credibility Archives - Barbara Genest

If you are struggling to build your business and looking for ways to improve, building an online or brand community may be the best solution. In fact, it is likely the tool you’ve needed all along.

The following are five common business problems building a community can solve:

Poor Return on Investment

While email lists, advertisements, and your blog are all fabulous ways to generate interest in your offers, there is nothing more effective than truly getting to know your customers more intimately. If your ROI is not what you want it to be, but your customers are otherwise satisfied, a brand community can help you fix that problem.

You can create the community free or for a fee. It’s up to you. It really does depend on your niche and your business model, but you can test out various ways to run your community. Once you have a captive audience that you can communicate with regularly, they will start buying more, and your ROI will improve.

Poor Cashflow and Intermittent Revenue

Whether you provide services or products, or you’re an affiliate with no products of your own, if you work within a particular niche, your income is likely not consistent if you have not built a community of avid and hungry buyers. Having a membership-based community, whether paid or free, can stabilize your cash flow like nothing else.

In your communities, you can offer them the first peek at new products and services, get more feedback, receive more customer reviews, and even get your members to become brand advocates and recommend you to others much easier than you can without having a community.

Poor Credibility, Trust, and Awareness

Communities humanize businesses, and once that happens, your audience will start trusting you more. The credibility that you end up with after creating more awareness through community building will jumpstart your creative juices and end up helping you become even better in the eyes of your customer base due to all the inside knowledge you’ll gain by being part of your community.

Poor Business Growth and Stagnation

If you have grown as far as you can with what you are doing, consider building a community. An active and engaged community can really boost your growth and end the stagnation you’re experiencing. Even if you haven’t sold a solitary product yet, building an active community will generate new revenue.

Finally, you can vastly improve your customer service by setting up an active and involved community. Not only will your members offer each other community peer-to-peer support, but you’ll also be much more in tune with what is going right and wrong and learn better ways to help your members in the way they desire.

Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service

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