bgenest, Author at Barbara Genest

January 23, 2022January 23, 2022

Why You Should Take Advantage of Social Media Stories

To Increase Brand Awareness and Exposure

Social media stories are highly shareable content, making it easy to increase your exposure and awareness on the internet. Bringing value to your audience ensures that they want to share it with their peers, increasing your views and exposure. A vital step to the success of any business on the web. It’s simple, the more people you can get to view your content, the more likely your viewership or audience will grow. Social media stories are another creative and interactive avenue to do this.

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To Humanize and Personalize Your Brand

Social media stories are powerful because they are viewed as a more personal and less informal way to communicate with your audience. Showing your human side effectively increases your reputation as a business, as many viewers see this as a more trustworthy trait. This inspires more trust and credibility required to transition your readers or viewers into loyal or paying customers. Being more personable and human also shows your relatability beyond your business responsibilities and goals. You can understand what your audience goes through daily.

To Increase Audience Engagement and Interaction

Audience engagement is how you keep them interested in your business. It also provides them value or solves a problem, further increasing your exposure and reputation as a brand or business. Again, the more value you bring, the more successful you will be. Engaging content keeps your viewers wanting more and provides you more resources to update and perfect your products or services.

Take advantage of these benefits by adding social media stories to your marketing plan today. The more tools you use within each platform, like stories, the easier it can be to build your awareness and exposure as a business while improving your audience engagement and participation. In other words, not taking advantage of social media stories is a poor decision and only shows your audience that you don’t care to adapt or provide them more value.

January 15, 2022

Four Ways to Reduce Your Email Unsubscribe Rate

Customer retention is a top priority if you are a business owner or email marketer. It is quite well known that it can cost five to twenty times more to find new customers than to please the ones you have. Therefore, if your unsubscribe rate is below two percent, you are currently on the right track and should strive to keep it there or even lower.

The following are four ways to reduce your email unsubscribers and build a more sustainable list:

Audit Your Email Funnels Often

Better segment your readers, be sure they have a consistent schedule, not too long or too short, watch out for spammy looking content, segment by interest, and add them to multiple lists.

Plan and Map Your Content

Add in value and fun content, don’t just be a salesperson. Be cautious of your titles, as they are your first impression. Don’t use click-bait or sound obnoxious. Instead, speak to them naturally and let them know exactly what they will get out of the opening and reading your email.

Personalize and Incentivize

Be generous to get back what you are worth. If you only focus on what you get out of each email, then the content you are providing lacks quality. Instead, it would help if you concentrate on your audience and what they need the most for it to come back around to you. Then, keep the content personalized and find ways to incentivize them to continue engaging or reading your content. Giveaways, free downloads, or discounts are a few ideas.

Engage and Follow-up

Don’t ignore your audience once they become a subscriber or paying customer. The point of email marketing is to grow a sustainable and active audience that you can communicate with for the long-term. It is not a one-and-done strategy.

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Keep up with your audience by sending free educational material and asking for feedback or other questions that help you improve your content and overall value as a business. The more you engage and ask questions, the more you get to know your audience to become a better information source, improving your business’s growth and suitability.

A Harvard Business Review report states that simply increasing your retention efforts by as little as five percent can improve your profits by 25 to 95 percent. Showing you just how valuable keeping your unsubscribe rate low can be to your email marketing efforts. If you want to maximize your revenue and keep your subscribers interested, reviewing your goals, content, and getting to know your audience more is vital to your success.

January 15, 2022

Four Easy Ways to Improve Your Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is determined by how often your email ends up in your subscriber inbox. If it’s not deliverable, it will bounce back or be rejected by their email service provider. On the other hand, a bounce-rate higher than you wish may mean that subscribers are not seeing your emails and not getting the value they deserve from your email campaign.

There are two types of bounce-rates; hard and soft. Hard bounces indicate some permanent error, such as an outdated or nonexistent email address. Which likely means the only thing you can do is remove the lead from your list. On the other hand, a soft bounce can be fixed and is probably a temporary error such as a full inbox or some server issue or lag. Meaning you can likely resend the email once the problem is fixed.

It’s important to note that many people have noticed that once their bounce rate reaches higher than ten percent, it starts to affect them throughout other campaigns. This is because your subscribers’ email service provider uses this information as a security measure and will add your email straight to the spam box or reject it.

Here are four easy ways to improve your bounce rate:

Create Double and Relevant Opt-Ins

Make sure your acquisition process includes a way to evaluate the information you collect. For example, using a double opt-in form makes your subscribers verify their email addresses. Ensuring that every lead you get is viable. The fewer errors in data entry you have, the easier you can pinpoint the main culprit to increasing your bounce rate.

Remove Inactive Email Accounts Regularly

If emails consistently bounce or are active, remove them from your list. Inactive emails can have a major impact on all of your conversions and this can give a more accurate representation. Programs such as NeverBounce can help simplify this process with their email verification and email cleaning services.

Don’t Forget Proper List Segmentation

One way to avoid your subscribers’ email service provider from thinking you are spam is to implement proper list segmentation. This is using a certain set of criteria, information, or time to target certain subscribers. Getting marked as spam is less likely if you stay organized and timely.

Avoid Free Sender Domains

Authenticate your email address and avoid using services such as Gmail. Using your own email prevents email service providers from seeing your content as spam.

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Don’t ignore your bounce rate just because you believe it is out of your control. You can and must do many things to ensure your emails end up in their inbox and improve your bounce rate.

January 15, 2022

Five Email Marketing Tips to Boost Sales

Email marketing is the most effective marketing strategy to date. Even compared to social media marketing by nearly 40% more. Industry or niche doesn’t really matter; you will see a high return on investment if you implement the proper email marketing tips and strategies.

These are the five email marketing tips you need to follow to boost your sales and increase your return on investment:

Enhance your Opt-Ins and Acquisition Process

You must generate leads by strengthening your acquisition process or opt-in forms. This is the content used to persuade viewers to subscribe to your email campaigns. Small eBooks, discount codes, or simple newsletters are a great place to start. Make sure the opt-in you use is what your readers want or need, and be sure to execute on that promise as soon as possible. If you know your audience struggles in a certain area, then this is the best place to start when developing opt-in or lead magnet content.

Value Your Subject Lines

While subject lines are short and sweet, you should take the time to craft the most compelling one. In fact, you should create at least two to three for every email you send and test them among different subscribers to pick the one with the best return eventually.

Perfect Your Call-To-Actions

Always include a call-to-action and be sure it is consistent between email and campaign. Don’t add more than one type per email, or you will likely split or confuse your subscribers. Instead, pick one goal and then perfect the call-to-action to optimize your chances of accomplishing it.

Focus on Personalization and Quality Content the Most

A huge benefit to email marketing includes how powerful it can increase your authority, credibility, and trust as a brand. The more personalized, engaging, and valuable the email content, the more likely you will convert your subscribers to paying customers. Valuable and quality content is key to gaining their trust and believing in your word. It’s simple if your target audience doesn’t know you very well, they are less likely to trust you with their money or time.

Create Multiple Landing Pages for Each Campaign

If boosting your sales is your email marketing goal, as it is for many, then you must create landing pages for each campaign you create. Landing pages are sales pages that further describe, entice or invite someone to join or purchase their products. Your call-to-action should lead them right to the landing page.

Work On Your Funnel Each Week And Continue To Branch Out

Be sure to follow these email marketing tips or use them to audit your email marketing process to ensure you are doing what you need to boost your sales. Working on each part of the email marketing process is your key to success.

January 15, 2022

Seven Tips to Optimizing Your Email Onboarding Sequence

The email onboarding sequence or acquisition process is the first and most crucial step to email marketing. Obviously, without leads or email addresses, you can’t properly communicate or market to them. However, acquiring your leads is far from the only requirement to creating an email onboarding sequence. Onboarding sequences also involve the steps between being a new subscriber to becoming a veteran or hopefully a loyal customer and, in turn, leading them down their next email sequences.

Here are seven tips to optimizing your email onboarding sequence

Always Start with A Confirmation

This is vital to ensure the deliverability of your email. Often, subscribers fill in the wrong information; however, a double-opt-in form where the reader must confirm their address reduces this chance. A confirmation is also a great way to personalize your introduction and further excite their interest.

Focus On Benefits Not Features

When subscribers first join, show them the benefits you promised in the opt-in. Don’t just list features. Provide real value. Give them instant satisfaction by joining your list with hardly anything in return.

Develop Inactive and Active Reader Sequences

Be sure to segment your list in terms of their behavior and how they respond to your emails. Especially the first few. If they don’t click them, they should be moved into different sequences or emails to persuade their interest further. This way, you know every email you send can accomplish its goal more effectively.

Use Call-To-Actions to Accomplish Your Goals

Lead and end every email with a call-to-action. Show and tell your subscribers what you need them to do in exchange for all the valuable content you provide through email. Make them clear and straight to the point. It is also important to note that call-to-actions with buttons and graphics convert better than those that don’t.

Be Fun and Engaging

Personalize and humanize your content. Speak to them as if you were talking to a friend, not a business lead. You want to focus on growing their trust and show them that you are worth the time and effort. Invite them to other platforms or ask them to reply to your email to get them to interact, engage and feel connected.

Keep It Short and To the Point

Your email copy length should be around 125 to 250 words or so. That’s right, and your emails should be pretty short. You don’t want to offer too much information all at once. Instead, each email should guide them along short and different journeys that all work together to share a similar message or goal.

Provide Generous Incentives

Make it even clearer to your new subscribers that you value their time by providing earlier and generous incentives that align with your call-to-action.

As you can see, the onboarding experience is more than just acquiring new subscribers. It’s about teaching them about the value you have to offer and what your company is about while also proving it. Finally, it’s about exceeding their expectations and giving them a great experience to transition into a loyal customer and subscriber.

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January 15, 2022

Five Actionable Tips to Boost Your Email Opt-In Rate

Your email opt-in rate is the percentage of those who visit your website compared to those who become email subscribers. The higher the rate, the more email addresses you have to better market and communicate to your target audience. In other words, the imagine you had 1,000 people visit your website this month.

Fifty of those viewers decided to provide their email and opt-in to your campaign. Therefore, your opt-in rate would be five percent, the average that many other businesses see. An opt-in rate that is two percent or higher is said to be on the right track. To determine your opt-in rate, use the following formula:

(Monthly or Weekly Opt-In Subscribers/ Monthly or Weekly Website Viewers) * 100

(50/1000) * 100

0.05 * 100 = 5%

Opt-ins are materials that hook your audience in by providing them high-value content in exchange for their email address or cell phone number. Once you acquire their information, you lead them through your email marketing funnel to hopefully persuade them to be paying loyal customers. Therefore, improving your opt-in rate is important to running a successful email marketing campaign.

These five tips will help you boost your email opt-in rate:

Use Pop-Ups

Pop-ups can be a great reminder for your viewers as they are leaving or browsing your website. However, don’t overuse them as they can quickly become annoying and make them click off altogether. Many readers expect a few, but if they pop-up too frequently or make it too difficult for them to browse the site, they will simply get discouraged and leave.

Make the Opt-In Process Obvious and Easy

Be sure to optimize the signup process to the mediums your readers use the most such as smartphones. If the opt-ins or lead magnets are not optimized for their cell phones, they won’t be able to complete the process. Many readers will abandon a brand or business altogether if they refuse to learn how to adapt to their audience as well. Keep the opt-ins organized and straight to the point. Don’t overload the reader with too much information. For the most part, the opt-in should be scannable and understood in a few seconds.

Add Prominent Testimonials

Show social proof with customer testimonials. Make them obvious and near the signup button to show your readers that you are trustworthy. If others are seeing the benefit you promised they will want to participate.

Use the Fear of Missing Out

Urgency is a useful tactic to get your readers to act now. Discounts with deadlines or early bird tickets for hands-on classes are great examples of these. Most people can’t pass up a good deal, nor do they want to miss out.

Invite Them to a Call or Webinar

Humans love to feel like they are important or part of a community. Not only that, inviting them to a short one-on-one call or free webinar makes them feel more valued and that there is a real person who cares on the other side. It shows that you are there for more than just monetary gain. Increasing their trust and loyalty to the business.

Overall, providing value is key to increasing your opt-in rate and achieving your email marketing goals. If you don’t have valuable content to provide nor follow these six tips, it’s likely your email opt-in rates will be poor, destroying your sales and overall email marketing conversions.

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January 8, 2022

Four Tips to Enhancing your Email Call-To-Actions

Call-to-actions are vital to your email marketing campaigns. It is the material that instructs your audience to do something in order to get the conversions you need to grow and build a sustainable business. If you don’t tell or show your audience what you need them to do, you are unlikely to succeed.

Call-to-actions are like a guidebook that instructs your readers on where to go and what to do. In fact, you can increase your click-through rates by over 300% just by adding one single call-to-action, according to a WordStream report and further highlighting the importance of adding them to your email copy if you want to run a successful email marketing campaign.

The following are four tips to enhance your email call-to-actions to increase your conversions and run a more profitable email marketing campaign.

Use a Button and Colorful Graphics

Buttons are easy to see and obvious to most readers. They are eye-catching, clear, straight to the point, and easy to understand and use. Buttons also can improve your results by nearly 28% more than call-to-actions without them. A big red “buy now” button or “read more” is more obvious and easier for your subscribers to understand. Making it more likely for them to follow through if your products and services are what they need.

Use Action-Oriented Words

“Get the discount here” or “Try your free trial today” are perfect examples of action-oriented words that should be used in your call-to-actions. These words inspire your readers to do something and grab their attention.

Keep it Short and Urgent

Too much information or crowded images only persuade your audience to click away instead of click-through. It can also be confusing and overwhelming, allowing your readers to second guess instead of making a quick decision.

Using a sense of urgency and clear and direct information increases your click-through rate because people fear missing out. However, be sure to use this appropriately and not take advantage or misuse your readers. Urgency should be to inspire, not to take advantage of.

Highlight the Value Proposition

When deciding on what copy to use, be quick and to the point by highlighting the most valuable part. What are your readers getting out of doing the action you ask of them? Is it at a discount, more education, a chance to participate with others, and a bigger community? If you lead with this, it will be easy to get your readers to take action.

Don’t neglect your call-to-actions. Make sure your CTAs align with your goals and objectives to each and every email copy and campaign you create. Please keep it simple, direct, and obvious, and don’t forget the power of call-to-action buttons.

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January 8, 2022

Six Proven Ways to Increase Your Email Click-Through Rates

To make a sale or increase your conversions in email marketing you need to monitor your click-through rate. Click-through rate describes the percentage of subscribers who see the link or email or subject line and click the links within your email after they have opened them. This rate allows you to determine how to affect your email content by persuading or valuing your target audience.

To determine your click-through rate, you need to take the number of links clicked and divide it by the number of delivered emails. Then times it by one hundred to get the correct percentage. For example, say you sent four hundred emails and noticed around twenty of them have opened and clicked the link inside. The formula would break down as follows:

(Link Clicks / Number of Emails Sent) * 100 = Click-Through Rate

(20/400) * 100 =

0.05 * 100 =

The following are six proven ways to increase your email click-through rate:

Keep Email’s Organized, Clear, and Direct

Your emails should be short and direct but with enough information to get your point across and provide value to your subscribers. For example, instead of providing your full blog in the email, please provide a link for them to read the rest.

Emails should be used as a summary or overview. The longer it is, the more likely they will get disinterested and click off the email. Make sure each email you send has one main objective. This way, your readers don’t get distracted or confused on what direction they need to take next.

Use List Segmentation

Personalized and targeted content is key to increase your open and click-through rates. This is because list segmentation helps you organize and divide your customers in a way that makes it easier to communicate with them.

Segmentation involves picking outliners such as your subscribers’ website viewing or email reading behaviors, demographics, and geographic characters and then developing and sending each segment’s individual and personalized email sequences. The idea is to make sure only those truly interested will receive the content, improving your conversions while maintaining your email list.

Make it Smart Phone Friendly

Nearly eighty-four percent of those who use a smartphone have reported it as being their primary tool to check email. This means if your email is not mobile-friendly, you are likely missing out on many opportunities of making it easy for your subscribers to opt-in and click-through. If the process is frustrating, they won’t want to participate.

Add Social Sharing

You can increase your click-through rate by as much as thirty percent, according to an Econsultancy report, by adding three or more social sharing options. Every email you send may not be useful to your readers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know a friend, loved one, or coworker who could use the information instead.

Enhance your Call-To-Action

Use one obvious call-to-action through your email sequence. Make it the first and last thing they see so they know exactly what they need to do to click through.

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The key to improving your click-through rate is to make the right content, understand your target audience, and make it obvious and easy for them to participate. The more your subscribers click-through, the higher your revenues.

January 8, 2022

Five Actionable Tips to Boost Your Email Opt-In Rate

(Monthly or Weekly Opt-In Subscribers/ Monthly or Weekly Website Viewers) * 100

(50/1000) * 100

0.05 * 100 = 5%

These five tips will help you boost your email opt-in rate:

Use Pop-Ups

Make the Opt-In Process Obvious and Easy

Add Prominent Testimonials

Use the Fear of Missing Out

Invite Them to a Call or Webinar

10 Content Marketing Tips for Email Marketing Success

January 8, 2022

Four Tips to Writing Better Email Subject Lines

Subject lines are like first impressions or hooks that grab your readers’ attention. It’s often thought that since subject lines or titles are short, that they shouldn’t take valuable time to develop, but this could not be further from the truth.

You need subject lines and titles to be highly clickable and make your readers interested to click and read your content. If they don’t read your emails, then it doesn’t matter how big your list is. They won’t convert into paying customers or achieving other marketing goals if they don’t open them.

Here are four tips to writing better email subject lines to increase your email open rate and other conversions:

Tell Them What’s Inside

Be simple and straight to the point. If there is valuable content or a discount code inside, let them know. For example, “Don’t forget to download your free guide” or “Your 20% discount is waiting for you” are great examples. Be sure to execute on that promise too. If the title says there is a discount, make it obvious and don’t be misleading. For example, if it’s 20% in the title, it must be 20% in the copy, or your click-through rate and reputation will be affected.

Be Minimalistic Yet Unique and Personable

Titles should be scannable, meaning they shouldn’t be any longer than fifty characters. Otherwise, they will be cut off, and readers will be too caught off guard by all the information. Finally, there are mere seconds to impress your audience. Researchers have stated that you have anywhere from seven to forty seconds to grab their attention.

Include Deadlines and a Sense of Urgency

Use the power of urgency or the fear of missing out to your advantage. However, again, be sure not to mislead or take advantage of your readers. Urgency and fear of missing out include short deadlines on discounts. It’s not using poor language to make your audience feel bad that they don’t participate.

Create More Than One and Test Them

Most email marketers craft more than one title and test it on different readers for a few hours or days to see which one creates the most results. This is a great way to ensure you communicate and understand your audience the best way you can. When you test titles, try different terms, languages, and styles. Then use the results to craft even better titles in the future as you see which tones and styles work better on your audience.

As you can see, your email’s subject line or title is important to improving your open rates. Sometimes it’s about timing, but it’s mostly about the content and how you relate and understand your audience.

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