Tag: business plan

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Four Tips to Creating an Effective Email Sequence

An email sequence is a set of emails sent to specific groups of subscribers or readers on your list. These sequences are either trigger-based or time-based. Trigger-based usually means particular sets of criteria such as demographics or behaviors that your subscribers perform will automatically send emails in the order you set up.

 

A few of the most common behaviors include their browsing behavior, paying customer or downloading your content. Time-based can be a certain number of days after a purchase, the subscriber’s birthday, or anything based on any amount of time passing. Triggering a thank you or welcome email right after opt-in or purchase is another email of time-based sequences. These criteria should be set depending on your niche and email marketing needs. However, the way you craft the material is vital to your overall success.

 

These tips will help you develop compelling email sequences:

 

Outline Your Purpose

First, you must know your goal, and in order to do that, you must know your audience, including the kinds of problems they are dealing with. Second, what is the overall purpose of sending and creating the email sequence? Don’t just create an email sequence because you know it is the best marketing strategy out there. It helps if you have a clear goal and understanding of the email sequence too.

 

Perfect Your Title and Subject Lines

Your titles are important to increasing your open rate. This metric allows you to keep track of how your content or emails perform in front of your subscribers. If your open rate is not what you want it to be, it is likely due to your titles or subject lines. Make sure they are relevant, short to the point, and have your most important keywords in the beginning for a few quick tips on creating the right email subject titles. While they may be short, you don’t want them to be boring or crowded with too much information to look like a spam email.

 

Always include a Call-To-Action

For every goal you set, there should be a separate call-to-action that helps you to achieve it. But, again, make sure it is easy to understand, complete and obvious to your reader.

 

Be Specific, Clear, and Educational

Keep each email straight to the point, and don’t make it too long. Always use your email as an opportunity to educate and provide value to your customer. The point is to exceed the expectations from the start to gain their trust and commitment. The more educational content you provide with accurate information that helps your subscribers, the more likely they will trust your authority and establish your credibility.

 

Be sure the time and effort you put into your email sequence are worth the investment. Follow these tips to craft an effective email sequence to see the return on investment you need and achieve more email marketing goals.

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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.

 

 

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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.

 

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Common Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

While email marketing may be the best way to engage and increase sales, you can easily make mistakes. The email marketing process requires preparation, review, and evaluation to keep it running smoothly and successfully. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you are doing, you can fall into some common poor habits that result in a poor return on investment.

 

The following are some of the most common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them:

 

Only Using Email to Make a Sale

If the only emails you send are promotional and full of sale links, you are already doing a disservice to yourself. No matter how many links you try to send, the value you provide will translate into real results. Use email to teach your readers something you want them to know instead, and even better, make sure it solves a common issue or problem for them. Then add other smaller promotional sequences throughout.

 

Ignoring Your Bounce Rate

Meaning the deliverability of your emails is likely poor as you are probably ignoring key steps to ensuring your subscribers get your emails. For example, using emails with your website works better than third-party addresses like Google and Microsoft. Using third-party addresses can easily signal spam warnings, while using your email address better verifies your authenticity.

 

Poor Goals and Understanding of Audience

Lastly, not taking the time to understand your goals and audience fully leads to poor quality content and communication within your email campaign. Email marketing is powerful because subscribers view it as more personal – providing you the opportunity to form a deeper connection and understanding through personalized and quality content.

 

Disregard of Subscriber Mediums

In other words, you are ignoring the device your readers use the most to read and engage with your content. This is crucial as not every email service provider or platform is optimized for mobile devices. However, smartphones are far more available to people than computers. Meaning most of your subscribers likely read your emails and other content on their phones. Therefore, you must ensure your content is optimized to view and click-through for mobile phones.

 

Poor Call-To-Actions or None at All

Every email should have a clear goal which means they should also have an easy-to-use and understand call-to-action that translates to achieving it. An email without a call-to-action is like a company without a business plan.

 

You must avoid these common mistakes if you want to see high conversations and a return on investment from your email marketing campaign. Lackluster call-to-actions, poor follow-up, nurturing, and understanding of your audience can all potentially affect your email marketing results.

 

 

 

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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

 

 

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Six Secrets to Creating the Perfect Email Funnels

Email marketing has by far one of the largest returns on investment compared to other forms of marketing. However, that doesn’t mean it is straight forward nor will you see results just because you have a campaign set up. Like most things in life, there are important rules to follow to get to success.

 

Here are the six secrets to creating a powerful email marketing funnel:

 

Lead With Your Goals in Mind

Better Goal Setting Tips for Maximum Productivity

Before you develop any content, you need to know what your marketing goals are. For example, do you need more exposure to increase your sales, or are you hoping to educate your audience more? As you can see, these are important questions, so you know exactly what type of information you need to create and how to develop the right call-to-action to see proper results.

 

Add Readers to Multiple Sequences and Segments

Remember, many of your readers will be on different journeys. Some will be brand new, and others will be avid users of your products. Meaning they shouldn’t be on the same email sequences or segments. Likewise, if you have multiple products, they may not all be interested, making segmentation important. Welcome emails, abandon carts, or re-engagement emails are a few different examples.

 

Keep Your Content Funnels Varied

In other words, don’t just sell to your readers. Make sure there is a mix of value, promotional and fun. If every email you send to your readers encourages them to buy something, for example, your audience is more likely to be turned off and eventually unsubscribe to your email campaign.

 

The best policy is to lead with generosity. You don’t need to make a sale after every email you send. Providing value without anything in monetary return is often time the best way to see success. This is what establishes your credibility, trust, and awareness as a brand that eventually works together in return on profits.

 

Take Advantage of Your Titles

Titles are the most important part of the funnel. Sure, you need their email address; however, just because you have it, doesn’t mean they will read it. So you still need to work to capture their attention. In fact, you will want to create more than one and then test them on different readers.

 

Test Your Funnels

Nearly 47% of marketers, in a HubSpot “Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2021” report stated, that they test different titles to see which ones perform the best. Some key aspects to keep in mind when developing your titles include clarity, urgency, curiosity, and relevance. In other words, make sure they know what they will get but don’t give too much away. Then be sure the copy or email you present to them satisfies the expectations of the title.

 

Focus on Retention

You got the sale, but that doesn’t mean the work is over. You must further nurture and inspire your customers to keep them interesting and to come back. One sale won’t lead to sustainability.

 

Be sure you get the results you need from your email marketing campaign by following these six secrets to creating a powerful email marketing funnel. As long as you have the secrets and take action, you will see the results in no time.

 

 

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Email Funnel Red Flags to Take Notice Of

To perfect your email marketing funnels, you need to be aware of certain factors that hinder your success. Many red flags are obvious if you just know where to look. Thankfully these red flags have plenty of solutions to them as well.

 

Here are five common email funnel red flags to take notice of in order to see proper conversions:

 

Low Open Rate

While this is not a metric you usually want to use on its own, a low open rate at least indicates that your subscribers are not reading the content. Meaning your deliverability could also be low, the titles don’t spike their interest, or you are simply sending them at the wrong time.

 

However, a high open-rate will not always translate to success, so you should always track other metrics to measure your results more accurately—for example, a high open-rate with a low click-through rate.

 

High Open Rate with Low Click-Through Rate

This means you are on the right track as your readers are interested, but something about the product you are advertising is off. Maybe the price is too high, or it doesn’t actually solve their problem.

 

High Click-Through Rate with Low Conversions

Again, this can be associated with the same problem presented above. The readers are clearly enjoying the content as they click through; however, you cannot make the final conversion. This could indicate a disconnect in your landing page from your email. Your email had enough detail to persuade them to click on the landing page; however, the expectations were not set. Be sure you don’t have any misleading discounts and that your email and landing pages have similar expectations.

 

High Unsubscribe Rate

This can happen for a couple of common reasons. First, you are either marketing your opt-in copy or forms to the wrong people, sending out too many emails, or are developing copy that is not compelling enough or too spam-like for your audience.

 

A great way to solve this is to keep your sequences and segmentations short and direct. Don’t send emails too often. If you know your target audience well, including how you can help them, you can develop the right content, products, and services to prevent a high unsubscribe rate. Usually, unsubscribe rate is not a problem if you start with your buyer personas in mind.

 

Varying Unsubscribe Rates Per Sequence

Some email sequences may be too long, short, or seen as spam. Some customers may end up in the wrong sequence, too, leading to them unsubscribe. Meaning you should be sure most of your readers are in more than one sequence.

 

Keep these red flags in mind to know where to improve your email marketing content when a problem arises. Successful email marketing will always require consistent reviewing and updating.

 

 

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How Powerful Are Email Funnels?

Email funnels are a set or series of marketing materials that inspire your audience to do something—most of the time in the form of a purchase or to benefit your company in some way. Your emails provide value that persuades your audience to purchase your products, follow your social media pages or become a loyal audience and customer.

 

At the start of every email, the funnel includes an opt-in that gets your audience’s attention and trust in exchange for their email address. Then once you grab their information, you can start going down the email marketing funnel through well-timed and targeted emails. These emails should be full of information to establish your authority and trust further.

 

Then you can lead your readers right out of the funnel to your landing page to hopefully turn them into brand-new customers. Lastly, the funnel repeats, or the reader is thrown into a new funnel to further continue the process in the hopes of a repeat purchase. The email marketing funnel never truly ends, as you should always be nurturing your readers and create new and interesting sequences to establish their loyalty.

 

As you can probably tell by now, email funnels are powerful because:

 

They Solve a Problem

Your audience is readers because you provide some value for them. You solve a problem in the form of entertainment, education, comedy, or more. It all depends on your niche and why you are starting an email funnel campaign in the first place.

 

They Are Personal

While you may be sending the same email to many readers, that is not how they see it. It goes directly into their personal email, and frequently they are reading it alone. Even better, it is personalized to them. Making them feel special, important, and connected with your brand. Allowing you to provide more value and then more easily convert them into paying customers.

 

They Create Brand Awareness, Trust, and Credibility

Emails are another great way to provide your audience education and resources, further increasing your industry’s brand awareness, trust, and credibility. The more you communicate to your audience, the more they get to know you and trust your authority, especially through quality content that solves a problem.

As you can see, if you want to build a loyal audience while turning them into paying customers, then email marketing funnels are a must. In fact, if you are not convinced yet, then it’s important to let you know that many businesses often see a return of forty-eight dollars for every one dollar they spend on email marketing — making it by far one of the most affordable and easiest ways to market and boost your sales.

Work On Your Funnel Each Week And Continue To Branch Out

 

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Top Influencer Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

10 Content Marketing Tips for Email Marketing Success

As you get started engaging in influencer marketing, whether you are the influencer or hiring influencers, you want to avoid making mistakes. Remember that others have gone before you and succeeded. All you have to do is follow their path, and you’ll be successful too.

 

  • Focusing on Reach Over Impact – While you do want the influencers you choose to have an active and engaged audience, you don’t need them to have million-plus followers for the campaign to be effective. In fact, having a smaller audience can indicate a better return on investment due to the higher engagement smaller influencers enjoy.

 

  • Not Providing Influencers the Right Information – What information does the user really need to make a buying choice? Look at everything you do from the buyer’s perspective and where they are in the journey but, at the same time, consider the influencer and what info they need to make decisions about the direction of the content they produce.

 

  • Not Allowing the Influencer to Showcase Their Creativity – The worst thing you can do when you contract with an influencer is micromanaging them to the point that they cannot be creative. You do want to provide some guidelines of what to avoid, but you don’t need to tell them everything to do.

 

  • Not Being Product Focused – The product is what you want to promote, so if the influencers you choose don’t focus on the product and what it does for the viewer, it’ll be hard for the audience to make a buying choice.

 

  • Having Unrealistic Expectations – If you’ve never run an influencer campaign before keeping your expectations realistic by realistically looking at the numbers. Set your goals using the SMART goal technique so that your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.

 

  • Choosing The Wrong Influencers – Don’t just pick anyone to promote your brand. Instead, pick someone who already fits your company brand in voice, personality, principles, morals, and values.

 

  • Rushing a Launch Campaign – Don’t just launch an influencer campaign without being ready. If it works and you get a lot of traffic from it, you need to be totally prepared for the impact on your business so you can serve your audience better.

 

  • Not Expanding Across Platforms – You want to be on all the platforms your audience is responsive to. You don’t have to personally have an account on these platforms to work with influencers successfully.

 

  • Not Following Up – When you work with an influencer, you always want to debrief when a campaign is over so you know what can be improved next time. In addition, if you gained new followers, you need to be prepared to communicate with them.

 

  • Not Serving Your New Customers Well – If an influencer sends new customers your way, you must serve them and take care of them well. No one wants to turn their customers over to someone who mistreats them.

 

As you go forward with your influencer marketing campaigns, keep these tips in mind. You want to be as authentic as possible while also serving your audience in new ways, and influencer marketing can help you achieve more faster than you may have ever experienced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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How to Repurpose Your Influencer Marketing Content

When you work hard paying for and contracting with an influencer to create content for you and market your services and offers, it would be a shame not to get all you can out. However, the best way to get the most out of any content you create is to repurpose it into new forms and types.

 

Testimonials

 

When you collect a testimonial, you can use it within other content that you create, and you can also grab testimonials out of separate content. For example, if you contract with an influencer to review a product and their review is positive, you can add that review to your testimonial page. You can even change the format of it by transcribing video or turning text-based content into memes or videos.

 

E-mail or Newsletter Campaigns

 

Any content you create for your newsletters and campaigns that can be reused in other areas is a game to repurpose too. You can take parts of your newsletter or campaign and add that content into something else. For example, you can add a how-to video to your newsletter by transcribing it and linking to it. You can also grab an e-mail you created and turn it into a video.

 

Guest or Blog Posts

 

One of the most adaptable and useful types of content is your guest or blog post content. If you accept guest posts, you can use that guest post in other ways if your contract says so, such as sending it in your newsletter, adding it to a book, or making it part of your membership site.

 

Live Events

 

Live events are always great fodder for more content creation. You can capture video testimonials at the live events, transcribe them for your website testimonial page or use the info to produce a new blog post idea. Set up an event hashtag to help organize all the content you can use later.

 

Social Media Ads

 

When you create an advertisement for social media, it can be used elsewhere as free content and information to your audience. The ad is good on its own, but there is no reason to keep that content in the advertisement. Instead, spread it around to your blog, to your website, to your videos, and more.

 

Video

 

All videos can be repurposed and used again. For example, you can reorganize the footage you shot, or you can transcribe it and manipulate it in other places such as your blog, within a book, or as part of a webinar.

How to Easily Crank out Content Daily

Remember that you can also repurpose content you created for YouTube to put on other platforms too. You don’t have to use the content you make only on one platform; you can tweak it and use it wherever you want to as long as it does not go against your agreements with other collaborators.