The Three Proven Rules for Email Marketing Success
We recently ran a series on how to put your sales on autopilot, and included among those three articles was one that featured several handy apps and plugins. The purpose of some of the apps mentioned – they were landing page apps – was to help website owners collect email addresses or other prospect contact information. There must be dozens of plugins and apps designed to collect email addresses. We’re all familiar with the popups. The red “hello bar” that appears at the very top of the homepage is another successful way to get your visitors’ attention and present them with an offer in exchange for an email address. However, even more important than the software that powers these procedures is your strategy dictating what you are going to do with the email addresses after you collect them. Before we get into some specifics, let me give you an important guiding principle upon which you will design your emailing program: Prospects are most interested in you the moment they give you their email address. After they type their email addresses into that little box and press the “submit” button, their interest in you has a very short half-life. In other words, you need to engage them quickly to maintain their attention. If you are publishing a monthly newsletter or some other kind of email, it could be a long time before your prospect receives anything from you. Many prospects probably wouldn’t even recognize you as the sender and your mailer would go straight to the garbage can. So this gives us our first rule: 1. Respond to an email signup promptly and then send further emails on at least a weekly basis. Depending on what you want to accomplish, you can send more frequent emails. Many successful email marketers send to their lists every day. Of course, if you send every day, your content will be different than if you send once a week. Readers will expect shorter emails. However, they will still expect informative emails. Which brings us to our second rule. 2. Always deliver valuable information in your emails. Even more important than open rates is the information you give people on your email list. If you craft a sly subject line that gets a lot of opens, but your content fails to live up to the promise of your subject line, people will unsubscribe and start ignoring your emails. Frankly, you can keep people very engaged with three-paragraph emails sent on a daily basis, if you have a little gem of actionable information tucked into those three paragraphs. By the way, I want to include “engaging” as an attribute you should strive to deliver. Some of the most successful frequent emailers are known for their personality. They consistently deliver actionable information with attitude; today this is called infotainment and it’s a hot commodity. If you can achieve this with your emails, you are on the fast road to success. 3. Occasionally deliver a great value. You can keep looping through rules one and two above and feel like you’re doing okay. But can we talk? The whole reason you’re going to the effort to send emails is to make money. Some small business owners fail to include this step. Having an informed and engaged audience for...
read moreNeed to build your email list? Try these tip for adjusting your opt-in popup timing
Unless you have one of the best opt-in pages, forms, and popups you aren’t gathering all the email addresses you need to succeed. There are a number of variables you must experiment with to discover the newsletter opt-in best practices. Today we’re going to look at one (actually more like one and a half): the timing of your opt-in popup. We all know what the timed-popup is; you navigate to a webpage and at some point – occasionally as soon as the page loads – you’re presented with a popup that asks you to enter your email address in exchange for something of value. The “thing of value” is often a download, a subscription, or a discount. One important attribute you need to discover is the best time to present your popup. Here are your options: Immediately, After a predetermined number of seconds, When the user scrolls down a certain percentage of the page, When the user reaches the bottom of the page, or When the user starts to exit the page. Depending on the design of your website, the software powering your website, the software powering your popups, and the pages within your site where your popups appear, you may – or may not – have all of the above options. First, you should work to have as much control over your opt-in popups as possible. This is true for three fundamental reasons: You need to test, Not all of your website pages will opt-in popup optimize identically, and Repeat visitors to your site will become desensitized to the same opt-in popup presentation over time. WordPress Opt-in Plugins and Others If you have a WordPress website, there are many excellent plugins that give you a lot of versatility in the way you use opt-in forms. The best tend to come with a price tag, albeit usually a small one. The choices are less numerous if you’ve built your website from the ground up. Opt-in Popup Timing The timing is one of the first questions you need to answer as you decide how to get people to opt in. You may start out with an idea of what you think would be best, but don’t trust it. This is such a crucial decision that you must test your major timing options. Here are some considerations for starting points: Content pages. If you’re presenting users with some great content, give them time to appreciate it and recognize its value. Therefore, allow some time to go by. Present your opt-in when the user gets to the bottom of the page. (That’s partly why I said this article covered one and half strategies: When you use the bottom of your page it’s not timing dependent, it’s based on web page geography.) Some opt-in plugins have testing built into them, so you can have several opt-in strategies going at the same time. Good ones also let you do page or “category” specific opt-in presentations. Some websites have very long homepages, while others have a very short one-screen homepage. These sites would likely require different opt-in popup strategies. Category of pages. If possible, avoid any one-size-fits-all presentation of your opt-in forms. Look at the category and content of each page on your website. While the same opt-in form presentation may work for the majority of...
read moreTrying to find your best small business growth strategy? First you need to get serious!
Which do you have more to spend: time or money? Consider that question as you plan how you will promote your small business. In very general terms, you’ll want to commit yourself to an extensive marketing effort if you have time to spend. If you have money to spend, then you’ll probably want to invest more in advertising. Don’t get me wrong; I understand that “time is money” and lots of social media marketing programs are not fully DIY – you’ll end up hiring someone or assign an employee to the job. In fact, in both marketing and advertising, it takes a warm body to “place” the messages. However, with social media marketing, “running” the message is generally free. Of course, the opposite is true with advertising. When you commit to an advertising program, you’ll pay someone for the writing or design, and then also pay for the space, or clicks, or views that your ads use, capture or generate. Let’s go back to the question that I used to kick off this article. Which is more abundant in your business, time or money? More often than not, small business owners will give “time” as the answer to that question – even though they may be running themselves ragged already. Their thoughts go something like this, “Well, I could come in a little earlier or stay a little later and find an hour or two here and there to work on social media marketing.” That may be true, but if you’re planning to take that approach, you may not be giving your social media marketing program a fair chance – and this is really the point I want to get around to. You need to invest sufficient time, talent and money into any promotional program to determine whether or not it has been, or has the potential to be effective. The ultimate success of your small business hangs on your ability to grow, through advertising, marketing, or both. If you conduct some trial programs, but do them poorly, you end up in a worse position than if you had not conducted trials at all. At least before your trials you know you are uninformed! After a bad trial you’ll be under the impression that you learned something when, in fact, you haven’t. This means that the groundwork you do before you jump in with both feet on your trials, or experiments, is critical to your long-term success. You need to: Read current books and articles that directly relate to your plans, Talk to others who own similar small businesses and have had success in social media marketing or online advertising, Interview either freelancers or small ad/marketing agencies that handle clients similar to yourself, and Get a strong working knowledge of how the various social media platforms, and PPC advertising programs. There are many small business owners who, through diligent work and careful observation, are able to maintain a substantial growth rate through lower-cost social media marketing. However, there are also many who discover that the real secret for their growth lies in targeted online advertising. Of course, a combination of the two is often the best strategy. But to gather this critical information, you need to give your trials a “fair...
read more3-Step Data Mining Guide for Small Business Prospects
Say you sell supplies to dry cleaners and your sales rep is going to start exploring a new territory. A good strategy would be to “break the ice” with some personalized emails that might be followed up with phone calls before hitting the bricks and knocking on doors. To accomplish this, you would need names to go along with the emails. (By the way, as long as you are sending emails one-by-one from a private email account, it’s not “spam.” It becomes spam if you create lists and start pumping out emails via any of the automated email sending services.) Knowing how to do some basic “data mining” is an important skill to have. We’ve published a number of articles filled with tips on how to build email lists, including growth hacking tips and using trade shows as input. This step-by-step guide to finding prospects is a simple data mining technique that scoops information from public records on the Internet. For the purposes of my instructions, I’ll continue with the example I referenced at the top. I’ll pretend I sell hangers to dry cleaners and I’m going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, spending one day on the Peninsula – starting in San Mateo. I begin my research on Google with a long tail keyword: san mateo cry cleaners. 1. The initial search. The point of this first search is to capture the URLs and domain names of all the dry cleaners in the area. In some cases, you can go to the website and get the rest of the information you need. However, many times you won’t be able to find out the name of the person in charge, or get a good email address. Through the actual website, your only method of getting in touch might be through a contact form, or you could be forced into making a cold call. We want to get a good name. You’ll probably want to start a spreadsheet with all the URLs in the first column. Many of you will be wanting to gather this information for many prospects, so you’ll be drilling down on this initial search several times to capture the URLs and domain names. 2. Find domain name ownership. Head over to a site where you can perform a “Whois” look up, such as this one at Domaintools. Copy one of the URLs from your spreadsheet and look up the public information that’s on file. Sometimes at this point, you’ll encounter a “private registration” where the person who owns the website has paid an extra fee to keep his or her name away from the public. However, when that’s not the case, you’ll usually get some good contact information you can use. When we’re dealing with sole-proprietorships – such as a dry cleaner – the “decision maker” in the business is usually the name that’s connected to the ownership of the website. Obviously, if you’re trying to make contact with a single business that’s part of a larger corporation, you may not get the information you need; your Whois lookup will return some corporate contact information, which won’t be very helpful. 3. Copy the owner’s name, email address and phone number into your spreadsheet. At this point, I recommend a very short introductory email using...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Does your marketing look mahvelous?
Remember Billy Crystal’s old character on SNL, Fernando, and the catchphrase he made famous (You look mahvelous!)? This week’s curated content asks that question about your sales and marketing materials…and offers some advice. Marketing and sales If you’ve been concentrating on copywriting for your advertising and marketing materials, you may have overlooked design – you need this information. Along those same lines, you’ll get a lot out of this piece that discusses the power of visuals in content marketing. Have you started to think about how artificial intelligence will impact your marketing? Anne Costello says it’s about time to consider the subject. Here are five marketing hacks that small business owners say have changed their lives. If you’re late to the content marketing game, this Forbes article will get you caught up and positioned to move ahead of your competitors. Check out this Vistaprint survey: How customers are finding your small business. It’s no secret that sales and marketing teams don’t always play nice with each other, so your top priority needs to be getting them aligned. Are you B2B? Do you love social media? You should. Here’s why. Two excellent views of content marketing: The one thing that could ruin it for you and why it’s more like chess than checkers. And finally, you want your content to be shareable, right? Then check out these 46 expert tips. Leadership, management and productivity In this article I wrote for Capital One Spark, I share some important information on retirement accounts specifically created for small business owners. Powerful customer relationship management (CRM) software is now affordable for small business owners. Here are five questions to ask when you’re selecting a system. We love automation, but customer service still requires a human touch. And while we’re on the subject, leaders obsessed by customer service do these five things…do you? Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Women entrepreneurs shared their stories at a recent Bay Area event, highlighting their hard work and what it takes to succeed. If you’re looking for funding, you may want to consider the three types of grants discussed in this article. Save the date? If you see owning a franchise in your future, you might want to attend the International Franchise Expo in NYC on June 16-18. Politics, government and the economy Legislation matters and John Sims, writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, says Dodd-Frank continues to hurt small business. We get very conflicting opinions on the economy. This piece outlining five things to know offers a helpful...
read more