Tag: Marketing tools

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Four Tips to Creating an Effective Email Sequence

An email sequence is a set of emails sent to specific groups of subscribers or readers on your list. These sequences are either trigger-based or time-based. Trigger-based usually means particular sets of criteria such as demographics or behaviors that your subscribers perform will automatically send emails in the order you set up.

 

A few of the most common behaviors include their browsing behavior, paying customer or downloading your content. Time-based can be a certain number of days after a purchase, the subscriber’s birthday, or anything based on any amount of time passing. Triggering a thank you or welcome email right after opt-in or purchase is another email of time-based sequences. These criteria should be set depending on your niche and email marketing needs. However, the way you craft the material is vital to your overall success.

 

These tips will help you develop compelling email sequences:

 

Outline Your Purpose

First, you must know your goal, and in order to do that, you must know your audience, including the kinds of problems they are dealing with. Second, what is the overall purpose of sending and creating the email sequence? Don’t just create an email sequence because you know it is the best marketing strategy out there. It helps if you have a clear goal and understanding of the email sequence too.

 

Perfect Your Title and Subject Lines

Your titles are important to increasing your open rate. This metric allows you to keep track of how your content or emails perform in front of your subscribers. If your open rate is not what you want it to be, it is likely due to your titles or subject lines. Make sure they are relevant, short to the point, and have your most important keywords in the beginning for a few quick tips on creating the right email subject titles. While they may be short, you don’t want them to be boring or crowded with too much information to look like a spam email.

 

Always include a Call-To-Action

For every goal you set, there should be a separate call-to-action that helps you to achieve it. But, again, make sure it is easy to understand, complete and obvious to your reader.

 

Be Specific, Clear, and Educational

Keep each email straight to the point, and don’t make it too long. Always use your email as an opportunity to educate and provide value to your customer. The point is to exceed the expectations from the start to gain their trust and commitment. The more educational content you provide with accurate information that helps your subscribers, the more likely they will trust your authority and establish your credibility.

 

Be sure the time and effort you put into your email sequence are worth the investment. Follow these tips to craft an effective email sequence to see the return on investment you need and achieve more email marketing goals.

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The Importance of Email List Segmentation

Separating your email list subscribers into different segments of your audience is the process of dividing up your subscribers or customers into other flows or email sequences. When subscribers sign up to your email list, they will not receive the same emails as everyone else at the same time as they go along with the email campaign. Thus, segmentation allows you to better market and communicates to your new potential customers and readers.

 

Most lists are organized based on three different factors: demographics, geographics, and behavior. Depending on your niche and marketing goals, you will need to organize them differently. However, the most popular way to segment lists includes how they behave on your websites and with your emails.

 

Once they are opted-in to your campaign, readers are then divided based on how they interact. Do they open more often than others? Do they click-through links frequently? Then it would be good to put them on a different path than those who are less likely to open or click-through your emails. They likely don’t need an aggressive approach and are clearly interested in your products or information.

 

Reasons list segmentation is an important step of the email marketing process:

 

It Allows You to Send More Targeted Information

Most businesses will have more than one buyer’s persona, which means not every email you send needs to go to every lead or customer on your list. It also means you likely have more than one goal in mind when it comes to email marketing. Segmenting allows you to pick certain keywords or information in order to organize and better target them with different key pieces of content.

 

For example, readers who have bought your products are more likely to get content about the products they purchased or new products to try. While new subscribers who have not purchased a product will be reading content on why the products benefit their life and possibly information about you and your business or other emails to get to know them better to further convert them into paying customers.

 

To Increase Overall Conversions

List segmentation better targets your readers, which allows you to communicate more effectively. When you understand at what point of the buyers’ journey they are on, then you have a better chance at maximizing your opportunity.

 

To Improve Engagement and Reputation

Clear communication and understanding your audience are key to increasing your conversions and running a successful email campaign. Better communication provides more value to your customers, further building your reputation and improving your engagement—two important metrics for running and creating a sustainable business.

 

As you can see, the key to list segmentation is to ensure the right emails are being sent to the right people to achieve your email marketing goals better. If everyone receives the same emails and you ignore primary information about your target audience, you are likely not communicating to them effectively enough to produce results.

 

 

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Common Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

While email marketing may be the best way to engage and increase sales, you can easily make mistakes. The email marketing process requires preparation, review, and evaluation to keep it running smoothly and successfully. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you are doing, you can fall into some common poor habits that result in a poor return on investment.

 

The following are some of the most common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them:

 

Only Using Email to Make a Sale

If the only emails you send are promotional and full of sale links, you are already doing a disservice to yourself. No matter how many links you try to send, the value you provide will translate into real results. Use email to teach your readers something you want them to know instead, and even better, make sure it solves a common issue or problem for them. Then add other smaller promotional sequences throughout.

 

Ignoring Your Bounce Rate

Meaning the deliverability of your emails is likely poor as you are probably ignoring key steps to ensuring your subscribers get your emails. For example, using emails with your website works better than third-party addresses like Google and Microsoft. Using third-party addresses can easily signal spam warnings, while using your email address better verifies your authenticity.

 

Poor Goals and Understanding of Audience

Lastly, not taking the time to understand your goals and audience fully leads to poor quality content and communication within your email campaign. Email marketing is powerful because subscribers view it as more personal – providing you the opportunity to form a deeper connection and understanding through personalized and quality content.

 

Disregard of Subscriber Mediums

In other words, you are ignoring the device your readers use the most to read and engage with your content. This is crucial as not every email service provider or platform is optimized for mobile devices. However, smartphones are far more available to people than computers. Meaning most of your subscribers likely read your emails and other content on their phones. Therefore, you must ensure your content is optimized to view and click-through for mobile phones.

 

Poor Call-To-Actions or None at All

Every email should have a clear goal which means they should also have an easy-to-use and understand call-to-action that translates to achieving it. An email without a call-to-action is like a company without a business plan.

 

You must avoid these common mistakes if you want to see high conversations and a return on investment from your email marketing campaign. Lackluster call-to-actions, poor follow-up, nurturing, and understanding of your audience can all potentially affect your email marketing results.

 

 

 

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Email Funnel Red Flags to Take Notice Of

To perfect your email marketing funnels, you need to be aware of certain factors that hinder your success. Many red flags are obvious if you just know where to look. Thankfully these red flags have plenty of solutions to them as well.

 

Here are five common email funnel red flags to take notice of in order to see proper conversions:

 

Low Open Rate

While this is not a metric you usually want to use on its own, a low open rate at least indicates that your subscribers are not reading the content. Meaning your deliverability could also be low, the titles don’t spike their interest, or you are simply sending them at the wrong time.

 

However, a high open-rate will not always translate to success, so you should always track other metrics to measure your results more accurately—for example, a high open-rate with a low click-through rate.

 

High Open Rate with Low Click-Through Rate

This means you are on the right track as your readers are interested, but something about the product you are advertising is off. Maybe the price is too high, or it doesn’t actually solve their problem.

 

High Click-Through Rate with Low Conversions

Again, this can be associated with the same problem presented above. The readers are clearly enjoying the content as they click through; however, you cannot make the final conversion. This could indicate a disconnect in your landing page from your email. Your email had enough detail to persuade them to click on the landing page; however, the expectations were not set. Be sure you don’t have any misleading discounts and that your email and landing pages have similar expectations.

 

High Unsubscribe Rate

This can happen for a couple of common reasons. First, you are either marketing your opt-in copy or forms to the wrong people, sending out too many emails, or are developing copy that is not compelling enough or too spam-like for your audience.

 

A great way to solve this is to keep your sequences and segmentations short and direct. Don’t send emails too often. If you know your target audience well, including how you can help them, you can develop the right content, products, and services to prevent a high unsubscribe rate. Usually, unsubscribe rate is not a problem if you start with your buyer personas in mind.

 

Varying Unsubscribe Rates Per Sequence

Some email sequences may be too long, short, or seen as spam. Some customers may end up in the wrong sequence, too, leading to them unsubscribe. Meaning you should be sure most of your readers are in more than one sequence.

 

Keep these red flags in mind to know where to improve your email marketing content when a problem arises. Successful email marketing will always require consistent reviewing and updating.

 

 

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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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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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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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Seven Common Influencer Marketing Problems and How to Avoid Them

If you want to work with influencers to market your goods and services, you must be super familiar and aware of the rules, laws, and regulations surrounding this marketing method. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, someone else has already invented it, and it works great. All you need to do is get familiar with what the ins and outs are.

 

Here are the seven most common influencer marketing mistakes to avoid and what you should do to prevent them:

 

Not Understanding Your Target Audience

 

This leads to picking the wrong influencer, and choosing the wrong platform and social media channels.

 

Not Providing Enough Resources and Information

 

Don’t expect the influencer to do the job without the proper information. While they are great at what they do, they need solid information from you first to understand the expectations and goals for your business.

 

Remember, they are influencers because they marketed themselves as the product. Therefore, they don’t know anything about your business and what content needs to be created to get the conversions you are hoping for.

 

Thinking Too Short-Term

 

It takes work to find the right influencer and even more time to keep them accountable. Due to this, you should always think about forming long-term partnerships with your influencer. Over time, they can become even more of an asset as they become experts on your brand, products, or services. When you show influencers you truly mean business and value them as humans, they are more like to stay accountable and meet all your marketing requirements.

 

Prioritizing Conversions Over Quality Content

 

While conversions are what you want, you can’t expect that without creating good content. The right content and the influencer that actually fits well with that content make the engagement rate you need to be successful with the campaign.

 

Not Calculating and Keeping Track of Your ROI

what is return on investment

Return of investment can be tracked and should be during the entire campaign and from the very start. While it is not as easy to determine, like regular social media ads or other similar online marketing, it can be done.

Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics

 

When you only think about how many people are following someone rather than their level of engagement, it’s easy to get tricked into working with them without realizing it. Pay close attention to all the metrics that matter.

 

Ignoring Federal Trade Commission Guidelines

 

Ignoring the law is not the best way to ensure that you get what you want. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines and stick to them no matter what you feel about them.

 

There are legal requirements to follow before you can safely post influencer content. First, you must legally disclose whether or not a post is sponsored, for example, and whether or not links are monetized in order to keep consumers aware.

 

Ensure you read the information provided by the FTC guidelines and get to know them so that you don’t make these types of legal mistakes. Otherwise, working with influencers is a very profitable joy that you won’t regret doing.

 

 

 

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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.