Dominate Email Marketing Today!

Dominate Email Marketing Today!

10 May, 2016

Email Marketing is daunting when you are first beginning.  So we’ve put together 5 easy steps so that you can ensure that you are getting the best outcome from your campaigns to dominate email marketing!  These top tips are simple but will really help you to dominate email marketing.

Be approachable: When you are in a business mindset, it can be hard to be personable and approachable.  By adding a touch of your story, you can be more approachable and engage your customers to make that purchase from you. Although you want to look cool and all business in front of their audience. In reality, when you are more available and approachable, you will earn your audience’s trust quicker. At the same time, it will help you to grow your business faster.

Engage with your audience: Engage with your audience on every level especially in public. This allows your audience to build a bonded-relationship with you.  Share some of your story and how you came to be in business or what drives you.  Add a personal touch to your newsletters to really engage. REMEMBER: Everything you do in business is all about building a relationship.

Ask questions: Instead of trying to figure out what your audience truly wants to see from you, why don’t you ask them.  This engages the client to reply.  Hearing from your audience directly enables you to tap into what they are thinking when they receive an email from you. It also engages your audience because they think that you care enough to want to hear what they have to say! Always send a reply thanking them for their feedback as well.

Track your links: Be a nerd!  This has to be a favourite because deep down, I love this tech stuff and I am a complete nerd and proud of it! Always test the type of email that will give you the highest click through rate (CTR). This allows you to increase your sales conversion on every product you promote in the future.  Another option is to split test your campaign as well to see which type really generates the highest leads and conversions.

Train your audience to buy your products: Train your audience to buy is the key. If your audience want you to solve their problems, they need to invest in themselves. So, it is important that you always emphasise the importance of that vision on each email you broadcast to your audience. Without conversions, essentially you have no profit!  Profit is key!

Email Marketing if done correctly is not dead!  It is one of the most powerful mediums you can use to build your business. By building a quality list of subscribers that want to hear from you means that you will build a powerful relationship with your audience from the start.  Email marketing will be the most powerful tool you ever need for your business.

9 Classic Email Marketing Tricks

9 Classic Email Marketing Tricks

3 May, 2016

Marketing is always a big part of business.  An easy way to market your business is to implement some simple email marketing tricks into your everyday emails, campaigns or blasts. By adding these email marketing tricks into your everyday procedures, you will find that marketing will be simplified and your audience will be more engaged!

In each email, build a relationship. – It is important to always build a strong relationship with your subscribers and customers on each email. This will engage your audience to open every single email you send them.

Put an ‘Opt-in’ form on your blog. – It could be on your sidebar, as a pop up, as a pop up when visitors exit your page, but it should be easy to find. REMEMBER: Your focus is to build your list as soon as possible so that you have a great audience that wants to read content from you.

Train your audience to buy from you with bonuses. – It is all about creating an irresistible offer. Instead of just telling your audience to buy, offer them bonuses or an irresistible incentive to buy.  A bonus could be an ebook, video course, webinar.

Use Q&A emails to sell your products – When you sell higher priced items, it is important that you use a question and answer style as a way to answer all of your customers questions, remove their doubts, as well as the objections. This allows you to motivate your audience to purchase the products.

Use ‘reason why’ on every email you broadcast. – Benefits really do sell so instead of telling your audience to buy, buy, and buy, for every email you send out, you need to tell your audience the reason why they need to get it. Make it irresistible so that they can’t live without it.

Brand your name – Customers want to hear from a person, not just a business.  It is important to brand your name such as: John Doe. This allows you to build your reputation as a public figure and create yourself as an expert where you will attract loyal followers for your business. This is also the key element to become the authority figure or expert in your niche.

Always use images that focus on the result – Images are more powerful than words and with the majority of people being visual, it is really important to use images in your communication. Use them to show your audience what they can get if they use your products and services. Show them what the end result will be!

Schedule your campaign ahead of time. – Most email marketing programs have a scheduler available so that you can prepare the campaign ahead of time and send at the most optimal time of opens for your subscribers. This allows you to work less, make more, and enjoy your life. The most popular time to send an email campaign is between a Tuesday and Thursday in between the hours of 11am and 2pm.

Offer something tangible. – Customers only buy from businesses they trust. In order for your audience to know you, tell them who you are in a free ebook you have written personally. This allows your audience to get to know you. NOTE: Having a quality ebook helps you to build your list as well as build a great relationship with your potential clients effortlessly.

These are just a few of the best email marketing tricks that can be used to qualify your leads and keep your audience engaged.

5 Common Email Marketing Mistakes

5 Common Email Marketing Mistakes

20 Apr, 2016

Email marketing is far from easy, and if you are new to sending email marketing newsletters there are many potential problems that you should learn to avoid. Some of them could completely ruin your list, forcing you to start over again from scratch.

Here are some of the most common email marketing mistakes that we see often:

Not sending out emails regularly

As business owners and now internet marketers, we’re busy people. We’re usually juggling a bunch of different projects at any given time, and sometimes a few get put on the backburner and sometimes certain tasks get neglected completely. However, you should make sure you never neglect your marketing and part of that marketing should incorporate staying in touch you’re your email lists on a regular basis. At a minimum this should be monthly so don’t let several weeks or more go by without you sending out anything. It’s a common mistake, but one that can quickly cause your list to decay.

The key to good results from email marketing is sending out emails at regular intervals, never letting too much time pass in-between. If you do, chances are your subscribers don’t even remember you once you finally send something new out to them and they will unsubscribe! This will leave you starting from scratch to build a new email list.

Only sending out promotional emails

You’ve probably been on at least one list like this, where the owner does nothing but send out offers on a daily basis until you’re forced to unsubscribe. The reason people do this is because, believe it or not, it does work and it does get results. However, the results are purely short-term, and marketers who follow this strategy need to continually add new subscribers or eventually they’ll be marketing to no one. It’s always better to focus on delivering good value, relevant content and expertise in your emails and building a long-term relationship with your subscribers.

Making it impossible to unsubscribe

This is a very common beginner mistake. For some reason, some email marketers believe that by making it difficult or impossible to unsubscribe, their subscribers will simply be forced to read their emails and buy their products. Well, think again, because it will cause them to click on the ‘Spam’ link instead, which is definitely not good. If enough people on your list, click on this link you can actually get banned or have your account closed by your service provider!

Hammering the list with advertisements

Some marketers who are out to make a quick buck and build a list as fast as possible sell solo ads and do ad swaps with affiliates to accomplish their goals. Nothing wrong with that, if it’s done tastefully and rarely. If it’s all you do, you’re not going to build a good relationship with your subscribers as it’s basically the same thing as only sending out promotional messages.

Importing a list from a social media stream

I’ve seen clients regularly import their list from Linkedin or another social media platform and the results are never good. This is not a quality list because they’re used to seeing you on a social platform with updates, not via email. These types of subscribers normally unsubscribe quickly, wonder how they ended up on your email list and report the list as spam even if they love hearing from you on the social media platform. Just don’t do it!

There are many more mistakes that beginner to email marketing can make. A simple rule of thumb is that if the content is quality content that your subscribers originally opted in for, then they will love your content and stay an avid reader of your email newsletter.

What is List Building?

What is List Building?

15 Mar, 2016

List building is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the process of building lists! Generally, though the term list building is used to describe a specific kind of list with the most common being email marketing lists.

Here the term list building refers to the creation of a list of email addresses or other contact details that can then be used as part of a marketing campaign. This is a big aspect of digital and content marketing and one of the more effective ways to reach a large audience, engage and build a relationship with them online.

Things to consider

The thing to be cautious of when list building, is that the lists need to consist of emails for people who have happily shared their details.  These subscribers are granting you permission to contact them (double opt-in processes are great for this). It would be very easy to create an email list of a million emails long or to purchase a list. If you did not care in any way and added every email address you could find, this would do more harm than good and you would not be engaging your target market. – see Why You Shouldn’t Buy an Email Marketing List.

If you send out emails to people who haven’t given you their permission then not only will you potentially face some legal issues but you will also likely damage your reputation and not get any sales or newly engaged subscribers anyway. They will unsubscribe from your email straight away and then report your content as spam because they are not engaged in what you are saying, nor are they interested in the information that you are providing.

Effective marketing of any kind should be targeted so that your target market are receiving your messages. Otherwise, it is not worth putting the time and effort into collecting the contact details.

Methods of list building

So how do you go about list building?

The most popular method online is usually to have a sign up box on your website usually with an incentive. Using incentives to engage subscribers is a great way to build your list.  The sign up box can go in your side bar, on the front page or sometimes in a ‘pop-up’ that will appear when you view the website. This will then give the visitor the opportunity to ‘opt-in’ to your messages and to receive communication from you. This is what you call an engaged subscriber.

Having an added incentive to try and encourage more people to subscribe themselves to the mailing list – either providing discounts, an ebook or other opt-in options can really boost your email marketing list to skyrocket.  Sending relative content after can increase sales and engagement.

The Power of Pop-Ups

The Power of Pop-Ups

4 Mar, 2016

Is it a good or terrible idea?

Nobody likes pop-ups, they can be pretty annoying especially when you are halfway through reading that article. Fortunately we’ve come a long way from the internet of the past which used to open about fifty windows (remember that?)  Now most pop-ups just bounce up as you enter or scroll down or go to click on the close of the page without opening a multitude of windows.

They are making a comeback though. And actually? You might want to join them and this is why?

Pop-ups for email collection

The perspective in which pop-ups seem to be making something of a comeback is in their use as a list building method. If you go onto many relatively big blogs (and some not so big – Adminaholics included) within a few minutes of being there, you’ll often be greeted by a pop-up window inviting you to hand over your email address, hopefully there is an amazing incentive to engage you to do so as well.

This includes the websites of some of the top bloggers who have an email form that either pops up or shows at some stage while you are reading the blog. With most of these pop-ups you won’t be able to continue reading until you add your details or hit cancel. Okay, so it’s not a separate window but it definitely has the potential to annoy and certainly makes you either subscribe or cancel. What do we realise from this?

Pop-ups for list building

Well to begin with, this should tell you just how important these highly successful bloggers, businesses and websites think it is to collect email addresses.  Most bloggers know that these pop-ups are potentially annoying and essentially feel guilty in some cases for using them. Nevertheless, the benefits of having them drastically outweigh the cons/guilt! So is this something you should consider as well?

Are you really against pop-ups?

The answer to this question will depend on how you feel personally when your own reading is interrupted by such a pop-up. The key point to remember is that the bigger bloggers have millions of regular readers who aren’t going to be put off by such tactics, but pop-ups can still annoy so if you make them generally unobtrusive until you get more comfortable, it will allow you to build your list without driving away too many future visitors or put them off of revisiting your site.

An important tip!

The most important tip. If you do decide to use pop-ups, then don’t make them too irritating. Make sure they don’t keep popping up, make them easy to close and make them generally as simple and unobtrusive as possible.