Tag: blogging

Posted on

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.

 

 10 Content Marketing Tips for Email Marketing Success

Posted on

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.

11 Ways SEO Improves Email Marketing

Posted on

Four Email Follow-Up Strategies to Implement

Did you know that, on average, only about two percent of sales are made on the first initial contact? This means those who use email marketing successfully see most of their profits through their follow-up strategies. If you don’t follow up with your subscribers after the initial contact, you are not using email marketing correctly or to its fullest potential.

 

Every great sales person knows that you have to reach out and communicate with the same lead more than once to grab their attention and hook their interest finally. In fact, research shows that nearly eighty percent of sales come from the fifth contact, which jumps significantly compared to the two to ten percent of sales you see from the first to the fourth follow-up.

 

Meaning you shouldn’t be the one to opt-out or give up; leave that up to the readers and implement these five follow-up strategies to improve your email marketing sales:

 

Say Thank You and Ask for Feedback

When an audience member signs up for your list or purchases a product, an automated email to thank them or ask for feedback should happen. The feedback you get allows you to make sure the process is easy to complete and that the products or services you promoted throughout your emails provide the value you promised.

 

Add Value and Personality

Show subscribers your brand’s personality, which is often your personality. Show them that you are there for more than just monetary gain. This means you should always find ways to add value and your character when sending an email. While many of these messages are automated, you should make it obvious or the same every single time.

 

Keep it Short, But Not Too Short

Emails between fifty and 125 words have often been the most successful, especially when increasing click-through rates. Too little information provides the incorrect amount of time to marketing to your readers, while too-long emails distract and overwhelms them. Thus, showing you just how crucial it is to make sure your emails are direct and to the point to make sure they follow your call-to-action.

 

Add Personalized Support

Send periodic emails to invite your readers’ personalized support through one-on-one calls or even creating support groups within your community. The point is the remind your readers that you are there for them and someone they can reach out to if they need it.

 

Don’t expect results right away from one email or opt-in sequence. The power of email marketing starts with continuously getting to follow-up with your interested readers more directly and personally. The more personalized and valuable the follow-ups, the more likely you are to see positive conversions. Give your readers the trust and credibility they need to transition into loyal and paying customers through proper follow-ups.

What is Email Deliverability and How to Improve It

 

 

 

Posted on

How To Improve Your Email Marketing ROI

Depending on your niche, you can see an average return of around forty-eight dollars for every one dollar you put into your email marketing campaign. Email marketing is powerful because it is more direct, personal, and cost-effective than other marketing avenues.

 

Your return on investment is a simple math equation that requires knowing your current revenue gained and the costs of receiving those gains. To determine your current ROI, take your revenues gained and subtract your costs. Then take that value and divide it by your costs again to determine your return on investment.

 

The equation looks like this: (Revenue – Costs) ÷ Costs = ROI

 

Understanding this basic equation first allows you to determine better the areas you need to improve or adjust to see a more positive return. To see a proper return on investment, your costs should be low while your revenues should be high.

 

Use these tips and tricks to implement now to improve your email marketing ROI:

 

Mobilize Your Content

It is more likely that your subscribers are reading from their smartphone than a personal computer or laptop in this day and age. Meaning you should optimize your opt-ins, lead magnets, email call-to-actions, landing pages, and website for mobile use. If the call-to-action is too hard to understand and doesn’t entice a click-through, or they simply can’t read the email, you won’t get the results you desire no matter how hard you work.

 

Add Video and Graphics

Your brain is wired to receive and digest visual content. It can process and understand it way faster than written words. Therefore, make graphics and videos useful tools to communicate, educate and engage with your subscribers properly.

 

Develop Valuable and Engaging Content

Develop email sequences that involved a variety of different types of content. Meaning you shouldn’t just spam your subscribers’ inboxes with promotional emails. Include educational material and even encourage them to reply to get them to participate throughout the whole process.

 

Evaluate your Spending

The last thing you want to evaluate is the spending or costs required to complete the email campaign. You are more likely to have higher costs if you don’t produce the content yourself or use many tools and software. While these are great options, they should only be used if you see results. Then you can add them to your costs as your revenue allows it.

 The Three Keys to Optimizing Your Email Content

Overall, improving your return requires keeping your spending low while maximizing your revenue by sending valuable, engaging, and quality content. The more value you strive to bring to your subscriber, the more likely they will return in the favor by increasing your return on investment. In other words, the more you invest in your subscribers, the more they will invest in you.

 

 

Posted on

A/B Testing Your Email Funnels is a Must

A/B testing, often called split testing, compares the results of two or more similar email campaigns or funnel material sent to different audiences. After testing, marketers can use this information to determine which material converts the best. Thus, allowing you to perfect your email marketing campaigns and funnels more efficiently.

 

The following is why A/B testing is essential to the email marketing process and a few tips on how to perform them for maximum results:

 

To Increase Open and Click-Through Rates

Improving your overall conversions is the main goal and idea behind split testing. When you test and track these conversions, you can easily see if it is successful or not by how high or low the open and click-through rates are compared to the other sequence results.

 

To Understand Your Audience Better

A/B testing allows you to watch your audience behavior and see them interact with your content. If certain titles or graphics work better to engage and relate to your audience, then you can better update your material to this effect. Thus, allowing you to communicate better and increase your overall email marketing conversions.

 

Increase Engagement and Content Quality

Through split testing, you discover the right ways to communicate to your target audience to improve the quality of your content. An email funnel without quality content might as well not be called one at all. If you don’t take the time to perfect and send the right content your subscribers want to see, it won’t matter what else you do to fix your results.

 

Test One Thing at A Time

Find one area of the email funnel process to test at a time. Only change your titles, then update the email copy after you are done establishing your title. Changing too much information at once can easily cloud the results and make it difficult to understand which change really increased the conversions.

 

Keep Timing and Schedule Consistent

Be sure email is sent during the same times and day of the week, even though the content is slightly different. This way, you can be sure the metrics you analyze later directly result from the content quality rather than other factors.

 

Be Sure Every Test Has a Control

This means you always test your normal content to the new idea or different content to get accurate results.  The only way to know if your test content is better is to compare it to your normal content.

10 Content Marketing Tips for Email Marketing Success

As you can see, A/B testing gives you the data you need to make better content and email copy for your subscribers. It allows you to perfect your titles, call-to-actions, and more, to improve your communication and get your readers more involved and engaged.

 

 

Posted on

Five Lead Magnet Tips to Grow Your Email List

Did you know, nearly four billion people worldwide utilize email almost daily? What is even more interesting is that every second, three million emails are being sent. So that means by the time you finish this sentence, likely eighteen million emails, give or take, just ended up in people’s inboxes, which is no surprise why sixty-four percent of small business owners have reported that using email marketing has been vital to their success and is why they continually strive to grow their email lists.

 

The most common and powerful way to grow your email lists is through lead magnets. Free or low-cost material that attracts your potential customer into your buyers’ journey or email marketing campaign. Lead magnets will vary depending on your niche and are quite low cost if you can craft and complete the material yourself.

 

Here are five lead magnet tips for growing your email list:

 

Use How-To Guides or eBooks

Short guides or how-to eBooks are attractive options to many readers. Most people use the internet to ask questions to solve a common problem and gain more knowledge about their favorite things, which is why eBooks and how-to guides are so attractive. Understanding your audience and their struggles are key to creating an effective eBook or guide that piques their interest. Nearly thirty percent of marketers prefer this option.

 

Email Courses and Workbooks

Similar to eBooks, yet more direct are email courses and workbooks. These are materials that work together to help your subscriber actively solve or work through a problem. Instead of downloading all the material at once, your readers will receive their course through weekly and timed emails. Again, keeping an audience engaged for a longer period of time is the goal.

 

Develop Templates and Checklists

Easy, downloadable, and printable material that aids your subscribers in their favorite hobbies or solves their problems are affordable and easy lead magnets to produce. In addition, they can often be used with other paid products for free to incentivize a sale further.

 

Free Webinar and Trials

Invite your audience to join in on a live webinar and offer a free trial of your products and services. This can be a great way to ask for email addresses to send a link directly to the webinar or free trial. In addition, the hands-on and live material is often more attractive and easier to digest.

 

Incentivize

Host contests and giveaways and send coupons such as free shipping or birthday discounts to incentivize your subscribers. It is hard to pass up a good deal, especially one that provides so much value and excites your interest.

Putting It All Together And Developing A Routine That Will Keep You On Track

Although lead magnets are usually free, this does not mean they are not good investments. In fact, a wpforms report stated that marketers saw a 50% increase in signups after using and developing valuable lead magnets.

 

 

 

 

Posted on

What is Email Deliverability and How to Improve It

Email deliverability is about how your readers or customers are receiving your emails. It includes keeping track of your bounce rate and increasing the safety and authentication of your email and internet service provider to ensure your emails don’t get rejected or end up in your subscribers’ spam folders. It’s likely obvious to state, but if your bounce rate is high, your readers are not getting your content, and this can have an overall effect on how email providers view your content.

How to Write a Lead Nurturing Email Campaign

The following are a few ways to improve your email deliverability:

 

Enhance the Opt-in Process

Use double opt-in forms to ensure the information subscribers provide is correct. For example, an incorrect email address or typo can easily lead to your email being rejected. However, double opt-in forms require your readers to confirm their information to avoid this altogether. Just be sure to make this requirement clear when signing up; otherwise, it can lead to further confusion, or you won’t receive your content until they confirm.

 

Establish a Proper Send Schedule

In other words, don’t spam your readers. If you send too many emails, they won’t see you as trustworthy nor know the content as personalized and valuable. If your content gets marked as spam, eventually, their email service provider will reject you altogether. It is important to note, too, that spam or being marked as spam won’t just affect the one reader. If the email service provider notices a pattern, it will also start rejecting them for other email addresses as a safety precaution.

 

Enable SPF and DKIM

This is essential to ensuring your email address does not get spoofed or risk hackers taking over your customer’s information. In addition, this information tells your internet service provider to authenticate your email address and prevents others from using the information.

 

Add Easy Unsubscribe Options

While not something you want to see, it helps improve your deliverability and other metrics as well. It keeps those truly interested in seeing your content on the list and is also recommended by the federal trade commission to add an obvious way for subscribers to opt-out if they want to. This also further authenticates and protects your email address from email service providers rejecting your emails.

 

Overall, the goal of proper email deliverability is to make sure your content ends up in the subscriber’s inbox in order to be seen and clicked open to be read. If your emails never make it or consistently end up in their spam folder, you won’t see any conversions and will likely need to start over as your reputation gets tarnished. Use these deliverability tips to avoid it.

Posted on

Best Practices for Email List Segmentation

A MailChimp study conducted in 2017 on the “effects of list segmentation on email marketing stats” highlights the importance of list segmentation. In fact, it showed improved open rates by fourteen percent, increased click-through rates by one-hundred percent, and even better decreased unsubscribe rates by nine percent. Again, showing you just how valuable it is to your email marketing campaign.

 

List segmentation is the process of organizing your subscribers based on certain factors. For example, understanding that not all your readers or potential customers are the same, even in the same industry. Most of your readers or customers will be on a different buyers’ journey too. Common ways to segment email lists include:

 

  • Demographic segmentation – This is the information sorted based on age, gender, occupation, income level, education level, and family.
  • Geographic segmentation – When readers are sorted based on their country, city, language, or other information based on their location or where they reside most often.
  • Behavioral segmentation – This is by far the most important way to segment your lists. This includes information based on how they browse your website, interact with your emails, or when and how often they purchase your products.

 

Try these best practices when creating email list segmentation:

 

Keep It Simple

You don’t need to go overboard. Instead, pick a few key pieces of information that work for your industry and goals to know where to start and how many segments to create. For example, if you are a women’s clothing store, you would likely segment based on their gender, age, and purchase history.

 

Use Buyer Personas

Buyer personas should be used at every stage of the email marketing process, list segmentation included. If you truly understand your audience, your buyer personas are like guidelines for crafting the perfect emails. They have details that outline your target audience according to their interests, behaviors, and geographic and demographic information. Thus, allowing you to control and create the perfect process before anyone signs up.

 

Automate with Tools

Automate the process and keep track of results easily with email marketing tools. These tools will keep track of your readers and their behaviors and organize the lists to maximize your goals and do the bulk of the work for you. This way, you can use your time crafting and developing quality email campaigns.

 

Overall, list segmentation aims to ensure that each message sent and received gets to the right audience member at the right time for maximum conversions. The more organized and targeted your email lists are, the more likely you will achieve your email marketing goals.

 

Posted on

The Importance of Email List Segmentation

Separating your email list subscribers into different segments of your audience is the process of dividing up your subscribers or customers into other flows or email sequences. When subscribers sign up to your email list, they will not receive the same emails as everyone else at the same time as they go along with the email campaign. Thus, segmentation allows you to better market and communicates to your new potential customers and readers.

 

Most lists are organized based on three different factors: demographics, geographics, and behavior. Depending on your niche and marketing goals, you will need to organize them differently. However, the most popular way to segment lists includes how they behave on your websites and with your emails.

 

Once they are opted-in to your campaign, readers are then divided based on how they interact. Do they open more often than others? Do they click-through links frequently? Then it would be good to put them on a different path than those who are less likely to open or click-through your emails. They likely don’t need an aggressive approach and are clearly interested in your products or information.

 

Reasons list segmentation is an important step of the email marketing process:

 

It Allows You to Send More Targeted Information

Most businesses will have more than one buyer’s persona, which means not every email you send needs to go to every lead or customer on your list. It also means you likely have more than one goal in mind when it comes to email marketing. Segmenting allows you to pick certain keywords or information in order to organize and better target them with different key pieces of content.

 

For example, readers who have bought your products are more likely to get content about the products they purchased or new products to try. While new subscribers who have not purchased a product will be reading content on why the products benefit their life and possibly information about you and your business or other emails to get to know them better to further convert them into paying customers.

 

To Increase Overall Conversions

List segmentation better targets your readers, which allows you to communicate more effectively. When you understand at what point of the buyers’ journey they are on, then you have a better chance at maximizing your opportunity.

 

To Improve Engagement and Reputation

Clear communication and understanding your audience are key to increasing your conversions and running a successful email campaign. Better communication provides more value to your customers, further building your reputation and improving your engagement—two important metrics for running and creating a sustainable business.

 

As you can see, the key to list segmentation is to ensure the right emails are being sent to the right people to achieve your email marketing goals better. If everyone receives the same emails and you ignore primary information about your target audience, you are likely not communicating to them effectively enough to produce results.

 

 

Posted on

Five Common Email Automation Flows to Implement

Email automation flows are exactly what they sound like. It is a set of emails sent automatically to subscribers to streamline and enhance your email marketing process. Automation can be set biased on time or a certain set of events, such as signing up for a newsletter.

 

Automation will send them a welcome email. It will also ensure they receive the other emails in the series consistently. What’s more, is it can better segment your list to target and refine your communication to see better results and conversions. It would be impossible and highly time-consuming to send each email yourself, which is why email automation is key.

 

Here are five common email flows to implement in your email marketing strategy:

 

Welcome Email Series

First, establish the connection with a welcome email. If someone subscribes to your list, you should never neglect the opportunity to say hello and thank you for joining the community. They need to know at first contact what to expect and when to expect it.

 

Abandoned Cart Email Series

This is a straightforward reminder crucial for e-commerce businesses that send reminders to customers’ inboxes that they left items in their cart to purchase. Often times this is a great opportunity to incentivize your customers to continue with a small discount.

 

Personalized Discounts

Asking for a birthday, anniversary, or other personal information is a great way to set up an automated series personalized to that specific subscriber. Then, when their birthday or anniversary comes around, you get the opportunity to make them feel special by recognizing their special day.

 

Post-Purchase Series

This is a set of emails sent after a subscriber makes a purchase or follows a certain call to action. This shows that you appreciate their business and hope to continue to provide value to them. It also ensures they use the products or services correctly to maximize their usefulness. This is also a great time to ask questions and give feedback to establish your trustworthiness and credibility further and improve your customer experience.

 

Value Drive and Educational Email Series

Also known as lead nurturing content, this is a series of emails that focuses on further building a connection with your subscribers to keep their interest and understanding about your business, products, or services. The more education and value you provide your subscribers, the more likely they will become loyal customers.

 

Remember, automation is there to keep you consistent and help reduce tedious and mundane work. It does not mean you can let it go and ignore it. If you want to crush your email marketing goals, always keep track of the results and test new automated series to see which ones your readers like the most.