Tag: online marketing

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Six Instagram Influencer Marketing Tips

Nearly 90% of influencer marketing campaigns in 2020 were done using Instagram. Making it by far the most popular platform to utilize if you want to get the most out of your influencer marketing campaign as well.

 

Enhance your Instagram influencer marketing campaign with the following six tips:

 

Use The Instagram Business Profile

 

Set up your Instagram account using the business profile option. You want to start correctly on this platform because you will unlock many useful tools with the business platform. In addition, it is free of charge to you.

 

Take Advantage of Instagram Insights

 

There are tons of info available to you within Instagram insights. Of course, if you have an audience, you can learn a lot, but you can also ask the influencers that you work with to give you the information about their audience with insights to help you know if their audience is right or not for the promotion.

 

Develop Branded Hashtags

 

Don’t just pick any hashtag. Take your time figuring out the right hashtags based on the intention of your audience and what they want and need. Keep the hashtags short and sweet. Consider pulling on their emotional strings within the hashtag.

 

Encourage User-Generated Content

 

You want to create buzz for your brand by encouraging your fans and audience to talk about your brand. But you have to give them a reason to do that by hosting contests, collaborating with other influencers, and rewarding participation somehow. Ask the right questions of your audience, and you’ll get the ball rolling fast.

 

Post Daily and Often to Instagram Stories

 

Once you start your own Instagram page, you’ll want to share often by posting every single day at least once a day to your stories and your page. However, you do want to publish with intention. So consider what you wish the action for your audience to be as you make your plans.

 

Don’t Only Use Videos and Posts

 

When you post, you’ll want to use many different types of content, from videos to text, using many kinds of multimedia. Include posts, questions, polls, testimonials, behind-the-scenes action, and more. Then, mix it up to stay on brand by remembering your brand story and your intent with each publication.

 

Do Meaningful Giveaways

 

When you decide to do a giveaway, don’t just pick anything. Instead, make it really special by giving away something of enormous value to any of your customers and clients.

 

Running an influencer marketing campaign using Instagram stars is an excellent way to get the word out about your offers. You don’t need high popularity on Instagram to get an influencer to work with you. You just need to have a product or service that your and their audience wants to use to get started.

 

 

Why Influencer Marketing Works

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Affiliate Vs. Influencer Marketing: Key Differences to Know

While you will likely give your influencers an affiliate link to help them make money marketing your products and services, there are some differences between straight affiliate marketing and influencer marketing.

 

Let’s explore some key differences between affiliate and influencer marketing:

 

  • Costs – Most likely, it’s going to cost you slightly more to work with an influencer, at least initially. The main reason is that affiliate marketers do not charge anything up front, but influence marketers often make money both up front and per sale depending on the deal you make with them.

 

  • Compensation Models – You will pay your influencer a set fee according to their schedule to create the video or images or review for you. The cost depends on how many subscribers or followers they have, how much engagement they receive, and how motivated their audience is to follow them to purchase. You never pay affiliates anything unless they make a sale and how they make it is not usually your concern.

 

  • Marketing Goals – When you work with affiliates, you don’t involve yourself in their marketing or creation other than to provide the tools for them in your affiliate dashboard. Still, they promote when and how they want to within those guidelines. If you work with an influencer, it’s more likely that you’ll have more control over when they promote your products and services per your contract.

Are You Being Realistic About Your Goals?

  • Performance Tracking Metrics or KPIs – You probably don’t look at the stats of your affiliates as closely as you will your influencers. Mostly because you’re going to work with far fewer influencers over your business life than you will have affiliates, affiliate marketing is more hands-off.

 

  • FTC Guidelines Abidance – There are many guidelines for promoting products and services that you need to follow, and they all actually boil down to the same thing. Don’t lie, don’t mislead, and tell the truth. You may get away with an affiliate breaking a few rules against your TOS, but if an influencer you work with does it, it’s going to affect you more.

 

Both forms of marketing, affiliate, and influencer, can cross over. An influencer may ask for an affiliate link, and an affiliate who is doing an amazing job may actually be an influencer who found your product on their own. All types of marketing are essential to use, but the subtle differences need to be known.