Tag: email marketing

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Five Tips to Using Email Marketing Effectively

Email marketing offers even the smallest business a powerful marketing tool. It is one of the most influential and cost-efficient ways to reach out to your customers. You can use it to make them aware of your products and services and educate them on information that makes them want your products or services. Email marketing is the most effective method in all of history so far for reaching prospects and customers with a fifty percent open rate and twenty-one percent click-through rate

 

Create a Clear Call-To-Action

A call-to-action is a way for you to guide your customer toward the next step. It should be specific, resonate with your customer, and align with your marketing goals. They are a crucial tool to be used in email marketing to encourage readers to take the action you want them to. They can be as simple as “Shop Now” or as complex as a countdown timer. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s relevant and gives your reader a clear idea of what they should do next.

 

Create a Compelling Subject Line

Subject lines provide your audience with the first impression of your marketing campaigns. It is the only thing that a recipient will see before opening your email to read it. A subject line can make or break your campaign. A bad subject line can lead to an uninterested audience. The best subject lines are short, catchy, and specific to the content of the email. They also need to be relevant for any particular industry or niche audience.

 

Personalize Your Emails

When sending an email, people’s most common mistake is that they forget to personalize it. Personalizing an email with details about the recipient makes it more likely that they will open it in the first place. It also keeps your recipients interested in what you have to say. This simply means using their name and information about their personal interests.

 

Make Sure Your Emails Are Not Too Long

Long emails are a common mistake many new entrepreneurs make. You may feel that drafting a long email will better engage the reader, making readers more likely to unsubscribe. Emails should be concise, with three to five paragraphs max.

 

Send Emails at Least Twice a Week

It is recommended to send emails at least twice a week. It would help if you had a different offer for your subscribers in each email. An email marketing automation tool can help schedule your emails in advance to make this easier to do.

 

Email marketing is only as effective as you make it. Although, at the same time, it is still the most effective and cost-effective marketing strategy, you need to know the right way to do it. Following these email marketing tips is key to your success as an entrepreneur.

 

 

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Six Email Marketing Strategies to Incorporate as a Solo Entrepreneur

Email marketing is a powerful tool for solo entrepreneurs. It helps you stay in touch with your customers, build relationships and grow your business. Email is effective for reaching out to your target audience. In addition, it is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing tools available.

 

Email marketing can promote products, increase sales, and build your brand’s reputation. Solo entrepreneurs need to have a good relationship with their email subscribers because they will be the ones making purchases from you regularly.

 

Here are six email marketing strategies to incorporate as a solo entrepreneur:

 

Include Sign-Up Forms on Your Website or Blog

Sign-up forms are an essential part of any website. They help you build your email list, connect with users, and create a personal connection that can be used to convert them into paying customers. In addition, when you have a sign-up form on your site, it is easier for visitors to subscribe to your content and receive notifications from you through email.

 

Create Valuable Freebies or Opt-ins

Offering freebies or opt-ins is a proven strategy that will help you get more subscribers and customers. Many companies provide freebies or opt-in forms to incentivize people to subscribe to their email list. This is a prevalent email marketing strategy because it’s easy, inexpensive, and effective. In addition, it allows you to create valuable content for your website visitors, which leads them to sign up for your emails. You can also use this tactic during sales events or promotions to boost the number of people who buy from you.

 

Be Sure to Create Autoresponders

Autoresponders are automated emails that are sent on a set schedule. They are typically used for marketing and sales, but they can also be used for customer service. They are a terrific way to stay connected with your customers without manually sending out emails. Autoresponders are software that automatically sends personalized messages to your customers at specific time intervals. These messages can be triggered by certain actions such as purchase, abandoned cart, or just general customer care.

 

Take Time to Write “Click-Worthy” Subject Lines

The email subject line encourages the people who see it to open it. Therefore, it is important to capture their attention and make them want to read it. Try using a catchy subject line that is short, specific, and to the point. It should also have a call-to-action that entices the reader to click on it.

 

Make Sure You Are Mobile-Friendly

Your customers are using their mobile phones more than ever. If your email is not mobile-friendly, you will be missing out on potential sales. In addition, more and more people are reading emails on their phones, and this means that you need to make sure that the layout looks the same on a mobile device as it does on a desktop. Thankfully, most email software providers have options to make this easy to do.

 

Utilize Email Segmentation

Email segmentation is an important email marketing strategy that divides customers into different groups based on their interests, demographic information, or past behavior. These segments are then targeted with additional messages relevant to the specific audience.

 

To segment your audience, you need to have some data about them. This can come from various sources, including Website visitors, purchased items, demographic information such as age, behavior like abandoned shopping cart, location, or interests.

 

These email marketing strategies help you retain your target audience and maximize your impact or value. Over time, proper email marketing will help grow your trust, credibility, authority, and revenue. On the other hand, skipping email marketing means missing out on many vital leads and opportunities to achieve your entrepreneurial goals.

 

 

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Why Email Marketing is More Important Than Social Media

Entrepreneurs have been using email to communicate with their customers for decades. Social media has become a popular alternative to email marketing in the past few years. However, marketers and entrepreneurs realize that email is still more effective than social media at generating sales and leads.

 

Email still has an average user engagement rate of forty percent. Compare this to Facebook’s at four percent and Instagram and Twitter’s at one percent. Your success requires regularly staying in touch with your target audience to stay at the top of their minds. Email marketing is a powerful tool for anyone running a solo business, as it helps them build and maintain relationships with customers.

 

Here are four primary reasons why email marketing is more powerful or essential than social media:

 

Email Marketing Generates Higher Conversion Rates

The cost-effectiveness of email marketing makes it highly desirable for small business owners to use. Even if you personally don’t enjoy email, understand the stats. The average email open-rate is around forty-three percent. The click rates are approximately 3.2 percent. In comparison, the average click rate for social media is roughly 1.3 percent.

 

Email Marketing is More Personal and Direct

Email marketing is personal and direct, so it’s more effective than social media. Unlike other forms of advertising, email marketing messages are less likely to be blocked by spam filters, and emails are delivered quickly to inboxes. Email marketing also makes it easier to segment your market and only share certain information. For example, sending your new readers an email about who you are and a newsletter to your current readers. This allows you to diversify your communication and engage in many different ways.

 

Email Marketing is More Affordable

Email marketing produces the best return on investment than any other type of marketing out there. Email marketing campaigns are also not that costly. It’s much lower than running a successful social media campaign. The average cost per lead for an email campaign is one to two dollars, while the same metric for Facebook is roughly six to eight dollars per lead.

 

Email Marketing is Easier

Building a list with email is simpler, but it’s also more effective than a social media following for building a hungry list of buyers. This is because most people use email. It is estimated that roughly ninety-four percent of users on the internet have or use email. In addition, email is straightforward to understand and doesn’t require a lot of time to implement as social media does. However, depending on the social media platform you use, you will need to take the time to learn the distinctive features to maximize your results.

 

While this information is important to be aware of, that doesn’t mean you should ignore social media. However, it does point to not choosing social media over email marketing, as it can significantly impact your success as a solo entrepreneur.

 

 

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Common Community Building Obstacles that Can Hinder Your Success

Like any business advertising or marketing strategy, there are bound to be obstacles that can hinder your success. For this reason, understanding some of the many common obstacles to community building now will prevent them from destroying your results in the future. In addition, knowing what to watch out for can mitigate the problems and help you be more successful than your wildest dreams.

 

Here are four common community-building obstacles that can hinder your success and tips on how to avoid or improve them:

 

Unique and Valuable Content

 

Continually creating and sharing valuable content is no easy feat. Repurposing content, sharing boring promotions, or expecting your community to do most of the work won’t help you either. Instead, developing and sharing content that is unique to that platform will inspire more engagement.

 

Asking questions and getting to know your audience more by figuring out their needs and frustrations will provide you with endless content ideas. What keeps them up at night? If you know your audience and what makes them who they are, you will know what content to produce. If you’re not sure, ask them.

 

Platform and Tools

 

Not using the right tools or platform for your target audience is the first mistake many make. Just because a platform is easy for you to use doesn’t mean it will translate to your audience. If you use a platform or software not used by the common public, you must add additional content to teach them how to use it and why they should even try. Working with difficult tools or confusing information will only deter them from participating or showing up. Instead, pick a well-known tool, and even if it’s not perfect, stick to it if that is where your audience is.

 

Market Competition

 

Competition is inevitable, and it only gets bigger the more avenues or tools you use for your business. However, doing the right research on your competition and developing superior resources makes it a non-issue. You can always do better.

 

One strategy is to find and join your competitors’ groups within your niche and see what comments and information they receive. Then, watch how they answer their customers or help lead them toward purchasing. Then, as you learn, find ways to make it better with your distinctive touch.

 

Consistency

 

Finally, but certainly not least, consistency is a common struggle to many businesses who start a brand community. Finding the right balance of content to share and working with your members’ schedules is the best way to achieve this. Adopting and learning automation tools will also help perfect consistency. Consistency shows your members that you are there to value them, not use them for money.

 

Knowing these common obstacles should provide you with the tools to build a more successful brand or online community from the start. Consistent materials, schedule, and image with the right tools and education are essential to running a profitable and valuable brand community. Keeping up with your industry and always supplying valuable and powerful content can be a lot of work but is crucial to the success of your community.

 

Harness the Power of Consistency

 

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Five Important Principles of Authentic Community Engagement to Learn

With more social media and online communication, being genuine and trustworthy are two important characteristics many consumers are looking for from businesses more than ever.

 

With authentic engagement and communication, you can foster communities that work together to empower each other and your brand. It provides the knowledge you need to improve your products while also helping the members solve problems that can then be used to improve their lives and others. It’s about being real, inspiring your community, and doing your best not to mislead or misdirect them.

 

The following are five important principles to learn and incorporate to inspire authentic community engagement and grow your business:

 

Get the Community Involved and Active Right Away

 

Don’t wait until you have a lot of members to start publishing information and activating the community. At first, your community may feel a little lonely until you get more members but keeping it active and full of information that will still be there when people join is very important to building a dynamic and vibrant community.

 

Encourage Trust and Integrity

 

Set the rules of your community to establish trust and highlight your integrity to the group. As you communicate openly with members of your community, others observe and become more trusting of you as they notice how much integrity you have.

 

Foster Community-Led Solutions

 

As a business owner, you need to create and or find solutions for your ideal customer’s problems related to your niche and your expertise. The impressive thing about having a community is getting input to create more solutions from the people who need them.

 

Be Consistent, Clear, and Open with Communication

 

It can help to create a branding guide that includes your business personality and voice to ensure that all content and communication are consistent, clear, and accurate. It’s a lot easier to be open when you know for sure where your values lie and how to ensure you stick to them.

 

Empower and Support Your Audience

 

The best thing about a group is that you will have one of the best advantages in empowering and supporting your audience. After all, you want them to succeed, and if they succeed, you do too.

 

Create powerful and informed content that serves your members and only your members — meaning don’t just automatically share content that has been shared in other places unless you changed it in some way or added additional meaning to it by connecting it to a success story or a point you want to share. The more personal the content being shared in the group, the more likely your members will come back and engage with each other. Content is how you keep your target audience interested and involved, so make it worth it.

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

 

 

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Four Ways Communities Improve Customer Experience

Just one bad customer experience can destroy your reputation as a brand or small business owner. Research suggests that consumers are willing to spend more revenue on businesses that have excellent customer service.

 

In fact, a report conducted by The Economist states that 59% of the consumers surveyed are willing to reach out or find other businesses in hopes of a better customer experience. Building a brand community provides the customer experience you need to prevent this from happening.

 

Here are five ways communities can improve your target customer experience:

 

Communities Humanize the Support Process

 

Most consumers are very tired of being just another number or worse, a wallet, and not even thought of as humans. Small business owners are uniquely positioned to offer customers the most human support possible through their use of communities. If you participate, they’re going to see you as a real human with real feelings, and due to that, they’re going to buy more.

 

Communities Improve Customer Engagement

 

Not only will your customers engage and discuss your products one-on-one within the community, getting current ideas and insight into making use of your products and services, but they will also be more likely to respond to you and answer your questions due to the ease of communication in a group environment.

 

Communities Provide Clear Customer Insight and Understanding

 

While the community is mainly for your customer, the truth is, you will gain a lot from having a community. You’re going to learn more about your customer, and that will help you understand what they truly need from you within the bounds of your niche.

 

Communities Streamline the Customer Service Process

 

Offering more avenues of customer care to your customers will make them feel even more heard. It’s hard to provide phone support as a small business, but the next best thing is a community that allows them to publish their questions and find answers in your FAQ or by using your bot. Plus, sometimes you’re going to be there live to help.

 

In the end, making sure your customers have the best experience possible when communicating or engaging with your business prevents you from destroying your reputation or business altogether. Remember, most businesses have to shut down within ten years. The major contributing factors to these shutdowns include poor customer service and not prioritizing your target audience. Building a community provides you more control and tools to ensure you give the best customer experience at all times, anywhere around the world.

 

Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service

 

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Four Ways to Reduce Your Email Unsubscribe Rate

Customer retention is a top priority if you are a business owner or email marketer. It is quite well known that it can cost five to twenty times more to find new customers than to please the ones you have. Therefore, if your unsubscribe rate is below two percent, you are currently on the right track and should strive to keep it there or even lower.

 

The following are four ways to reduce your email unsubscribers and build a more sustainable list: 

 

Audit Your Email Funnels Often

Better segment your readers, be sure they have a consistent schedule, not too long or too short, watch out for spammy looking content, segment by interest, and add them to multiple lists.

 

Plan and Map Your Content

Add in value and fun content, don’t just be a salesperson. Be cautious of your titles, as they are your first impression. Don’t use click-bait or sound obnoxious. Instead, speak to them naturally and let them know exactly what they will get out of the opening and reading your email.

 

Personalize and Incentivize

Be generous to get back what you are worth. If you only focus on what you get out of each email, then the content you are providing lacks quality. Instead, it would help if you concentrate on your audience and what they need the most for it to come back around to you. Then, keep the content personalized and find ways to incentivize them to continue engaging or reading your content. Giveaways, free downloads, or discounts are a few ideas.

 

Engage and Follow-up

Don’t ignore your audience once they become a subscriber or paying customer. The point of email marketing is to grow a sustainable and active audience that you can communicate with for the long-term. It is not a one-and-done strategy.

How To Improve Your Email Marketing ROI

Keep up with your audience by sending free educational material and asking for feedback or other questions that help you improve your content and overall value as a business. The more you engage and ask questions, the more you get to know your audience to become a better information source, improving your business’s growth and suitability.

 

A Harvard Business Review report states that simply increasing your retention efforts by as little as five percent can improve your profits by 25 to 95 percent. Showing you just how valuable keeping your unsubscribe rate low can be to your email marketing efforts. If you want to maximize your revenue and keep your subscribers interested, reviewing your goals, content, and getting to know your audience more is vital to your success.

 

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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.

How to Repurpose Your Influencer Marketing Content

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Six Proven Ways to Increase Your Email Click-Through Rates

To make a sale or increase your conversions in email marketing you need to monitor your click-through rate. Click-through rate describes the percentage of subscribers who see the link or email or subject line and click the links within your email after they have opened them. This rate allows you to determine how to affect your email content by persuading or valuing your target audience.

To determine your click-through rate, you need to take the number of links clicked and divide it by the number of delivered emails. Then times it by one hundred to get the correct percentage. For example, say you sent four hundred emails and noticed around twenty of them have opened and clicked the link inside. The formula would break down as follows:

 

(Link Clicks / Number of Emails Sent) * 100 = Click-Through Rate

 

(20/400) * 100 =

 

0.05 * 100 =

 

5%

 

The following are six proven ways to increase your email click-through rate:

 

Keep Email’s Organized, Clear, and Direct

Your emails should be short and direct but with enough information to get your point across and provide value to your subscribers. For example, instead of providing your full blog in the email, please provide a link for them to read the rest.

 

Emails should be used as a summary or overview. The longer it is, the more likely they will get disinterested and click off the email. Make sure each email you send has one main objective. This way, your readers don’t get distracted or confused on what direction they need to take next.

 

Use List Segmentation

Personalized and targeted content is key to increase your open and click-through rates. This is because list segmentation helps you organize and divide your customers in a way that makes it easier to communicate with them.

 

Segmentation involves picking outliners such as your subscribers’ website viewing or email reading behaviors, demographics, and geographic characters and then developing and sending each segment’s individual and personalized email sequences. The idea is to make sure only those truly interested will receive the content, improving your conversions while maintaining your email list.

 

Make it Smart Phone Friendly

Nearly eighty-four percent of those who use a smartphone have reported it as being their primary tool to check email. This means if your email is not mobile-friendly, you are likely missing out on many opportunities of making it easy for your subscribers to opt-in and click-through. If the process is frustrating, they won’t want to participate.

 

Add Social Sharing

You can increase your click-through rate by as much as thirty percent, according to an Econsultancy report, by adding three or more social sharing options. Every email you send may not be useful to your readers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know a friend, loved one, or coworker who could use the information instead.

 

Enhance your Call-To-Action

Use one obvious call-to-action through your email sequence. Make it the first and last thing they see so they know exactly what they need to do to click through.

 10 Content Marketing Tips for Email Marketing Success

The key to improving your click-through rate is to make the right content, understand your target audience, and make it obvious and easy for them to participate. The more your subscribers click-through, the higher your revenues.

 

 

 

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Six Easy Ways to Improving Your Email Open-Rate

Email open rate determines how well your emails are getting in front of your subscribers and if your subject line or titles are doing their job to pursue them to read. Either your titles are boring and unattractive, or the timing of when the email was sent is off.

 

Whatever it may be, it is important to figure it out and improve it in order to see the return on investment you are hoping for. A low open rate means your audience is not reading or seeing your content. Meaning you won’t have the opportunity to convert them into paying customers or achieve other email marketing goals.

 

Here are six easy ways designed to help improve your email open-rate:

 

Ask A Question

Intrigue your audience with an interesting question. Spike the curiosity, but be sure it is relevant to your overall goal and message as a business.

 

Discover Optimum Delivery and Frequency Time

Sending poorly timed emails can easily destroy your open rates. In addition, email boxes can get crowded, and people are not always on them like they are on social media.

 

It’s not as likely for them to continue to scroll through for hours, especially if they just received hundreds of emails. Instead, find the time your audience is active by testing different times throughout the day for the email campaign you create. Be sure to set a short deadline to track your results to compare which time is best to get your emails synced to their schedule.

 

Be Conversational and Personable

Write all your content, including emails, as if you are talking to a friend, but use a branded tone and style that your audience understands and knows is you. A message that is coming from another human or friend is more likely to get attention and results.

Common Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Provide Value Every time

Even if you are doing a sales pitch, always find an opportunity to provide value. Add a fact as well as a coupon. If you are the only one who gets any value from the email, you need to start over.

 

Review and Refresh Your List

Be sure the email lists you have are new and updated. Old email lists are likely to have poor open rates. Maybe people change email accounts or interests over time, meaning no matter how hard you try, some of your lists will go stale, and it will be up to you to get them off your list. List hygiene ensures that you get a better understanding of what your real open rate is.

 

Use Short but Detailed Subject Lines

Your subject lines, like titles, are the first thing your subscribers get to see. So, make it count. Spend time crafting one that makes them want to click on it and discover what is next.

 

If you have a low open rate, one of these six areas is likely to be blamed and improved. Be sure your lists are up-to-date, your titles are attractive, and that you always find ways to add more value for optimal open rates.