What To Look for During an Email Funnel Audit

Stop neglecting your email funnels. Just because you have them automated doesn’t mean they will be successful. You need to add an auditing process to your email marketing campaign schedule to ensure the work and content you are creating is designed to maximize your success.

 

Here’s what to look for during an email funnel audit:

 

Goals and Value

The first places to review are your goals and value as a brand. Make sure your marketing goals align with the value you provide to your target audience and overall message as a brand. Starting with your goal is how you develop cohesive content that achieves results. It also ensures you understand your target audience and how you provide value to them. Next, write down these goals as you go along the auditing process to ensure that each part of the campaign matches and achieves them.

 

Abnormal Metrics

The four key metrics to keep track of are open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and return on investment. These numbers can give you an understanding of where to improve your content. For example, if you have a high open-rate but low click-through rate and your readers are not unsubscribing, you know that your titles are working, but there is a disconnect between the call-to-action, objective, and email content.

 

Email Flow and Segmentation Organization

Another area to review is the structure of how your content is sent and how your subscribers are organized. For example, each subscriber should be in more than one segment or email sequence to better increase your conversions and communication with that reader.

 

You will also want to take a moment to review this list to weed out any inactive subscribers and make sure they are in the appropriate segment. Lastly, you want to ensure there are not too many emails in each sequence and that they are organized to match your email marketing goals.

 

Content Value and Quality

Finally, and most importantly, is the evaluation of all your content within the email campaign. First, you need to make sure each email is organized and achieves the goals you were set out to do. Then look to make sure the email infrastructure has everything required as well. Some questions to answer when reviewing the quality of your content are:

 

  • Does it align with your marketing goals and company values?
  • Do they each have one call to action? Are they clear, obvious, and organized?
  • Are your messages and call-to-actions consistent throughout the entire funnel?
  • Are they personalized to your readers and the buyers’ stage they are on?
  • Do the titles hook or grab your attention?

 

As you can see, evaluating every process of your email marketing campaign is key to running a successful audit. Each must work together to successfully persuade or guide your audience into becoming a loyal subscriber or paying customer.

How to Easily Crank out Content Daily

 

 

Seven Common Influencer Marketing Problems and How to Avoid Them

If you want to work with influencers to market your goods and services, you must be super familiar and aware of the rules, laws, and regulations surrounding this marketing method. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, someone else has already invented it, and it works great. All you need to do is get familiar with what the ins and outs are.

 

Here are the seven most common influencer marketing mistakes to avoid and what you should do to prevent them:

 

Not Understanding Your Target Audience

 

This leads to picking the wrong influencer, and choosing the wrong platform and social media channels.

 

Not Providing Enough Resources and Information

 

Don’t expect the influencer to do the job without the proper information. While they are great at what they do, they need solid information from you first to understand the expectations and goals for your business.

 

Remember, they are influencers because they marketed themselves as the product. Therefore, they don’t know anything about your business and what content needs to be created to get the conversions you are hoping for.

 

Thinking Too Short-Term

 

It takes work to find the right influencer and even more time to keep them accountable. Due to this, you should always think about forming long-term partnerships with your influencer. Over time, they can become even more of an asset as they become experts on your brand, products, or services. When you show influencers you truly mean business and value them as humans, they are more like to stay accountable and meet all your marketing requirements.

 

Prioritizing Conversions Over Quality Content

 

While conversions are what you want, you can’t expect that without creating good content. The right content and the influencer that actually fits well with that content make the engagement rate you need to be successful with the campaign.

 

Not Calculating and Keeping Track of Your ROI

what is return on investment

Return of investment can be tracked and should be during the entire campaign and from the very start. While it is not as easy to determine, like regular social media ads or other similar online marketing, it can be done.

Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics

 

When you only think about how many people are following someone rather than their level of engagement, it’s easy to get tricked into working with them without realizing it. Pay close attention to all the metrics that matter.

 

Ignoring Federal Trade Commission Guidelines

 

Ignoring the law is not the best way to ensure that you get what you want. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines and stick to them no matter what you feel about them.

 

There are legal requirements to follow before you can safely post influencer content. First, you must legally disclose whether or not a post is sponsored, for example, and whether or not links are monetized in order to keep consumers aware.

 

Ensure you read the information provided by the FTC guidelines and get to know them so that you don’t make these types of legal mistakes. Otherwise, working with influencers is a very profitable joy that you won’t regret doing.

 

 

 

Four Influencer Marketing Myths Destroying Your Results

If you’ve been worried up until now about getting involved with influencer marketing, let me reassure you. There is no reason you can’t incorporate influencer marketing into your overall marketing plan regardless of your reach or budget.

 

Here are four influencer marketing myths stalling your results and hindering your ability to run and create a powerful influencer campaign:

 

You Must Have a Large Budget to Be Successful

Why Influencer Marketing Works

Unless you want to work with a mega influencer, you don’t need a large budget to get started or see results. A big budget doesn’t necessarily correlate to a successful influencer campaign. Choosing the right influencer with your specific and targeted goals in mind does.

 

Nano and Micro-Influencers Don’t Bring Conversions

 

Actually, nano and micro-influencers often have higher engagement rates. Virtually 22% higher than mega and macro-influencers. You may generate better results using smaller influencers than large ones.

 

High Popularity Means Instant Exposure and Success

 

The size of an influencer audience does not instantly equal success. Using audience size as your only or main factor to contract them is a major mistake. You should never discount influencers with lower audience totals as they can have a higher engagement rate than those with millions of followers. An audience can be bought, but engagement, the metric that matters most to your return on investment, is harder to fake.

 

Reach is More Important Than Relevant or Quality Content Creation

 

You must have relevant and quality content together to run a successful campaign. Again, just because an influencer has a high audience does not mean you will gain the same amount of reach.

 

Influencers that make the best impact create content their audience needs and wants. Meaning who they partner with should always be relevant, or they will likely ignore it. Their audience could also feel deceived or feel the partnership is ingenuine, further hurting your results.

Top Social Media Platforms for Influencer Marketing

When you start using influencer marketing, it’s important to understand that not all platforms will be viable for your needs. Only the platforms that have influencers who market to your audience will work for you. It will help you understand what the personality is and the audience is of each platform to make the right choices.

 

Instagram

 

This visual social media platform has grown so fast that hardly anyone hasn’t heard of it. Over a billion people use the platform at least monthly, and most of them are based outside of the USA, with 140 million residing in the USA. Even during the 2020 pandemic, Instagram grew by leaps and bounds. So if you have a visual product or know how to make your offers visual, this platform will work for you.

 

YouTube

 

It’s hard to imagine life without YouTube. It’s only been here since 2005, but it has changed the landscape of media. Anyone can truly get their “15 minutes of fame” by starting their own YouTube channel. YouTube is still growing its influence by expanding its member base by 14 percent in 2020, and it’s still growing. Today, there are almost 2 billion active users on YouTube. So there is no doubt that your audience is also on YouTube. Even if you don’t have a particularly visual niche, you can usually find what you need here.

 

TikTok

 

As a micro media visual platform, this social media network has taken off in a big way. Some of the explosion is due to “bad press,” which proves that there is no bad press if you’re ready to use it for your needs. This platform is in over 150 countries and is most loved by the younger generation.

 

Twitter

 

One of the most long-lived platforms on social media platforms has gone from a text-based solution to a multimedia solution used by millions every day. Many people use Twitter to get all their news and information. The audience on Twitter is mostly from the USA, and in fact, more than half of all citizens in the USA are using the platform regularly.

 

Blogs

 

You may not initially think of a blog as a social media platform, but it is because you can have plenty of engagement through the comment section of any blog. Influencers who have very popular blogs can help you get more views for your offer just as easily as a YouTube influencer can. If they have an engaged audience that needs your solutions, it will work for you.

 

Research each platform to see if you can find influencers who entertain or inform your ideal audience who wants and needs your offers. If so, you can surely work out a deal to get the word out that is beneficial for you both.

How do YouTubers Make Money?

Start with the Right Influencer and Target Audience

For influencer marketing to work in your favor, your target audience and the influencer’s audience must match. Before you reach out to the influencer or even understand which type of influencer to work with, you need to identify your target audience, one of the first steps required to running any business and creating products and services that make a real difference within your industry. It’s simple, if you share products, services, or ideas to the wrong audience, you won’t see any conversions.

 

Your target audience consists of a specific group of people with particular characteristics found within your target market. Therefore, your market is a lot broader and not as narrowed down. For example, a target market would be women ages 18 to 26, while your target audience would narrow this down to women 18 to 26 who enjoy travel and fitness.

 

To find the right target audience, you must:

 

Outline the Demographics:

 

To start, you want to outline their demographics which includes:

 

  • Their age and gender
  • Place of work and yearly income
  • Relationship status
  • Ethnic background
  • Level of education
  • Where they live and visit

 

Pretty much any information you can think of to better narrow down your audience. While it can sound a little invasive, it is crucial to ensure you get the information out correctly.

 

For example, if you know most of your audience is located in California, you will have a better time launching your content with their pacific daylight time zone. Furthermore, it helps determine how or what content to create and where to put it. Finally, 18 to 26 are more likely on Instagram than Facebook to give you another example.

 

10 Ways to Get to Know Your Audience Better

 

Highlight their Psychographics and Pain Points

 

This section focuses on why they buy and can better help you communicate your message.

 

Questions that determine this include:

 

  • What common problems do they have?
  • How do they live? What is their lifestyle like?
  • What are their interests and hobbies?
  • What are their buying patterns and habits like?
  • How do they behave in your industry?
  • Do they like brands, and if so, which ones?

 

Compare Your Content and Services

 

Once you have your demographics and psychographics outlined, you can better understand what to create and who to put on your team. Next, you want to compare your products or services to the information you determined above to select your campaign and influencer type better. The most important is that they share your target audience. How big their following is does not matter if their engagement rate is low and their audience doesn’t have any interest in starting.

 

Anything in business, including influencer marketing, starts with your audience. If you can’t determine the right target audience, anything you do next will only lead to poor or inconsistent results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Influencer Marketing Works

In 2020, Influencer marketing was worth more than nine billion dollars. It is now expected to grow beyond thirteen billion dollars. Showing you that it is here to stay and only growing stronger. Influencer marketing is a form of worth-of-mouth or online marketing using social media platforms and influencers who share content to promote products or services for companies with similar target audiences.

 

The goal is to influence their audience to increase their conversions, usually in increased sales, traffic, or engagement. Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are currently the top three social media platforms used by many influencers and companies worldwide to market their products, services, or ideas.

 

Here are the main reasons why influencer marketing works and why it is so beneficial to your brand:

 

Influencers Build Trust and Establish Creditability

 

Not only can influencers help you find your target audience more easily, but they can also help you connect and engage with them. An influencer has an audience because they have similar interests to them and appreciates their opinion.

 

Meaning the influencer already has established trust and credibility. When they partner with a company, that trust and credibility often transfer over. Without these two factors, you can’t expect to make a sale or increase your conversions. Customers need validity in exchange for their time and revenue.

 

Influencers Create Engagement and Long-Lasting Relationships

 

Along with trust comes needed engagement. What kind of engagement you need is up to you and your business goals? For many, that includes more likes, comments, shares, and clicks to their websites to make a sale and increase their revenue or exposure hopefully. Not only do they increase your engagement rate, the relationship is more personal too. Meaning they can form deeper and stronger relationships, further increasing the trust and loyalty to your brand.

 

Influencers Expose You to Larger and More Loyal Audiences

 

Establishing a relationship with several different influencers allows you to get in front of more people with the same target audience as yours, especially when comparing it to traditional online ads. In addition, your target audience is less likely to skip over it when an influencer is involved as it humanizes your brand.

 

As you can see, if you haven’t added influencers to your marketing strategy yet, then you are likely missing out. In fact, according to a Mediakix survey conducted in 2019, nearly 17% of companies use or will use half of their marketing budget on influencers alone. While that is a small percentage, many companies reported in the same year that they want to significantly increase their influencer budgets to keep up with the current demand for social media content. They believe influencer marketing is paramount to their success now and in the future.

 

 

 

These Niches Benefit the Most from Influencer Marketing

Any product or service can benefit from influencer marketing. However, some certain niches or genres perform better and see far more success than others. This is likely because the content is easily shareable, visual, consumable, and in high demand.

 

The following are the most popular industries for influencer marketing:

 

Beauty and Fashion

 

This is probably the most obvious niche within influencer marketing as it makes up the bulk of it. Products and services within this niche are built on their ability to make bold, beautiful, and colorful works of art. They are highly shareable and consumable, making them a powerful product to influence. The Instagram platform is a visual social media that is one of the most used for this niche as the niche creates amazing visuals.

 

Gaming

 

Another niche that probably won’t come to you as a surprise. This industry is worth over 130 billion dollars. Those who love gaming thrive for information to learn how to complete their game or compete at the highest level against their rivals. Sharing reviews on the most anticipated game of the year or console or walkthroughs and guides on how to achieve the highest level in competitive play are just a few things audiences crave. You can often find gaming influencers on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and even Twitter.

 

Health and Fitness

 

Most people want to learn how to be healthy, improve their apparencies or maintain their weight. It is vital to your survival, meaning there is high demand for needed information. Weight loss how-to videos, advertising sportswear, or selling weightless programs are a few great things in this niche that influencers can promote.

 

Food and Travel

 

Mouthwatering dishes, videos on how to bake the perfect cake, how-to guides on traveling the world on a small budget, or simply sharing the meals you’ve tried while traveling to exotic places are just a few examples of content audiences crave within these niches. Many young adults have reported using Instagram as their source of information before they book their travels or YouTube to learn how to cook a new meal.

 

While these are the most common and successful industries in influencer marketing, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try if your niche didn’t make this list. You can be an innovator and start something new within your industry as long as you use the right tools and resources.

 

Find the right social media platform and influencer, and create the best content with your target audience and business goals in mind. This extensive list shows that influencer marketing will likely benefit your company as long as you can provide visual content that solves a high-demand problem. Influencer marketing thrives on high-quality visuals and in-demand content.

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Influencer Marketing and the Pyramid of Influence

The pyramid of influence is a great model or image to categorize your different audiences and the influencers who represent them. It’s designed to quickly show you who and what makes up the most of your engagement to create the right content and materials to develop and run a successful campaign.

 

To put it simply, a pyramid of influence is designed to allow you to quickly understand who makes up your community and how they each influence your audience. This way, you can easily develop content and strategies to reach your target audience more efficiently and ensure you get the right influencer on board.

The pyramid of Influence is made of the following levels:

influencer Pyramid

First Level: Brand Content Creators

 

They are the brand experts and make up most of your content that your influencers can’t wait to use, share with their audience, or use inspiration to make new content. The content is produced by your company, by those you hired, or even mega-influencers.

 

Second Level: Influencers or Leaders

 

This is where digital influencers come in and make up the bulk of the content and engagement. They spark interest within those who want and must get your products. They inspire and influence transactions and engagement. They are the ones that will do anything to get their hands on your product and share it with their audience because they love your products or services. They are the leaders of your content and mission.

 

Third Level: Prosumers or Seed Planters

 

Prosumers are active in the community consistently, usually using third-party platforms such as Facebook or YouTube. They are the ones that build groups and posts questions or spark interest in topics supporting your niche or brand. In other words, they plant the seed of interest and increase engagement and interaction.

 

Quite a few people in this level of the pyramid will eventually move on to the second tier as low level, or nano influencers can also be found in this level as they often plant the seed. They look up to those above them in the tier to help them create content, answer any questions, or sound the alarm to a common problem within the industry.

 

Bottom Level: Consumers or Readers

They consume content but don’t generate it. They are known as consumers and will make up the bulk of your audience and are responsible for revenue. They are the ones that are influenced by the rest of the pyramid and make purchases or other actions that can positively affect your conversions.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages

Understanding the pyramid of influence helps you see how your customers, influencers, and content writers can influence different types of people. The ones on the top have the most impact, while those on the bottom make purchases and increase your conversions.

Set Up A Product Creation Schedule For Yourself And Your Team

Let’s talk about money. More importantly, let’s talk about how you profit from your online properties. You do it through ads, by making affiliate sales, or my personal favorite – by selling your own products. Those products are what we’ll be talking about today. More specifically, we’ll be discussing creating information products consistently. Why information products? Because you create them once and sell them again and again. No supply line, no storage, no overhead. When you make a sale, it’s almost pure profit.

 

I’m going to let you in on a secret it took me a while to discover when I first started out. It’s much easier to sell an existing customer a second product than it is to find a brand new customer. It’s even easier to sell them the third, fourth, fifth one. You get the idea. That’s because you’ve done all the hard work of earning this person’s trust already and if you’ve done your job right, the first thing they purchased from you is already helping them solve their problem. That’s what information products are all about. Solving a problem. To create that next product, look at where your customers are at and think about what they need to do next. What’s another problem they will face and how can you help them solve it.

 

For example, your first product may be an eBook or course on setting up a WordPress site. Next, your customers may need to learn about creating content that attracts the right type of reader. And then they need to learn about traffic, and list building, and effective social media strategies. Each one of these could be a new info product or new content for your paid membership site.

 

Once you have an idea of what types of products you want to create, it’s important to get them out consistently. You want to have a new product out there for your existing customers to buy. Of course, you’ll also attract new buyers along the way who will then not only buy the new thing you’ve come out with but hopefully also some of the other titles and courses you have out there.

 

Start with a list of products you want to create. Do your best to estimate how long it will take you to create the product and all the infrastructure that goes along with it like a sales page, a download page, autoresponders, and solo emails to promote it, a promotion schedule, etc. Make a list of everything you need to do before you can launch this new product. Then get to work. Chip away at it every day and continue to consistently work towards each of these new product launches, adjusting your timeframe as needed.

Outsourcing: The Key to Success for The Life Affirming Entrepreneur

In the beginning, it will probably be just you working on this product creation. Maybe you’re hiring out the graphics. Put that on the schedule and communicate with your graphic designer early to avoid bottlenecks. As time goes by, you may choose to outsource some of the product creation. Maybe you’re hiring an editor to proofread your work. Or a VA to help with the setup, infrastructure, and customer service. Eventually, you may even hire some writers to create these products for you. As your team expands, it’s even more important to have a schedule everyone works off to make sure these new products come out regularly.

 

 

Work On Your Funnel Each Week And Continue To Branch Out

You should already have at least some very basic funnels set up for your online business. To make sure we are all on the same page, let’s quickly define what a funnel is when it comes to your website. It’s a way for people to work their way through what you have to offer. This could be going from the content of your blog, to signing up for your email list, receiving a series of emails and getting an offer for one of your products or services. That’s one simple funnel and I hope you already have that one set up.

 

While that’s a great start, it should be your only funnel. The goal for any business is to continue to find new ways to draw in more potential customers and engage them. That may mean setting up several new opt-in offers. It may mean sending out a monthly or weekly newsletter. It should always mean creating new products, or making offers for existing things. And of course it could mean presenting affiliate offers.

 

Funnels are great and they are never done. For starters, things change. Links break, you find better offers, and you learn more about your subject matter and have more or even better information to present to your audience. That’s why it’s a good idea to audit your existing funnels from time to time, updating, editing, and fixing them as needed.

 

It’s also a great idea to test and optimize your funnels. For example, you could split test two different lead magnets and see which one converts better. Test what product you present to your subscribers when. Tweak and test to improve your overall conversions, open crates, and click-through rates. Split test your sales pages … The sky’s the limit when it comes to testing and tracking your funnels. The goal will always be the same – try to do a little better than what you have been doing. Over time, you’ll make huge improvements that translate into a bigger bottom line.

 

In addition to improving your existing funnels, you also want to set aside some time each week to consistently work on expanding and adding new ones. This could mean adding a couple of new autoresponder emails to your first funnel this week. And it could mean creating a new lead magnet next week that attracts a slightly different audience into your circle of influence. The important part is that you work on your funnels every single week. Consistency here, like in so many other areas of your online business is key. Doing a little bit each week, will help you grow, expand, and improve your funnels.

HBA Funnel Builder…