Tag: business planning

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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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Four Easy Steps to Creating a High-Converting Email Funnel

Crafting the right Email funnels is an important marketing strategy to understand if you want to maximize your profits and better communicate and engage with your target audience. While it may be hard to believe, email marketing still outperforms social media by nearly forty percent more. Not only does email marketing generate more revenue, but it is also more productive as it is three times faster.

 

Here are the four easy steps to creating a high-converting email marketing funnel:

 

Step One: Lead Generation

The most crucial step to creating a high-converting email funnel includes your brand awareness and lead generation. Next, you need to create an acquisition process that draws in your target audience. This consists of an opt-in form and incentive to get their information and start them down the email funnel. Once they are opt-in, they can then be segmented as a new subscriber and receive welcome content and other further information.

 

Step Two: Nurture Content

The next step is to further build their interest with lead nurturing content. Content that teaches them about the products or services and has less to do with promotions. Lead nurturing is about building a stronger relationship with your customers to keep them around long-term. It allows you to learn your audience better and form a deeper connection to craft engaging content and leads to more action.

 

Step Three: Content Persuasion

Once strong relationships are built with your readers, you want to persuade them further to make a certain decision. This is where the promotional content begins to flow or stream into your sequences to convince your readers to make a purchase and become loyal customers. Be sure you always include an easy and obvious call-to-action, so your audience knows what to do. Your click-through rate depends on it.

 

Step Four: Engage and Follow Up

Nurturing your leads never stops. The step keeps going as is required to keep their interest and see more conversions. Even after your readers purchase, you want to follow up with them and keep them engaged. Send thank you emails and invite them to other groups or platforms that teach them how to use your products or services even better. The more places and ways you can keep your audience engaged, the better and fewer chances for them to unsubscribe or become disinterested.

HBA Funnel Builder…

Following these steps ensures you have everything you need to create high-converting email funnels. A great marketing strategy to learn to get the highest return on your investment that costs little to nothing to get started.

 

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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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Powerup Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Influencer marketing is not really new. People have been doing it for centuries. A popular person who inspires others presents a product or service to their followers in a good light, and boom, sales take off.

 

You really don’t need to work with the biggest names in the industry to make your mark. You can work with small influencers or big ones, but the main characteristics that spell success are personality, authenticity, and offering value. So if you really want to power up your influencer marketing campaigns, take note of these tips.

 

Add Your Own Personality

 

Remember that your brand has a personality too. Be sure to include that information about your brand voice and personality in all branding information you provide to each influencer who will work with you. When they understand who your brand is and who you are, they’re more likely to want to work with you. Likewise, encourage any influencer working with you to add in their own personality to promotions too.

 

Use and Study Your Competition

 

Look at your competition posting and read the comments to see what their customers are missing or liking. Then, find the content with the most engagement and figure out why their audience enjoys it so much. Then, take that information and find ways to add your own personality to it.

 

Look Out for New Platforms, Tools, and Social Media Channels

 

Part of running a successful business requires keeping up with industry standards. For influencer marketing, this also means being aware of all the technology, platforms, and channels that may appear. For example, TikTok was hardly used last year and is now about to take over YouTube and Instagram in top social media platforms used by brands and influencers.

 

Strive for Authenticity

 

Use stories, live videos, or even podcasts to share your content in different ways while also striving for authenticity. To be authentic, strive to be who you are, warts and all. If you ask that of all influencers you work with, you’ll end up a lot happier because it’s just easier to be who you are naturally than to fake it. Whether it’s you or someone you hire, you want genuineness to shine.

 

Know What’s Hot

 

Right now, for example, short-form videos are really hitting their will on YouTube and other video platforms. Because it’s working, you need to do it too, but always check your metrics. Do what’s hot but check the numbers to make sure it’s really delivering what you hope it will.

Why You Need To Mail Your List Regularly

Keeping track of trends is essential for any business owner, but if you’re working in a digital environment, what’s trending yesterday may be old news today. So it would help if you kept your ear to the ground in your niche and community to stay abreast of what is working now. It might be different than you think.

 

 

 

 

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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.

 

 

 

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Important Questions to Ask Before You Work with An Influencer

The following are important questions to ask your potential influencers and key information they should provide back to ensure you pick the right influencer for your campaign:

 

  • Who Is Your Target Audience? – Ask them if they have an audience persona created or if they can provide audience demographics so you can be sure their audience really will want what you have.

 

  • How Does Your Target Audience Algin with My Brand and Message? – You need your own brand message and reason for existing, and it should align in some way with the influencers you choose to work with. Let them explain how they align.

 

  • What Type of Content Do You Produce? – It will help you to know the type of content they can produce to start with. For example, some influencers do life-like vlogs and don’t do scripted commercials or advertorials. Work with influencers who give you what you need but be open to new ideas.

 

  • How Often Do You Publish Content? – Knowing their production schedule can help you ensure that your campaign is launched at the right time.

 

  • What Is Your Engagement Like? – They should tell you about some actual numbers regarding their engagement but understand if you choose to work with new influencers (which works great, by the way), they may not understand yet, but you can show them.

 

  • Have You Ever Worked with My Competitors Before? If so, Why and Why Do You Want to Work with Us Now? – This can help you ensure that they’re going to be upfront and honest with their audience about their recommendations.

 

  • Have You Worked with Similar Brands Before? How Successful Were You? – Getting these stats will really help you project the type of response they might get for your campaign.

 

  • How Often Do You Share Sponsored Content or Affiliate Links? – You want to ensure they have a good ratio of information and sponsored content or affiliate content. This will help you determine if they have staying power.

 

  • What Are Your Overall Expectations for Partnering with a Brand? – You want to know from them what they are expecting to gain from this too.

 

  • What Are Your Thoughts About Exclusive Brand Partnerships? – If you want them to work with you exclusively and not another brand that competes with you, this is good information to know.

 

  • What Is Your Content Creation Process? – Understanding their process can help you understand how you’ll work with them, including timelines and other info.

How to Easily Crank out Content Daily

  • Do You Want to Work with Us to Create the Content and Share Before Posting or Be on Your Own? – How autonomous will they want to be, and are you okay with this method? Of course, you can’t make them work how you want to work, but you can judge whether you can work together or not.

 

  • What Are Your Fees and Other Compensation Needs? – Try to get them to give you a fee schedule instead of telling them what you’ll pay. Not only will they feel more in control, but it’ll make working together easier.

 

  • What Sort of Timeline Do You Need to Get to Publishing? – Knowing the timeline will help you get your information to them promptly.

 

Use these questions to figure out whether you can work with the influencer in a seamless way that matches your own needs and includes their needs. You’ll be very glad you took the time.

 

 

 

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A Comprehensive Social Media Influencer Checklist

To make any new process easier, it is good to develop checklists and templates to streamline the process. Even experienced authors and pilots use checklists to ensure they don’t miss a step.

 

Checklist to develop a successful social media influencer campaign:

 

  • Defined Target Audience – Who are they, what do they want? Create an audience persona for each stage of the buying journey, so you know, and you can show the influencer who your audience is.

 

  • Outline Important Key Performance Indicators – Using the information in the blog post about the KPIs to track during your social media influencer campaigns, always set up a new spreadsheet to enable you to track the KPIs exclusively for each campaign.

 

  • Create Clear Influencer Marketing Goals – Your goals will include the specifics of what constitutes success for the campaign. For example, you may have the goal to get more follows, but you need to state exactly what you want. Remember, even if you’re working with someone else, the goals need to be SMART goals.

 

  • Choose The Best Social Media Channel – Do your due diligence to ensure there are enough of your audience on that channel to make it possible for you to reach your goals.

 

  • Choose The Right Influencer Campaign – Don’t just pick anyone. Take the time to get to know the influencer before choosing them to work with. Watch as many of their shows as you can to make sure you vibe.

 

  • Set A Budget – You must set a budget to have a guideline before searching for the right influencer. For example, if you know how much you earn per click, it’ll help you figure out a good budget.

 

  • Identify Your Influencer Type and Size Needs – What type of influence do you want? Make a list of the characteristics you want.

 

  • Influencer Qualities Needed – What do you want the influencer to be like. It’s fine to choose outside of the business model. Even if your product has nothing to do with the issues you care about, if you want to work with only redheads, that’s fine.

 

  • Influencer Outreach – You’ll want to track how you reach out to the influencers so that you can keep track of how it’s working.

 

  • Influencer Vetting – Always check out the influencer before offering them the job because you never know if they’re doing something in their personal life that would be off-putting or even career-ending for you.

 

  • Influencer Contract – Don’t do a single deal with an influencer without a written and signed contract.

 

  • Compensation Package – Spell out and define what the compensation package is for each influencer, and don’t expect it to be the same for every one of them. Tip: Let them tell you their fee. It might be cheaper than you think.

 

  • Influencer Brief and Training – Set up a package that explains your products, offers, and branding to the influencers so that they know everything they can about your product.

 

  • Remember FTC Guidelines – Familiarize yourself with the FTC rules for communicating on social media as a business. It’s important to follow these guidelines whether others do or not.

 

  • Plan, Publish and Promote – Set up a schedule that allows you to plan the campaign, publish it, and promote it simultaneously.

 

  • Track ROI – Nothing is ever done, as they say until the paperwork is done. While paper is not always necessary these days, you still need to do the math and track the return on investment to ensure you are making money the way you think you are.

 

When you use a process to get things done, it’s easier to figure out what went right or wrong so you can do more of what is right and less of what is wrong.

Define Your Influencer Marketing Goals

 

 

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Important Influencer Performance Metrics

When you begin an influencer marketing campaign, you must figure out what metrics to track. Part of goal setting includes identifying the tracking metrics, so it won’t be as hard as you think to accomplish as long as you take the time to set up your goals and objectives properly.

 

Here are the top metrics to keep track of depending on your influencer marketing goals:

 

Audience Growth

 

How has the influencer grown its platform over time? If you want to ensure that they are consistent in their efforts, you only need to check the metrics to find out. You can easily check by looking at their stats which they should provide to you, or you can use a third-party system to help like Socialblade.com but realize that these are only estimates.

 

KPIs to track for audience growth include:

 

  • Number of subscribers – How many subscribers are they getting each day, and how long did it take?
  • Social media followers – How many people follow them on other social networks, and how long did it take them to get to the level they are?

 

Brand Awareness and Reputation

 

While you aim to create more brand awareness for your brand and improve your reputation, you must ensure that the influencers you choose also have the same goal so you don’t accidentally select someone who doesn’t represent you properly.

 

KPIs to track to determine awareness and reputation:

 

  • Page views – How many viewers are going to find you on that platform potentially? You can find out by how many average pageviews the influencer is getting to find out how it might work out for you.
  • Impressions – Even if they don’t click, the information still shows and is called an impression. So the more people who view, even if they don’t click, the more awareness you’ll build.
  • Social media followers – How many followers does the influencer have now, and how many do you have now. Again, knowing how this grows during the campaign will help you see if it’s working or not.
  • Brand mentions – You can set up an alert with Google or use a third-party app like Hootsuite.com or Brandwatch.com to track who mentions your brand web-wide.

 

Engagement Rate

 Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Engagement

One of the things that really help build your business online is engagement. So if you choose influencers who are good with engagement, it’ll boost your own engagement. Once the customer clicks through the influencer’s mention, they’re going to expect the same sort of engagement and personality from you.

 Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

KPIs to track to ensure your engagement is what you want it to be:

 

  • Likes – Getting likes on your posts is one way to notice engagement and increase your reach. Ask your audience to like your posts to help.
  • Shares – When your audience really likes what you’re posting, they’ll do more than like. They’ll also share. Sharing will expand your brand in a multitude of ways that can’t be duplicated any other way. People trust their friends, and if a friend shares, it’s much more powerful.
  • Comments – This is a better form of engagement than the other two in many ways because useful comments increase reach and help you get to know your audience better.

 

Website and Social Media Traffic

 

You can’t get any type of engagement or sales without traffic. So one of your main goals and objectives is always going to be traffic generation. Of course, when you get more traffic, you make more money, but of course, you want the right traffic.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you are building your influence via traffic generation methods:

 

  • New users – How many new people visit that site, influencer, page, or product each day?
  • Session time – How long they are sticking around is also a good indication of whether they’re consuming the content or not. You want your pages to be “sticky” and keep them as long as possible.
  • Total number of sessions – How many times has that same person come back to your information?
  • Pageviews – How many pages views have you delivered for that campaign, product, or advertisement?
  • Click-through Rate (CTR) – This is how many times someone has actually not only viewed the page or info but clicked and followed your CTAs. If you get 100 page views and ten clicks, that’s a 10 percent clickthrough rate.
  • Cost per click (CPC) – Likewise, knowing how much it costs you to get those clicks will also inform how much you can afford to pay for advertising and influencer marketing. If you’re making $100 a click on average, you can reasonably spend 33 bucks to get that click.

 

Sales

 

Of course, all that work you are doing, the hiring and working with influencers and offering amazing value, is ultimately to make sales. So, therefore, of course, you must track sales. You don’t even have a business until you make sales.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you’re making a profit from your sales:

 

  • Sales conversion rate – How many clicks and views does it take for you, on average, to make a sale? Knowing that helps you determine how many touchpoints you need to create.
  • Number of sales – Finally, tracking how many sales you’re making during any period you want to follow can help determine the cause of those sales so you can repeat it.

 

Lead Generation

 

Did you know that most people will not buy anything from you by going to your website and clicking to buy unless you’re pretty famous, like Amazon or Etsy? But if you take that traffic, you receive it and turn it into a lead. Then, you can boost your conversion rate exponentially. After all, once a customer is on your e-mail list, you can now promote them and communicate with them anytime you want to.

 

KPIs to track to ensure your lead generation is working:

 

  • Signups – How many people have signed up for the freebie or low-cost offer you have promoted to them?
  • E-mail Subscribers – How many people subscribed to your newsletter due to the promotion you created?

 

Finally, track your return on investment or ROI for every KPI listed above. No matter your goal, you should always keep track of your ROI to ensure you are not spending more than the value you receive from the influencer contract. Again, it’s easy to determine by simply doing the math. You can keep track in a simple spreadsheet or use the platforms you have with their native tracking ability.

 

 

 

 

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Define Your Influencer Marketing Goals

 

A successful and sustainable influencer marketing campaign requires a plan to maintain focus and direction and identifying your goals. This means before you make any content and before you determine your campaign type and find your influencers.

 

If you do these steps before identifying your goals and setting proper key performance metrics, you are less likely to see appropriate returns. This is because the content and influencer you pick more than likely won’t correlate. Thus, wasting your time and other valuable resources required to run a positively functioning campaign.

 

Each goal you set will require a different type of influencer, budget, and resource needs and for you to produce a set of relevant and unique content. You can’t just use any influencer and throw out poor content and think it will work. Over time this will cause more work, confusion, and eat up at your profits and other resources.

 

  • Brand Awareness and Reputation – Your customers need to notice you several times before they feel safe enough to spend money. The more touchpoints you create using your content, the more notice you will get. Running a social media influencer campaign can make all the difference for your business.

 

  • Increased Sales and Leads – Another goal you can have with your influencer campaign is to make more sales. One way to do that is to use the campaign to build your e-mail list. One tactic is to offer the influencer a freebie to give away that only requires their audience to sign up for a newsletter. This act alone will increase sales today and tomorrow.

 

  • Higher Engagement Rate – Another goal is to increase your engagement rate. When you have more engagement and communication that is two-way with your audience, they get to know you better, and you get to know them better. When this happens, they will be more likely to accept your offers because your offers will be more likely relevant to them.

 

  • More Followers or Traffic – If you want more followers, more leads, more anything, you need more traffic. One type of influencer campaign you can do is designed to bring traffic to your site so that they see what you have to offer. Another option is to get them to another social media account instead, but it’s typically best to push traffic to your website.

 

  • Product Launches and Promotions – Using influencers to promote your next product launch or your sale on your products is a no-brainer. Influencers love to help people announce a new product to their customers because it makes them seem like VIPs.

Analyzing Business Models to See What’s Best for You

Remember when you create your influencer marketing goals not to skimp on your goal-setting process. Instead, use the SMART goal-setting process to ensure that your goal is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Then, you’ll never regret planning and implementing an influencer campaign that you’ve seriously planned out because you’re more likely to be successful and reach your objectives.