Tag Archives: digital marketing strategy

How to Write an Autoresponder Series

How to Write an Autoresponder Series

An email autoresponder is one of the best ways to connect with your audience and build a relationship with them. Essentially a series of emails sent to subscribers in a pre-determined order and frequency. The strategy is very efficient and very cost-effective.

The question is – how do you create a winning email autoresponder series? Here are 6 steps that experts at Opt-In Monster, Crazy Egg, and QuickSprout recommend.

Step #1: Establish Goals for your Autoresponder Series

There are 3 common purposes of email autoresponder campaigns.

  1. Send new subscribers a “welcome” sequence.
  2. Make sales on autopilot.
  3. Promote up-sells and cross-sells.

Whatever your reason is, remember to follow the SMART goals mantra.

Step #2: Segment Your Email List

Segmentation is breaking down your email list into smaller groups of contacts who share certain characteristics. For instance, you can categorize your contacts based on demographics, interests, personas, or stage in the sales cycle. According to one study by MailChimp, email list segmentation results in a 14.4% increase in open rates, a 62.83% increase in click-through rates, and an 8.54% reduction in unsubscribe rates.

Step#3: Select the Right Email Marketing Provider

Fortunately, there are several quality options to pick from. These include MailChimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, and InfusionSoft. If you’re new to email marketing software and don’t know much about these services, just pick either MailChimp or AWeber.

They are the two most popular options used by nearly 90% of beginners thanks to their reliability, support, and a wide range of features.

Step #4: Map Out the Autoresponder Sequence

How long do you want the campaign to last? How many days, weeks, or months? Also, how many emails do you intend to send over that period? There are no universal rules in both cases. But a good rule of thumb is that your autoresponder series should last as long as your sales cycle. The important thing is to send enough emails to accomplish your goals.

Next, decide on a sending frequency. After how long will you be sending the next email? Again, there are no universal rules here so choose what works. With that covered, sit down and decide the message you want to convey in each of the emails.

Step #5: Write the Actual Emails

This can be the hardest part of the process. Consider hiring a professional copywriter to write the emails on your behalf.

  1. The emails must focus on the subscribers’ needs, not yours.
  2. Every email must be personalized to make it relevant and valuable to the recipient.
  3. Subject lines are critical to high open and click-through rates.

Reread the emails to make sure these requirements are met and, if possible, test the series with close friends or workers to gauge their effectiveness.

Step #6: Monitor and Improve

Perfection comes with practice. After you roll out the autoresponder campaign, don’t just sit and wait. Instead, track the performance of your emails and see where you need to improve. Keep a close eye on open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates.

If you can follow all these six steps, rest assured you’ll have an email autoresponder campaign that’s guaranteed to consistently earn your leads and help you close sales.  An autoresponder is a key part of the digital marketing funnel sequence so important to your business marketing today.

4 Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

4 Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

One of the key advantages of digital marketing is you can track, measure, and tweak your campaigns immediately. If you feel your AdWords campaign isn’t working, change the ad copy, ad size, or other factors. The same applies to your blog articles. Play around with the content type, length, and posting frequency until you find a working formula.

With that in mind, let’s look at the four most impactful adjustments you can make to your digital marketing campaign for accelerated growth.

Focus on Mobile

In 2016 mobile overtook PC as the preferred device for internet access. Currently, more than 65% of consumers prefer mobile, and nearly 30% use mobile only to access the internet. Therefore if you ignore mobile marketing, you’re ignoring a huge chunk of your potential customers.

Pro Tip:

To take advantage of the huge and ever-growing mobile market; make your site mobile responsive. Create mobile-friendly content with AMP (accelerated mobile pages), get local with Google My Business, and consider text message marketing.

Make Engagement Easy

Marketing Week recently conducted a study to find if people understand the meaning and purpose of engagement in marketing. The results weren’t shocking; up to 25% of respondents didn’t even know the business definition of engagement. However, about 38.5% knew the definition but didn’t take the metric seriously.

Pro Tip:

It’s important to understand and appreciate engagement as a marketing metric. Focus on ways to make engagement easy. Options to consider including are making your Calls to Action (CTAs) easy to find. Additionally, integrate social media into your website with social buttons and social login. As well, provide a comment section for feedback. Use email to remain in touch, and chat  with your community on social media, chat tools, and online public forums/blogs.

Use Designated Landing Pages

According to Marketing Sherpa, a whopping 44% of B2B clicks are directed to home pages, with an even bigger number for B2C. As a result, you’re missing out big time if you’re in this category. For maximum conversions, you need specialized landing pages for your campaigns. Why? Because landing pages are designed for lead generation and your homepage isn’t. Landing pages are easier to navigate, have fewer distractions, and don’t require scrolling like home pages.

Pro Tip:

Find a professional to create exceptional landing pages. More importantly, ensure that each campaign has its own landing page.

Test, Monitor, and Test Again

Like everything else in life, no marketing campaign is perfect. For example,  it doesn’t matter if you’re converting 50% of your leads; with a few improvements, you could hit 60%. Therefore this makes testing very important. Testing allows you to determine what’s working and what isn’t. It can be useful in predicting future trends which help you stay ahead of the competition.

Pro Tip:

Test often, consider split testing every marketing campaign, use social media to test and always focus on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Again, marketing campaigns are never perfect. But, if you can implement these four tips, expect a significant boost in your ROI.

How to Make Money With Your Email List

How to Make Money With Your Email List  Email marketing is not dead– not even remotely close to dead. In fact, data shows that the impact of email marketing may actually be increasing every year. A record number of new email accounts are still being created every year. The average email user is receiving more emails today than at any other time in the past.

Rather than being used as a form of interpersonal communication, as it was at its onset, it’s now used as a central component of eCommerce transactions. Because your local utility company and your cell phone provider will send you email notifications when a bill is due, and a corresponding receipt once you’ve paid, brands know you’ll eventually check your email. It’s only natural that it’d be used as part of any serious online sales effort.

Obviously, there are two basic steps to any email marketing effort:

  1. Collect email addresses.
  2. Send out a newsletter, or market to your list.

Strategies, best practices, and variations on how to go about accomplishing these two steps will differ from one industry to the next.

Try these four powerful email marketing optimization strategies:

  • Provide value

    If you only send sales emails, be prepared to lose a lot of subscribers. Resulting in a rather dismal conversion rate. Send valuable content, intensely-targeted to your list, and you’ll earn the right to pitch your prospects. They’ll respect you, trust your authority in the space, and will have had enough chances to have considered doing business with you prior to your official ask.

  • Design your funnels

    Don’t be discouraged if you’ve been lumping your whole list into one category and emailing every subscriber on each campaign. Moving forward, you can begin to sculpt out defined list sub-sections. For example, a ‘previous customer’ segment is a no-brainer. Segmented lists for specific business objectives and for specific marketing campaigns not only allows greater granularity in targeting, but it also gives you a greater ability to experiment.

  • Blog optimization

    If your email marketing efforts are stagnant, you may want to look further up the chain. You might have done a great job converting new site visitors into email subscribers, but have you built any relationship with them prior to their opting-in.

    The answer to this can make the difference between a “who is this emailing me?”-response or an “Oh, these guys have a course?” type of response.

    Work on your blog content, keep it fresh, relevant and useful to your target audience. This practice will improve the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.Click To Tweet
  • The ‘tripwire’ trick

    This is as crafty and slick as it sounds. A tripwire is a very small ask you put directly after an email list subscription in each of your funnels. A tripwire might be $5 or $7 and it has a psychological reason for being used. Studies have shown that people are more likely to purchase from brands they’ve already done business with rather than ones they’ve never bought from.

    Therefore, it makes smart business sense to get a quick, low-cost sale from as great a percentage of your list as possible. As a result,  they experience what it’s like being your customer. Thus eventually make a follow-up purchase.

No matter what tips or email marketing strategies you try, just make sure you don’t write-off email marketing altogether. There is money in your list. All you need to do is grow it and get better at harvesting it’s potential.

4 Tips for a Better Digital Marketing Strategy

4 Tips for a Better Digital Marketing Strategy

As a small business owner, you know how important digital marketing is to you and the growth of your company. Digital marketing is the use of tech for promotional purposes. If you want to establish a thriving, recognizable brand, then making use of these techniques is a must.

Today, it’s almost impossible to find a company not using photographs, social media, and websites to spread the word about their brand. However, even though you use these digital strategies, you may not have the results other, more successful businesses get.

The question is, what are you doing wrong?

Maybe nothing.

In many cases, success is only a matter of redefining and tweaking your strategy. Use the tips to enhance the digital marketing strategies you have in place:

1. Define Your Goals

The problem of visible results may relate to the goals you have for your digital marketing strategy.

There are three key elements to an effective strategy:

  • Make sure you’re realistic.
  • Make sure you’re specific.
  • Keep an optimistic outlook.

While the mission statement of your business may read “keep growing the business effectively,” you need goals that are better defined. The goals you set can relate to reaching a certain number in sales for a quarter or to increase traffic to your website.

2. Put a Priority on Mobile Optimization

If you have yet to recognize the importance of a mobile website, it’s in your best interest to hop on board right away.

The number of mobile devices has increased steadily over the past few years. As a result, the number of mobile sales has surpassed that of desktops. If you don’t have a site that’s mobile friendly, you’re basically asking your customers to go to your competition.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to invest large amounts of money into this effort, but it’s a good idea to guarantee your website is mobile friendly/responsive.

3. Make Sure Your Business is Social

Even if you have made the decision not to engage on social media platforms personally, your business still needs a presence. The fact is, tons of potential customers are using social sites. Facebook alone has 1.49 billion users.

Make sure you take some time to figure out where your audience is. For example, interior designers likely want to target sites such as Pinterest and Facebook, while those selling business outreach services may find better results on LinkedIn.

4. Track Website Analytics to See What Works

You can’t determine the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts by looking at ROI alone.

Some of the other factors you must consider include:

  • The traffic – has it increased or decreased?
  • What percentage of traffic is organic vs. referral based?
  • How long do visitors stay on your landing/blog/video pages?
  • How many shares or views does your content have?
  • How many calls-to-action and clicks does your site receive?

When you take the time to create a digital marketing strategy that implements these tips, you’ll find success for your business. Consistency and creating a clear plan is essential.