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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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Best Practices for Email List Segmentation

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

 

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

 

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

 

Try these best practices when creating email list segmentation:

 

Keep It Simple

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

 

Use Buyer Personas

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

 

Automate with Tools

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

 

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

 

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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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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.

 

 

 

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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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Influencer Marketing Software Platforms to Utilize

You may feel slightly overwhelmed about finding the right influencers. After all, there are many blogs, vlogs, and channels, and platforms out there to search. But have no fear. You don’t have to search through the platforms on your own to find the right influencer, and you can instead use one or more of these options to help you find the right influencer for your business:

 

  1. Upfluence.com – This platform offers many tools for you to use to find and run profitable influencer campaigns. They keep track of each influencer you work with, manage payments, and even offer many tools for helping you measure campaign results. You can search for and work with many influencers using this tool with ease.

 

  1. Grin.co – This influencer marketing platform is built for e-commerce sites and offers search, discovery, relationship management, campaign management, and more through their platform. If you care about building relationships with your influencers in a trusting and authentic way, Grin.co will help.

 

  1. Influencity.com – This software is focused on managing many influencers for your marketing campaigns. They have a list of over 75 million influencers in all genres, and they are updating their database every single day. In addition, they offer a full CRM, content management, and more.

 

  1. Izea.com – If you want to do sponsorship marketing, this platform will work for you. You can contact marketers who wish to promote your offers for income. Just create a profile page today to find out how it all works.

 

  1. Linqia.com – Go to the next level with this influencer marketing software. You can run campaigns, communicate with influencers, compensate them, and so much more using this software.

 

  1. Theshelf.com – This software helps match social influencers with brands who want to collaborate on promotions. This is more useful for vloggers than bloggers who have a large audience.

 

  1. Awario.com – This tool is useful to help you find influencers who are already talking about you, your competitors, or a generic search term you choose. You can locate opportunities that already exist and put your products right in front of them.

 

  1. BuzzSumo.com – This software is top of the line for influencer locating, managing campaigns, and more. Whether you need content curation, a competitor analysis, or more, you can have it here.

 

  1. HypeAuditor.com – This is one of the better tools to find the influencers you need to run campaigns. Plus, there are many features that other options don’t have. For example, it’s a super-powered AI Instagram authenticity checker and more.

 

  1. NinjaOutreach.com – This blogger outreach software can help you grow your business online by allowing you to prospect, build relationships, analyze, and track metrics and watch campaigns too.

Sales Automation Tools and Tips

Before you start looking for the right influencers, set up a checklist with the desired criteria for the influencers to meet before using them, that way, you know what you want before you start looking.

 

 

 

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How to Track Your Influencer Marketing ROI

When you engage an influencer to help you market your product and services, you must track the metrics just like anything else you do in your business. The only way you can be sure that action A causes result C is that you tracked and measured it.

 

Determine Your Campaign Goals

 

Before setting a realistic budget, you need to understand your goals for each campaign clearly. You will have different requirements for every goal, which means the costs associated and return on investment for each product will vary. Working with a micro-influencer will fees significantly less than working with a macro influencer, for example.

 

For example, you may have the goal of getting more subscribers to your e-mail list. If so, what exactly will that require? It’ll require giving the audience a reason to click through and sign up, for one thing. What else? Make sure you know and match all goals with the requirements.

 

Identify Key Performance Metrics

6 WAYS YOU CAN TRACK YOUR PROGRESS

Your goal needs to be clear and direct for each campaign to determine what key performance metrics to keep track of. This way, you have a more accurate representation of your return on investment. Tracking the wrong indicators like sales volumes when your main goal is brand exposure will provide inconsistent results.

 

While exposure can translate into more sales, it is better to keep track of your audience growth, engagement rate, or new versus return visitors before, during, and after the campaign. The point is to make sure you are watching the specific metrics that reflect your goal. For sales, keep tracking affiliate links, promotion codes.

 

Highlight Individual Campaign Expenses

 

What supporting details or materials do you need to run the campaign? Product costs, travel costs, influencer fees, agency fees, and more. You must first determine the influencer strategy or content you want to create to know what you need to budget for the campaign.

 

Track, Compare and Evaluate

 

You should keep track of all data before any campaign starts. If you don’t pull key performance metrics first, you won’t know if the results are really translating into a positive return. The only way to be certain of effectiveness is to check the metrics before, during, and after.

 

Your return on investment will be as good as your due diligence. Do your research and find the right influencers who offer the best services for the budget you have. The more you work with others in this regard, the more effective you’ll become over time. You’ll be able to use the numbers to figure out what is working and do more of that.

 

 

 

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Seven Influencer Marketing Campaign Types to Know About

When it comes to influencer campaigns, there are several types that you need to know about. Most people do a combination of these in order to help get the word out about their products and services. Mix and match as needed to develop a fun and effective influencer marketing campaign that works for your needs and the influencer’s needs.

 

The following are seven popular influencer marketing campaign types to learn:

 

  • Sponsored Content – With sponsored content, you simply pay the influencer to create a post, a video, or both that works to promote your product or service. The influencer will reveal to your audience up front that it’s a sponsored post. Depending on the rest of the deal, you can get a sponsored post starting at about 50 bucks and on up.

 

  • Reviews – One way to have an influencer recommend your product is by asking them to do an honest assessment of it. At the same time, they will provide an honest review. You usually pay a set fee for the review and offer a percentage of sales for their unique link.

 

  • Giveaways – You can also give the influencer a free product to give away to their audience as a way to boost your own sales. Usually, they’ll provide a review plus do the giveaway and have a link to those who want to buy.

 

  • Guest Blogs or Collaborations – Working with several influencers or doing a guest blog on an influencer’s website or channel, if you’re also a vlogger or blogger, is also a great way to use an influencer’s audience versa.

 

  • Platform Takeovers – Some people give the influencer the ability to take over their own platform to get the word out.

 

  • Product Seeding – Having an influencer simply wear your t-shirt, use your product, or otherwise show themselves using it without talking about it is product seeding. Again, you’re most familiar with this happening in tv shows.

The Keys to A Successful Influencer Marketing Budget

  • Ambassadors and Affiliates – Working with influencers as ambassadors and affiliates is a great way to work with them, too, because you won’t have to pay them until they make a sale with this method.

 

There are a variety of types of influencer marketing campaigns. The above are some ideas to try for helping you get the word out about your products and services.

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Six Tips to Communicating and Collaborating with Influencers

Nearly 63% of top brand marketers have reported working with ten or more influencers at one time. Further making proper communication and collaboration paramount to your success. Every business should already understand the value of appropriate communication and take steps to learn how to do so for each goal and department of their organization, especially when it comes to marketing and communicating to your target audience.

 

Here are six tips to establishing proper communication with any influencer:

 

Keep Communication Type Consistent

 

If your influencer works mostly through e-mail, keep all the conversations there. However, if you work with several influencers, try to find one platform to keep everything organized. For example, you don’t want to talk to one influencer through Instagram directly while talking to another on Facebook directly.

 

Eventually, it will get too unorganized as you continue to add influencers to your team. Imagine if you had ten influencers on your team, each using a different channel or software to communicate. Over time this can get confusing and disorganized, easily providing an opportunity for missed information. Not a sustainable relationship for anyone.

 

Provide a Clear Plan or Roadmap

 

Tell the influencer exactly what you need and how their content can benefit your company. Highlight your goals and the metrics you are hoping to gain from the partnership. Be as clear as possible, ask questions and always follow up to ensure they know what the plan is or provide the influencer an opportunity to ask questions or offer suggestions.

 

Keep Communication Open

 

Allow space for your influencer to provide their opinion and be open to new ideas. The one thing that makes influencer marketing so great is its unique content. They also understand their audience and how they will react to certain information better than you would. They want to see success just as much as you. If they don’t produce the results needed, they will be without a contract or revenue.

 

Form an Authentic Relationship

 

Just because it is business does not mean you can’t form genuine and strong relationships with influencers—the more authentic the connection, the better the content. If you truly care about each other, you won’t have any problems working together and getting the results you both need. So start engaging with their content and following all their social media pages. Like and comment on their posts and treat them just like any other friend or customer. Not only will the influencer appreciate it, but their audience will too.

 

Schedule Content Creation Time Together

Important Questions to Ask Before You Work with An Influencer

Brainstorm new ideas or content to use for the campaign together. Be open to creativity and innovation. The influencer is here to create content, so be sure they are involved during this process.

 

While you need certain information to be shared with their audience, this doesn’t mean it has to be a sales pitch or read from a script. The influencer knows how their audience digests information so let them do the bulk of the content creation. Just be sure to provide them any supporting materials and information they need. You need to guide them and educate them on your products and services, not micromanage them.

 

Create Personalized Incentives or Gifts

 

Send products or create unique promotion codes personalized to each influencer. The more you treat your influencer as an individual with their own feelings and thought processes, the better the relationship altogether. Don’t treat them like a corporation and dehumanize them.

 

Overall, taking the necessary steps to communicate with your influencer properly is vital to your campaign and collaboration success. Use these important tips the next time you reach out to an influencer.