Tag: home business. online marketing

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Five Common Email Automation Flows to Implement

Email automation flows are exactly what they sound like. It is a set of emails sent automatically to subscribers to streamline and enhance your email marketing process. Automation can be set biased on time or a certain set of events, such as signing up for a newsletter.

 

Automation will send them a welcome email. It will also ensure they receive the other emails in the series consistently. What’s more, is it can better segment your list to target and refine your communication to see better results and conversions. It would be impossible and highly time-consuming to send each email yourself, which is why email automation is key.

 

Here are five common email flows to implement in your email marketing strategy:

 

Welcome Email Series

First, establish the connection with a welcome email. If someone subscribes to your list, you should never neglect the opportunity to say hello and thank you for joining the community. They need to know at first contact what to expect and when to expect it.

 

Abandoned Cart Email Series

This is a straightforward reminder crucial for e-commerce businesses that send reminders to customers’ inboxes that they left items in their cart to purchase. Often times this is a great opportunity to incentivize your customers to continue with a small discount.

 

Personalized Discounts

Asking for a birthday, anniversary, or other personal information is a great way to set up an automated series personalized to that specific subscriber. Then, when their birthday or anniversary comes around, you get the opportunity to make them feel special by recognizing their special day.

 

Post-Purchase Series

This is a set of emails sent after a subscriber makes a purchase or follows a certain call to action. This shows that you appreciate their business and hope to continue to provide value to them. It also ensures they use the products or services correctly to maximize their usefulness. This is also a great time to ask questions and give feedback to establish your trustworthiness and credibility further and improve your customer experience.

 

Value Drive and Educational Email Series

Also known as lead nurturing content, this is a series of emails that focuses on further building a connection with your subscribers to keep their interest and understanding about your business, products, or services. The more education and value you provide your subscribers, the more likely they will become loyal customers.

 

Remember, automation is there to keep you consistent and help reduce tedious and mundane work. It does not mean you can let it go and ignore it. If you want to crush your email marketing goals, always keep track of the results and test new automated series to see which ones your readers like the most.

 

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How to Conduct an Email Funnel Audit in Five Easy Steps

An email funnel audit is a process of reviewing every step of your email marketing process to ensure you see proper conversions. I know you don’t want to waste time, resources, and worst — subscribers — due to poor email content, poor understanding of your audience, or the email marketing process altogether. However, proper review, implementation, and reform are required to run a successful email marketing campaign. Furthermore, if you want to see a high return on investment, as the average is forty-eight dollars for every one dollar spent, then you must audit your funnels.

 

Here are the five steps to conducting an email funnel audit:

 

Step One: Evaluate Your Goals

 

The first step to any marketing process is to determine your goals and evaluate them. This means step one of the auditing process includes comparing your goals to the campaign materials you created. For each campaign you have, create a list of the most important goals. Then go through the content and review it to be sure it aligns with these goals. A great way to organize this step is to create a chart for each section for your email marketing funnel to the left and then the goals established for each campaign at the top.

 

Then as you read through the material, add each section to the goals you outlined. In the end, each campaign should be neatly organized and in its proper spot to achieve the goal properly. For example, if you notice your call-to-action in one campaign completes a different goal, then you can see that your campaigns are not properly organized to achieve your goals. Your call-to-action should be the same in each to be more successful.

 

Step Two: Review Your Metrics

 

Next, take a look at your metrics. The most important metrics include your bounce rate, open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, list growth rate, total revenue earned per email, and total revenue earned per subscriber. Each of these metrics can work as red flags to help pinpoint areas of concern or highlight your strengths. For example, a high open-rate with a low click-through rate shows your titles are strong; however, you lost your readers’ interest somewhere along the way. Meaning you should review your email copy and call-to-action to be sure they align with your target audience and marketing goals.

 

Step Three: Analyze Email Flows, Segmentation, and Sequences

 

For step three, you need to review the flow of your sequences and ensure they are segmented appropriately. The more focused your email campaigns are, the more likely you are to increase your conversions. So be sure they are not too long or short and that your subscribers are in the right sequence. It is important that cold subscribers, for example, are added to sequences and segmentations that nurture them and get them reengaged.

 

Step Four: Inspect Email Campaign Value, Variety, and Structure

 

Take the time to read the content and compare it to your buyer personas. Be sure the content you are sending has various types of content, such as educational and promotional. Too much promotional content will be viewed as spam and send you straight to their spam folder. Confirm that each campaign and email have the proper structure as well as quality content and titles.

 

Step Five: Fix, Plan and Execute

 

To wrap up the auditing process, you need to highlight the red flags or areas to improve and develop a plan of action. For example, if you noticed material in the wrong campaigns, adjust it. If you saw your unsubscribe rate is higher in one campaign than the other, you need to inspect the content quality further. Then whatever changes you make, set a short deadline to track and repeat the review to ensure the changes you made were appropriate.

 

Overall, the auditing process is designed to ensure each step of the email marketing processed is being executed appropriately to ensure you see the return on investment you need to make all the work and time investment worth it.

 

What To Look for During an Email Funnel Audit

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The Four Benefits to Conducting Email Marketing Audits

Email marketing audits are about reviewing everything it takes to create your email marketing campaign, from developing your goals to reviewing your content creation process and comparing them to your current metrics. It also includes identifying your strengths and weaknesses to build an actionable plan to improve your conversions and better connection with your audience through email marketing.

 

The following are four important benefits to conducting email marketing audits:

 

To Improve ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is the most important metric when keeping track of any marketing strategy. If your return is low or less than what you put in, it is not worth your time or investment. Meaning adopting strategies that provide a high return on investment are where you should spend most of your time. For example, email marketing is the top priority as it converts more sales than social media and gives you as much as forty-eight dollars back for every one dollar you spend.

 How to Easily Crank out Content Daily

To Identify Winning Content or Strengths

Knowing your brand’s strengths and weaknesses is crucial to improving your content, nurturing your relationship, and engagement with your readers. Your weaknesses are red flags or indicators that tell you what you need to do to better engage and connect with your audience, and your strengths can be used to improve them. If you know what you are good at, you can better use it to your advantage.

 

To Highlight Marketing Holes or Weaknesses

Highlighting your weaknesses easily is a strength within itself and vital to running a successful business. Of course, business is never perfect; it is a roller coaster that requires constant evaluation and improvement to keep up the speed and stay on track. However, if you know exactly what to fix, you can develop a better plan that directs it straight to success.

 

To Optimize Your Company Mission and Values 

A valuable benefit of email marketing includes spreading brand awareness, authority, and credibility. Three factors are needed to convert your readers into loyal customers. First, through email auditing, you can keep this message more consistent and ensure you provide the value your readers expect while also ensuring your trust throughout the process. The more your readers trust you and value your authority, the more likely they are to make a purchase and become loyal followers.

 

These benefits show that you are likely to fail if you don’t perform an email marketing audit and are only wasting your time and effort by skipping over steps. Instead, you must continuously track your results and commit to improving and understanding your audience to successfully and fully optimize your email marketing campaign.

 

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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 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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Tips to Using E-mail to Work with Influencers

One of the best ways to contact influencers is through e-mail. Unfortunately, when it comes to content creation and content marketing, lines can often be blurred and disorganized due to all the information and different people required to run successfully. Here are a few tips for using e-mail to work with influencers and streamline the influencer marketing process.

 

Use and Create Templates

 

Don’t start over every single time you start a campaign. Instead, start using and creating templates for each type of action you take. Then, simply fill in the blanks to get it done much faster while not forgetting to include some information.

 

Make Goals and Intentions Clear

Email Marketing: What You Need to Make It All Work

When you communicate with anyone, remember that it’s your job as the sender of the message to ensure understanding by the receiver. To ensure that you do this, be very clear about your goals and intentions in each e-mail message you send. Even if it feels redundant, explain everything. E-mail doesn’t offer the ability of the reader to decipher your tone or body language, so clarity is a must.

 

Create Innovative E-mail Headlines

 

Creating subject lines or e-mail headlines takes practice and persistence. Instead of using the first one, you create, try creating 50 every single time you need a headline. Do it very quickly, within about 15 minutes, just writing down all the headlines that come to mind. This type of brainstorming will improve innovation and get more results.

 

Highlight Their Compensation

 

When you communicate with an influencer, make sure you highlight the compensation you’re giving them because that will help motivate them more. In addition, your campaign can be even more effective if you’re offering them affiliate marketing deals in addition to their flat influencer fee.

 

Keep it Personal

 

Don’t act too business-like. Influencers are all about building relationships, but, at the same time, you want to keep your e-mails and messages personal, so they don’t feel too spammy to the receiver. For example, mention something you like about them or point out a particular video or post they did to make them stand out to you.

 

As you can see, using e-mail can make the process of communication with different influencers easier.  Using e-mail to communicate with your influencers can ensure that organization and communication are clear before the campaign starts. It also streamlines the process and makes it easier to understand as it can be pretty tedious to outreach to many different influencers.

 

 

 

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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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The Keys to A Successful Influencer Marketing Budget

One of the first steps to running a successful influencer marketing campaign is to set up the right budget. However, a large budget does not translate to instant results or a high return on investment either. For influencer marketing to work, you don’t need an outrageous budget to get started. Instead, you need the right budget that includes specific key information depending on your goals; this will and should vary.

 

Here are the keys to creating a successful influencer marketing budget:

 

Understand Your End Goal

 

This is by far the most important step to your entire influencer marketing campaign. Without clearly defining your goals, you can’t know what materials you need or who you can hire for the project—leaving many costs unaccounted for.


Pick Your Influencer Campaign Strategy

 

Each influencer level comes with a different set of fees and expectations. Typically, the fewer followers you have as an influencer, the lower the rate.

 

The following are common set rates for each level of influencers for a single post on Instagram:

 

  • Nano – Influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers charge a rate of $10 to $100.
  • Micro – With 10,000 to 100,000 followers, they charge around $100 to $500.
  • Macro – They have 500,000 to 1 million followers and charge $5,000 to $10,000.
  • Mega – Over 1 million followers cost $10,000 and up.

 

These are just estimated ranges that many companies have reported. The numbers can still vary outside of these ranges due to their metrics compared to your specific campaign goals, what type of content they create, and the platforms they use. In addition, follower numbers do not automatically transfer into a positive return on investment. This means these numbers should just be used as a baseline or starting point.

 

Pick your Pricing Model

 

While many influencers will charge a set price, that doesn’t mean there are no other ways to do it. Here are some common pricing models to pick from:

 

  • Cost Per Engagement
  • Cost Per Acquisition
  • Cost Per Click
  • Cost Per Mentions
  • Set Compensation Package

 

It’s important to note that even if influencers charge a set price, you can use these payment models to determine if the return on investment is worth it. For example, if the influencer is charging 500 dollars for one post and your goal is to get at least 1,000 engagements, then the following formula can be used:

 

$500/1000 = 0.5 * 100 = 50%

 

For this example, your return on investment would be 50%. As long as the influencer can show supporting metrics or other information that the post will get that much engagement, this would be a great partnership and more than worth your money.

 

Determine Other Campaign Costs

 

Influencer compensation is not the only cost needed to run a campaign. Remember to highlight products used, travel expenses, tools, software, third-party services, and any other supporting material costs required.

 

As outlined above, your budget is determined and set by your campaign goal. Keep it specific and clear to easily determine the right costs and run a more successful campaign.

Define Your Influencer Marketing Goals

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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.