with us!

The post How to Create Content for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey appeared first on Done For You.

Tactical Tips for Writing Sales Letters That Convert

Jason Drohn — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 17:26:59 +0000

So, you have been trying to create a compelling sales letter for your offer, and you can’t seem to crack the code. You’ve tried everything from Video Sales Letters to Long Form Sales Letters, only to come up short.

… And you’re wondering if there might be a secret recipe to writing a sales letter that converts?

In short, there is… Kind of.

The trick with writing a good sales copy and a sales letter that works daily is understanding your buyer quickly. You need to know their problems and the motivation behind seeking help. That’s what we’ll be covering in this article…

By the time you finish, you’ll have an answer to all your questions about writing effective sales letters and what you need to do next to get one done.

So, let’s dig in.

Know Your Audience

Can you write something that sells when you don’t know who will buy it?

You cannot.

Think of writing a sales letter as blind dating… You can find a person with whom you click and get on the right foot from the start, but the chances are pretty low that that will happen the first time out the door.

On the other hand, if you know a person before meeting them and have a good customer avatar built, it becomes easier to get on the right track and lay the foundation for a long-term relationship. Right?

When you understand your audience, you know:

Their deepest, darkest fears... The things that keep them up at night.
What problem they're looking to solve, and with what urgency their looking to solve it.
Their motivations for a solution, even the stuff that they don't consciously comprehend themselves.
Why they are seeking a solution now, as opposed to a month or a year from now... What triggered their involvement?

Inside our book, "Convert," we take an exhaustive look at building customer avatars and relating those to target markets, plus a TON of stuff on selling to them! Click here to grab a copy!

Know Your Channels

Where are you planning on doing the marketing for your offer? The marketing channel you use will be an essential factor in gauging the success or failure of your sales copy.

For instance, if you’re running a lot of Facebook traffic, you’ll want to use a Video Sales Letter (or VSL for short). A traditional sales letter approach might be more advantageous if you email traffic.

Remember, what works on one platform might not work on the other.

You must consider that each type of traffic pulls in prospects and buyers with different intent.

Social media is interruption based advertising. A person who clicks wasn't explicitly looking for your 'thing' but it caught their eye.
Search and Google Adwords are about discovery. Someone entered a query into a search box and landed on your page because it was deemed appropriate for helping them solve their problem.
Email traffic is interruption-based but the prospect opted in for something in the past, meaning their willing to take action and are already interested in things related to your offer.
Content marketing is designed around discovery. Someone was reading a blog post and clicked a link or a button revealing more...

Matching up the marketing channel with the sales letter type helps to increase conversions.

Video Sales Letter vs. Traditional Sales Letter

There are two types of sales letters: video and long-form or long-copy. The long-copy sales letters are the traditional ones.

Now, long-form sales letters are just that – LONG! A lot of the time, they’re anywhere between 10 and 20 pages typed. Moderate and long-copy sales letters are heavily graphics-based, so there are a lot of graphics, images, fonts, and attention grabbers. They don’t easily convert buyers now, so fewer people use them. They still work, though, and they can also be used in a way that video sales letters can’t.

One of recent years’ most effective sales tools is the video sales letter or VSL for short.

A video sales letter is essentially a video version of the traditional, long-form sales letter. The great news is that the skills you learn from writing sales letters and other copy also apply to writing video sales letters.

A video sales letter can contain any video content you can create, even what you would typically see in TV commercials. However, slideshow-style video sales letters are the easiest to make when just starting.

These video sales letters typically involve a PowerPoint presentation, narration, and, optionally, a bit of music in the intro or close. The narrator can appear on camera, but that is usually not done.

If the product can be demonstrated on screen, like software, you can include a short demo within the video sales letter. In the demo, briefly show the product and mention some key features. For software, you can make a separate demo or product tour video that goes into more detail; include a call to action at the end and put this video on its web page.

If you want to learn more about sales letters, videos, and their role in sales funnels, download the Funnel Factor Report here!

Your Headline Should Be A Compelling Start

More than 80% of the readers online don’t go beyond headlines. – Inbound.org.

This illustrates quite clearly how important it is to create a compelling headline… Something that immediately grabs the attention of your viewers or readers and helps pull them down the page.

The better your headlines are, the higher the chance of readers going through the entire sales letter and doing what you want them to do – in our case, buy something!

You can begin by creating multiple headlines for the exact copy and perform A/B testing or split-testing, keeping what’s working and throwing out what’s not.

The results of the tests can help you figure out what kind of content is turning out to be the most successful. So you can focus on that prospect in the future.

Personalized Content

In a world that’s being dominated by technology, who doesn’t like getting personal attention? That’s one of the reasons customer segmentation and marketing automation are so powerful.

This personalization strategy can also work when writing a sales copy.

Try to speak to your users with your content. For instance, by incorporating the word ‘you’ in your sales copy, you increase the effectiveness of your sales copy many times over.

Share personal stories. When your prospects hear them, they put themselves in your story which draws them into the sale!
Talk about their pain. Explain that you know what it's like to not be able to put your jeans on because you put on too much weight... To not have enough energy to play with your kids...
Describe the solution. Tell them how you solved the problem for yourself AND what the impact has been in your life.

Make your customers feel special and let them know you understand where they’re coming from.

Pro Tip:

Let your copy sit. Write it, save it to your computer, and return to it after a few days. Your brain will actively try to develop better copy to improve your sales letter!

Use Your Words Carefully

A wise man once said creating compelling sales copy is like playing a game of chess. You’ve got to be careful with your moves and know exactly where you’re going when you start.

It’s a puzzle.

You should pay particular attention to the words and phrases you use in your content.

For instance, writing short and crisp content is a great way to keep the readers hooked on what you are trying to say… But, when writing short and snappy sentences, is your reader taking in and interpreting your words? Or are they speed reading to get back to Facebook without giving your sales copy a chance to persuade them?

I used to think copywriting power words needed to be used whenever possible, but here’s the deal… Buyers are smart. They see through things in an instant anymore. Words like “Breakthrough, New, Instant…” They work. But will they work for your market?

Or, would a more genuine track in your sales copy convert better? One where you educated them, understood them, and truly wanted to help them solve a problem in their life?

Include The Benefits

Why is the user on your website? Why did they take time out of their day to visit your sales letter? Because you have something meaningful to offer for them – right? It would be best if you included benefits in your sales letters.

Studies have shown that when the simple word “because” is added to a sentence, the effectiveness of that sentence doubles.

Another tip I learned along the way is to add the word “so” to your features…

Create Copy & Paste Email Autoresponder Templates

Turns into…

Create Copy & Paste Email Autoresponder Templates So You Can Successfully Promote Your Business While Filling All The New Orders That Will Be Coming In From Your Campaigns…

Let your prospects know what will happen when they choose you by way of the benefits you include in your sales letter. The funny thing is that prospects internalize and decide based on those benefits. But they also verbally express those benefits to others to justify the purchase!

Benefits are a dual-edged sword that you should be making great use of in your sales letters!

Strong Calls To Action

They say actions speak louder than words. But, in copywriting, your ‘Call to Action’ is essential to the sales letter.

Your call to action, or CTA, is the most essential part of your sales letter. The ‘thing’ gets your prospect to pull the trigger!

Some tips to follow while writing CTAs include –

The KISS formula – keeping it short, and simple!
Power Words – like register, download, and signup!
Actionable – Click here, right now, and more!

Most importantly, it would be best if you were precise with the location of your call-to-action signups.

In a long-form sales letter, the CTA button must reach the bottom. You can even sprinkle CTA links through the copy as someone moves down the page. You never know when someone will decide to buy!

With a Video Sales Letter, you want your CTA button to appear underneath the video when the pitch is made… That’s usually at least a few minutes into the sales letter. If someone comes back later, there is marketing automation tech that’ll let you show that button immediately when someone hits the page a second time.

Pro Tip:

Play with colors and placement of these ‘Call to Action.’ Studies show that the color of these buttons can impact user behavior. So, test as much as possible and use the one that offers the maximum success.

Never Stop Split Testing Your Sales Letters

Your sales page is probably the most crucial page on your website. Your landing page runs a very close second.

It’s essential to continuously split-test your sales pages with new sales copy, different video sales letters, alternative headlines, etc.

From the words you use in your sales letter to the graphics on the page to the call to action buttons, you need to split-test everything thoroughly. One small change can yield a 2% better conversion, making you a LOT more money!

The more you test, the easier it will be for you to understand what works and what does not with your readers and potential audience.

You want to maximize the chances that your prospects will convert into buyers. It would be best if you were competent with your copy and willing to experiment and track the results of those experiments to be successful.

Pro Tip:

Focus on split-testing one thing at a time. For instance, test the color of the call to action buttons and the content written on your sales letter separately. Similarly, test the headlines and the call to action individually.

Your Winning Sales Letter

To summarize this post, writing sales letters that convert is entirely based on speaking to your customer avatar and making a compelling offer to help them solve a problem.

In other words, start with the end in mind. Put together the puzzle pieces and blow the doors off with a sales letter that’ll get sales!

As always, if you need a fresh set of eyes on your sales process and want to streamline it, book a strategy session with us, and we’ll get it figured out!

The post Tactical Tips for Writing Sales Letters That Convert appeared first on Done For You.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Email Marketing Copy That Gets Results

Jason Drohn — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 05:10:26 +0000

Writing email copy is a pain… I’m not going to lie. But you don’t need to be a copywriter to write exceptionally well-crafted emails that convert readers into buyers to be successful.

You need to know precisely what you want your prospects to do ahead of time, and you also need to chain together enough emails that you can effectively promote your product or offer days in advance through an autoresponder!

You can sit at your desk daily and write one email, but stuff pops up. You’ll be interrupted, and fires will need to be put out… Emails are one of the easiest things to push off if you let them be! The guys who are building the biggest businesses through email, though – they’re the ones who know that the most essential part of their day is the email that they’re about to send to their list.

If you don’t know what ‘copy’ is (I didn’t 13 years ago when I started…), a copy is simply the words strung together on the page that you use to get your prospect, your reader, to take action.

Email copy is just that – the words used in your emails!

When you hear the terms ‘sales copy,’ ‘sales letters,’ or ‘email copy,’ it’s just the way that you write sales messages or email messages that incite some action from your prospect :0)

That action can be a click, a sale, or watching a video. That’s how you sell stuff! If no one clicks, buys, or watches, then your copy is the first place you have to start troubleshooting!

There is an art to writing emails that people open, read, and ultimately click through, and that’s what this article is about.

Before we get to writing emails, though, we need to step back and figure out what exactly we’re trying to get our list to do – in micro-steps…

Our Goal In Writing Email Copy

Email copy is an exciting animal in and of itself.

You see, your emails don’t typically do the selling for you. Sure, you can link right to an order form, and you’ll get a few sales, but the much more typical way of using email to get buyers is to connect to a sales page or an automated webinar like this:

The flow looks simple enough…

Email your prospect a link to your sales page, and they will click through to the order form and buy!

Here’s the challenge, though…

Not everyone you email will open your email, let alone click the link to the sales page…

This means a specific set of micro-actions associated with your email will make the whole thing work.

(Note: the sooner you understand this idea of ‘micro-actions,’ the quicker you’ll be able to turn your campaigns around! It took me a long time to figure this out…)

For every person who receives your email, they all must do three things before they hit your sales page:

They have to open your email
They must at least start to read your body copy
They need to click a link in your email

All of that has to happen BEFORE they see your sales page!

So, when breaking down the results you get from your email marketing campaign, take a step back and consider the metrics associated with those micro-actions!

How many people opened the email?

How many people clicked the link to the sales page?

Those are your defining metrics when it comes to email copy…

Here’s the thing, though… The goal of your email isn’t to sell the product. The goal is to get the click. Let the sales page sell the product!

Now, let’s talk about what you can do to get the best results from your email, starting with the idea of ‘reframing.’

Preframing Correctly

Preframing is an NLP technique used by copywriters to get a prospect or user to take action.

You don’t need to get crazy into NLP or anything to understand how to use it, though!

Successfully pre-framing someone is about setting them up to take action on the next page after they click the link in your email.

I’m running a paid traffic campaign in the photography niche where we’re collecting email addresses. Directly after they sign up, they get an email from me with some email copy and a link to a sales page.

Rather than say, “Check out this photography course. It’s got lots of training on picking the right camera, using Photoshop, and taking expert pictures…”

My email copy says, “Imagine using X technique to sharpen your client’s photos,” or “Y strategy has served as inspiration for a lot of the landscape photos that I’ve been taking…”

The ‘conditions’ are X technique Y strategy.

The ‘experience’ or ‘event’ is their education after purchasing the product!

Make sense?

Preframing is the most significant difference between marketers who make HUGE money and marketers who don’t. You can use it everywhere, including:

Email messages you send out in your autoresponder
Landing pages that come before the actual product, like download pages, reviews, and advertorials
Sales copy you write, either as video sales letters or long-form sales messages
Webinars that you do with your audience, talking about the benefits of a product before the product is revealed.

Unfortunately, it’s not something that you get. It takes practice.

Now that that’s out, let’s talk about your email copy!

Writing Solid Email Copy Without Being A Copywriter

Writing good, clickable email copy follows a specific formula that can be mastered if you start with a result in mind.

Your entire email (and the autoresponder series you’re writing to promote a product) needs to accomplish one thing… To get a click to the sales page. You want as many people on your list as possible to click through; sometimes, that takes a few emails!

Step 1: Start With The End In Mind

What do you want your email list to do?

Do you want them to read a blog post? Or click through to a sales page? Or sign up for a brand new lead magnet? Or maybe register for a free workshop that you have coming up.

You’ll rarely email your list without some specific action in mind…

When you send an email, you’re:

Trying to build a relationship with them
Wanting to re-engage with them
Selling them something
Getting them to sign up for something

Once you figure out what specific action you want your email list to take, it’s time to create a campaign around that action…

Step 2: Write a Strong Subject Line

The subject line is the first thing your prospect sees in their inbox and is the most significant factor in whether or not they’ll read your email.

There are LOTS of different types of subject lines, including:

The "Ask A Question" subject line
The "How To" subject line
The "Scarcity" subject line
The "Brand New" subject line
The "Numbers" subject line
The "Curiosity Gap" subject line
The "Shock And Awe"subject line
The "Named" subject line

(We’ll have more on subject lines soon; download the 100 Most Opened Subject Lines PDF here.)

You must appeal to the prospect and interest them to open the email.

The FTC says you must adequately describe what is in the email, although that’s pretty vague. Something as simple as ‘New Stuff’ technically explains what’s in the email…

Elements of a great subject line include:

Curiosity – Make them so curious that they have to open the email to find out the rest of the story. (ie. Bad News)
Contradiction – Contradict something customarily held to be true (i.e., SEO is dead!)
Specificity – Specifics help make the subject line more accurate (i.e., THIS is 62% more options!)
Personal Touch – Make them feel like the email is from a friend… not a business marketing to them. (ie. Hey!)
Instant Usability – Make them think there is something they can instantly use to get a desired result (i.e., PDF Download Inside!)

I tend to be along the ‘Instant Usability’ spectrum, but that’s just me.:0)

Did you think this was going to be complicated? It isn’t!

Nothing beats good A/B testing. In most email marketing platforms, you can split test subject lines to nail down which ones get opened and which don’t.

The more people that open and read the email, the more clicks you’ll get. The more clicks, the more income!

Step 3: The Email Body

Writing email copy is pretty easy, especially with a great subject line.

The most obvious thing is to talk more about the email, explaining it and fulfilling the promise of what will happen when someone opens the email.

The next thing you want them to do is to take action…

You want them to click something in your email. That’s the whole reason for emailing them in the first place, right?!

You want your prospect to take action in almost every email, usually clicking on a link.

Keep in mind a person is reading this email. Too often, when an email marketer knows that 70,000 prospects are reading their emails, they forget to write for one person. They think they’ll get results if they blast out an image or a banner.

They don’t.

The key to email copy is to be relatable. To tell stories. To treat their email like it’s written to their best friend. It shouldn’t be written differently than if it was an email to a good friend you haven’t talked to in six months.

It’s your preference if you write a long copy or want to write a short document. Short composition tends to get more clicks, but those clicks are less qualified. Long copy tends to get fewer clicks, but the clicks are highly skilled (they read your whole email!).

Step 4: Getting The Clickthrough

Now for the link, you include in your email…

Your goal in writing an email is to get folks from your list back to your website for some reason. Sometimes, it’s just to place a retargeting pixel or watch a video. Other times, it’s because you’re selling something.

The link text you use in your email has a LOT to do with how many people click through…

Here are a few of the strategies we use in our emails occasionally. We switch it up sometimes, depending on what looks better in the email copy…

Getting The Click

The subject line is the reason that somebody opened up your email. It makes sense to use the exact text as your link.

For example, if your subject line is ‘7 Fat Burning Foods,’ use it as the link in your email, taking prospects to watch the sales video!

Include A Clickable Image

Putting an image in your email content is a great way to encourage a clickthrough AND helps your deliverability.

For someone to see the image, they have to enable images in some email platforms, which means they’ve taken another step in receiving your email…

That’s a good thing!

Here are some types of images that you can include:

A graphical button that they can click
A screenshot of the page that they’ll be going to after they click
A banner that you plan on using for the page (think banner images like Facebook uses)
A still image of the video that they’ll be watching

You can take a screenshot or some graphical element of the page you’re linking to to make this work!

The “Double Line Link Trick”

One of my favorites is the “Double Line Link.”

In your body copy, a double-line link is tough to ignore… So, rather than use something like:

Click here >>

You use something like this:

Click here to download the 100 Most Opened
Subject Lines Report >>

The big block of blue is hard not to notice, so you’ll get a bump in clicks!

“List-Style Link Trick”

Another thing I like to do from time to time is put a series of links in a list, all linking to the same place.

Often, I’ll tie this to a ‘rule‘ that saves the link that someone clicked so I can use it later for a more specialized email copy.

For example, you can do something like this:

In the blog post, you’ll discover:

How to write subject lines that get the open.
Crafting email body copy that gets read and clicked!
Effectively pre-framing your prospect into buying before they ever get to your sales page…

Then, every link links right to the same place!

Spell It Out

This option is the easiest…

Just spell out precisely what you want your prospect to do! The most obvious example is:

Click here >>

Or…

Download this PDF >>

You don’t have to be fancy… Just get the click!

… Some Additional Email Copywriting Tips

Here are some additional tips and tricks for writing email copy that’ll make it easier for you to finish…

These tips are all tried and true and have helped me immensely in getting more done in less time!

Write Narrow Email Copy

One little trick is that you never have a line more than 45 or 50 characters. Once the bar reaches 45 or 50 characters, you hold ‘shift’ and ‘enter’ and space the new line down.

It’s just a single space that keeps people reading down the screen, no different than why a newspaper has multiple columns. Scanning a newspaper is straightforward; your email should be the same.

Batch Your Writing

Another tip is to batch copy when writing autoresponders. It helps you consciously open and close loops, sometimes between three or four emails.

Basically, you start telling a story or raise an objection in the first email, then leave it open for a while. You don’t answer that objection or finish that story until three or four emails later. This process opens a ‘hook’ in the reader’s brain, and they must close it by continuing your emails!

The important thing is that you’re writing all of them in one stream of consciousness, so you’re not getting up and moving around and constantly being interrupted. You write your emails in the same train of thought and keep a consistent flow in your dialogue from email to email.

This ensures that you are consistent in your speech patterns, how you talk, and the stories you’re telling because you’re doing it all in one sitting.

Include Bonding Emails

Another essential thing to realize is that not every email has to be about selling.

I like to do three or four bonding emails when somebody signs up for my list. The bonding sequences contain little promotional stuff, just a little bit, but establish a good common ground between the reader and me.

They’ve all been about bonding lately because we haven’t sold anything inside the marketing niche, but other niches are a different story.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Writing Email Marketing Copy That Gets Results appeared first on Done For You.

5 Killer Tips For Writing Better Copy

Jason Drohn — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 04:31:08 +0000

Your ability to write marketing copy that moves people from just being introduced to you to buying from you is often the only thing standing in the way of enormous success. After all, the dream of selling day or night, while you’re awake or you’re sleeping, is only ever carried out if there is a mechanism running that moves a prospect through the buying cycle!

That’s what Scriptly is all about… Giving you access to customized email templates, marketing and email copy, and webinar presentations that you can use, without needing to pay an arm and a leg to a copywriter who may or may not understand what they’re doing!

Plus, but setting up an automated, backend marketing system through an autoresponder, you ensure that your prospects are always being sold to whether you’re in front of you computer or not!

Now, here are 5 tips for writing better copy and getting the most out of the leads you have in your sales funnel…

1: Kill Your Most Loved Marketing Ideas

Sometimes, your favorite, best loved marketing ideas aren’t what end up working in the market. In fact, they might perform the worst of all your variations! At the end of the day, your customers and the traffic that’s coming to your site will ultimately tell you if you’re off base or not…

Read the full article here >>

2: The Myth Of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a topic that’s getting tons of attention these days, and for good reason: inbound has had a dramatic impact on the business landscape. The core of inbound is this: create valuable content for your prospects and put them through an automated system that sells them something.

There’s a catch though…

Read about it here >>

3: How To Write Jaw-Dropping Headlines

You put in hours crafting a great post, but then you come to the hardest part: The headline. It seems like it should be easy to create a solid headline, right? I mean, it’s usually 5-10 words long. How long could that possibly take?

Click here to discover how to write headlines that demand attention >>

4: 6 Learnable Skills That Every Great Writer Possesses

If you want to be a successful online marketer, there’s one thing you must be able to do: you must be able to write. There are 6 completely learnable skills that all great writers possess, and you can too!

After all, writing is involved in almost every type of content creation there is. Emails, blog posts, and books are all primarily written content. But even for videos, podcasts, and courses, you need to at least have a script or know what you’re going to talk about.

This article will walk you through writing great copy – step by step.

Click here to read more >>

5: How to Squeeze The Most Out Of Your Landing Pages

Your landing pages are usually the most important pages on your entire site, as they usually serve as a gateway for readers, prospects and customers who are about to do business with you…

As such, dialing in the conversion of your landing page is of paramount concern, which is why it’s important that you get started right now!

Click here to read more >>

The post 5 Killer Tips For Writing Better Copy appeared first on Done For You.

Copywriting Archives - Done For You

Mastering the OpenAI Playground: Tips for Effective AI Experimentation

Mastering the OpenAI Playground: Tips and Best Practices

Key Takeaways

Understanding OpenAI Playground

Differences Between ChatGPT and OpenAI Playground

Getting Started with OpenAI Playground

Key Features of OpenAI Playground

Interactive Chat

Model Selection

Custom System Prompts

Practical Uses of OpenAI Playground

Content Creation

Audio Generation

Code Assistance

Benefits for Business Owners

Efficiency and Productivity

Cost-Effectiveness

Advanced Tips for Using OpenAI Playground

Optimizing Prompts

Adjusting Temperature Settings

Summary

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the OpenAI Playground?

How does the OpenAI Playground differ from ChatGPT?

How do I get started with the OpenAI Playground?

What are some practical uses of the OpenAI Playground?

What are the benefits of using the OpenAI Playground for business owners?

Top AI Content Mistakes and How to Fix Them for Better Results

Key Takeaways

Main AI Content Mistake: Lack of Contextual Understanding

Clear Prompts to Avoid AI Content Mistakes

Human Oversight

Overuse of Repetitive Phrases

Varying Vocabulary to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Editing Tools

Incorrect or Outdated Information

Fact Checking AI Content Mistakes

Regular Updates to Prevent AI Content Mistakes

Lack of Creativity and Originality in AI Content

Human Creativity to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Combining AI and Human Efforts to Avoid AI Content Mistakes

Poor Understanding of Reader Intent

Audience Research to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Tailored Content to Avoid AI Content Mistakes

Limited Emotional Engagement

Storytelling to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Tone and Style to Avoid AI Content Mistakes

Issues with Flow and Transitions

Logical Structure to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Transition Words to Avoid AI Content Mistakes

Ethical Concerns and Bias

Training Data to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Ethical Standards in AI Content Mistakes

SEO Optimization Challenges

Keyword Integration to Avoid AI Content Mistakes

Meta Descriptions to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Missed Opportunities for Internal Linking

Strategic Linking to Avoid AI Content Mistakes

Link Maintenance to Correct AI Content Mistakes

Common AI Content Mistakes in AI-Generated Content Creation

Lack of Human Touch

Ignoring User Feedback

Summary

Frequently Asked Questions About AI Content Mistakes

Why do AI content mistakes often lack contextual understanding?

How can I prevent repetitive phrases in AI content mistakes?

What are the risks of using outdated information in AI content mistakes?

How can human creativity improve AI content mistakes?

What are the ethical concerns associated with AI content mistakes?

The Copywriting Tip That Builds Instant Trust

Why This Copywriting Tip Works

How to Apply This Copywriting Tip Effectively

1. Listen to Your Audience’s Exact Words

2. Use Emotional Triggers

3. Paint a Clear Before-and-After Picture

Copywriting Mistakes to Avoid When Applying This Tip

Testing and Refining This Copywriting Tip

Final Thoughts on This Copywriting Tip

FAQs About This Copywriting Tip