Tag: email

How to Turn an Unsubscribe Back into a Subscribe

Once in a while you’ll have someone unsubscribe from your email list. In reality, you want to get some unsubscribes because that means your list is super focused and it might not be right for that particular person. However, the unsubscribe process is also another opportunity to refocus that person and better target your audience.

Follow the Law – By law you must offer an easy to use unsubscribe button. Don’t force them to re-enter their email addresses to unsubscribe. Just give them the button, and let them go without doing so grudgingly. However, you can remind them of why they joined your list at the same time by sending them to a special offer sales page when they click unsubscribe.

Keep It Simple – Don’t make it tricky to unsubscribe. Prepopulate the unsubscribe buttons but also offer the alternatives to the reader to choose different lists or information they may want that might be more accurate for them.

Ask Them Why They’re Leaving – Using the unsubscribe page as a way to find out why they want to unsubscribe can help you better focus your email messages and opt-in offers in the future. Plus, it can give the person unsubbing new insight into what you offer your lists and they may change their mind.

Offer Alternatives – On the unsubscribe page, don’t make them jump through hoops but do offer them some options such as lower frequency of email (such as a monthly option) and/or different newsletters they can sign up for, or other offers that you have that they may not know about.

Take It in Your Stride – It’s really not personal. If you can take the unsubscribe for what it is, a simple request not to get more email from the list they’ve subscribed to and not a personal attack on you, then you’ll be able to handle the unsubs better. Honestly, a clean list is better than a list full of inactive users, so some people are doing you a favor by unsubscribing.

Send High Quality Information – Stop unsubscribes before they start by providing high quality information that is very targeted toward your audience from the start. When someone subscribes to your list, let them know what to expect up front, then be sure to deliver what you promised.

Send a Free Parting Gift – When someone unsubs from your list, your autoresponder email will send them an unsubscribe confirmation email which is your chance to say goodbye. Within that you can offer them a parting gift which will then put them on a different list that might be more appropriate for them.

Ask Them to Reconsider – On the unsubscribe page you can also simply ask them straight out to reconsider unsubscribing. Offer them a gift if they stick around a little longer such as one more week or a month. Some people are only unsubscribing because they forgot why they signed up for your list. This is a chance to remind them.

You have to tread lightly when it comes to unsubscribing because you don’t want to make it really difficult and make them jump through hoops to finally get off your list. But, you do want to ensure that you remind your audience why they signed up for your list. Make it clear that you’re sorry they’re leaving, and finally ask them for another chance at pleasing them.

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Increase Conversion by Keeping Emails Simple

Email marketing is an effective way to market your products, services and information to your audience. But, it can be easy to confuse your readers to the point that they do not take action. If you want to improve conversions, consider the following.

Know Your Audience – The best thing you can do for your business is to understand your audience backwards and forwards. The more you know who you’re crafting emails for, the better you can word everything to get the response you want.

Craft Subject Lines That Create Curiosity – Your first line of defense is the subject line of your email. If your subject line doesn’t make the reader curious enough to open the email to read the rest, nothing else matters.

Create Attention-Grabbing Headlines – When someone opens an email, the headline is the first thing they will see after the subject line that enticed them to open the email in the first place. If this doesn’t grab their attention, they probably won’t continue reading.

Use Bulleted Information – Inside the email message, be sure to make the information easy to absorb. One way to do this is to use bulleted information and lists. People read online differently than they read a book. They read vertically instead of horizontally; therefore, make the information match where the eye goes.

Have One Focus per Email – Instead of giving too much information and many options for purchasing something, make your email focused on one item and one offer. You can always upsell and cross-sell at the point of checkout but for the purposes of the email, make the focus on one thing only.

Provide One Link per Email – Don’t overwhelm your audience with ten links to different items in your emails. Instead, provide one link for the focused information that you want to get across to your audience. One link gives them one thing to do.

Know Your Specific Call to Action – If you can identify the one thing you want your audience to do after reading your email then it will be easier for you to design the subject line, headline and email to match.

Keep It Short and Simple – Super long emails don’t translate well because most people just want to know what the point is and move on from the email. Take out extraneous words and get to the point in your emails for faster action.

Understanding that you can increase conversions by being more focused in each email that you send doesn’t mean you can’t promote more than one item in your email messages. However, focusing each message on one promotion will get you further than too many promotions in one email. The reason is that you avoid confusion and increase conversions by telling your audience about one offer at a time.

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What to Include in Your Email Newsletter?

Knowing what to put in your email newsletter is as important as creating one. They say that the money is in your list, but if you don’t send out regular messages you’ll miss out on the additional income that an email newsletter can generate. It’s important not to over think each newsletter that you send out. Keep them simple, not too long, and always point the reader to something else such as something to buy, share or do.

1. Tips and Tricks – It’s great to include a list of tips and tricks for your readers in your email newsletter. If you send out a daily newsletter, you could make once a week a list of ten tips or tricks to use that involves putting your services or products to their best use.

2. Special Offers – You don’t have to send out a special offer every newsletter but if once a month or so you offer your newsletter subscribers an offer that no one else is getting just for being a subscriber, you’ll make them feel special. People love the feeling of membership and exclusivity.

3. Engagement Opportunities – Give your newsletter subscribers an inside way to meet up with you, either through live meet-ups or online webinars. Having one webinar a quarter or more often is a great way to engage your newsletter subscribers. Google Hangouts is a great way to accomplish this. You can even offer Q&A’s.

4. Early Bird Notices – Tell your list subscribers about new products before you announce them to the world. Giving them a few days to purchase at a discounted “early bird” rate is a great thing to include in your email newsletters.

5. Feedback Questions – Using your email newsletter as a way to get feedback on potential new products or services is a great way to encourage engagement. You can do it via questionnaire or poll.

6. Testimonials – Including a section for customer testimonials is a great way to recognize your clients as well as to provide social proof to newsletter subscribers who have not purchased from you yet.

7. Share Buttons – Inviting your newsletter subscribers to share certain newsletters that don’t have exclusive material is a great way to improve your subscription rate, and will also make your current members feel included in your community.

8. Legal Notifications – Every newsletter needs to include all legal notifications relevant to anti-spam laws. If you go with the most stringent laws, you’ll be sure to cover all your bases.

9. Opt-Out Information – While this could be covered under legal notifications, it’s important that you include opt-out information that is easy to find in every single newsletter that you send out. Don’t be worried about subscribers unsubbing. It’s better to have a clean list of people who want to be there than a list full of people who resent getting your information.

Ensure that you include a variety of different things in your email newsletter that are designed to get a response and you won’t be disappointed in the results. In addition to the nine items above, never forget to include a call to action (CTA) in each newsletter that you send out. Without a CTA there is no point to the newsletter. So, be clear about that before you start.

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Subject Lines That Encourage Opening of Emails

You’ve finally got some subscribers to your email list, and now you want to start getting some interaction from your subscribers. You want them to read the information and answer your calls to action. But first, you have to get them to open the emails. All that starts with crafting subject lines that encourage opening of your email messages.

1. Pique Their Interest – Don’t give everything away in the subject line. Instead use the space to make them want to open the email and know more. Think about what they see when they get the email in their inbox and put the words in the right order to pique interest.

2. Tease Them – Email subject lines are a good way to bring humor and a fun personality to your email messages. Keeping your audience in mind, make your email subject lines evoke the emotions that your audience needs to open them.

3. Make Them Curious – The email subject line should make the reader curious enough to open it. If you know the audience you’re sending emails to well, and you should, it should not be difficult to craft curiosity-seeking email subject lines for them.

4. Don’t Be Too Clever – You don’t want to mislead your audience, so be careful about trying to be too clever with your email message subject lines. If they feel duped when they open the email, no matter how good your offer is, they’ll be unhappy.

5. Put Keywords First – Some people search their emails using various keywords; make it easy for them by including those keywords within the first three words of the email subject line. Plus, when the email comes in, the keyword will be immediately visible to them.

6. Personalize It – People respond very well to personalization in email messages, and that includes subject lines. If you can call out their name, or name their title, they’re going to be more likely to open the email message.

7. Avoid Filler Words – You have very little space in the email subject line. How long your subject line is will depend greatly on your audience. Test different lengths of subject lines to find out what works well with your audience, but the rule of thumb is 1 to 7 words or less than 130 characters.

8. Name Drop – A great place to name drop is in the subject line of an email. If you use a famous person’s name, or a person who your audience values, then all the better. You have to be careful doing this because you don’t want the person’s name you drop to be angry, so ensure that it’s all positive. It needs to be a win-win situation.

9. Focus on a Deadline – A time limit mentioned in the subject line will also entice your audience to open it. If you offer a special that expires in three days, say so in the subject line so that they know that they need to open now and not wait until later. Note: Make the deadline real to be most effective.

Creating subject lines that encourage opening of emails is something that you need to consider carefully based on your topic, your audience and the results you’re hoping to achieve through your email marketing messages.

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Ten Lead Nurturing Tips

A lead is someone who has in some way expressed interest in something you have to offer to sale. If you put everything in a funnel with the wide side up, it would look like this: Leads > Prospects > Customers. You’re going to have many more leads than prospects, and many more prospects than customers. When you get a lead your goal is to qualify them, turning them into a real prospect and then converting the prospect into a customer.

In order to do that, you need to nurture your leads from day one. There are many ways to do this. You can start with these ten most important ways to nurture leads and work from there.

1. Start with a Goal – Do you want to increase sales, educate prospects, get people to download your free trial, or do you want to accomplish something else? It’s important to know what your intentions are from the start so that you can design your lead nurturing campaign to fit in with the goal.

2. Edit, Edit, Edit – Every bit of content that you want to be consumed by your leads needs to be edited for grammar, clarity, and format. You want the information you send them free to represent the type of products and services you offer. If you make silly mistakes, they will notice and yes, they will judge you for it.

3. Outsource – If you are unsure about how to set up a lead nurturing campaign, seek out the help of a professional. There are many professionals that can take a look at your goals and help guide you through the process of what type of information you should push out to your leads.

4. Remember the Drip – Don’t send everything all at once to your leads. Instead, practice the drip system of sending just a little bit of information at a time. Tease them, heighten their desires, and make them want what you have to offer before you give it to them.

5. Consistency Wins the Day – Like with the drip, you need to send out messages and information to your leads on a regular and consistent basis. If someone signs up for your email list, they are expecting to get regular, if not daily messages from you. If you make them short, to the point, and informative, they’ll be happy to get the messages.

6. Use Your Blog – Don’t forget about your blog, too. While you will use your email list to send information out to leads, you can also use your blog, and use the blog update feature within your email marketing system to notify leads of new blog posts. Write some of your blog posts directly to leads as the audience.

7. Know the Buy Cycle – Every audience has a buy cycle according to the products and/or services that a seller is promoting. You should have information going out to leads at every stage of the buying cycle in order to qualify them and ultimately convert them.

8. Understand Your Audience – Nurturing a lead is different from talking to someone who has already purchased from you. Ensure that you separate leads from interested parties and from actual prospects or customers. In this way, you’ll be able to target your messages correctly for the audience.

9. Know Your Products – It should go without saying that you need to know your products and services backwards and forwards. Know how a product or service impacts your audience. Also, remember if you outsource some of this work you’ll need to help your contractors understand your products and services too.

10. Study Your Metrics – As they say, nothing is done without the paperwork. It’s very true about lead nurturing. If you want to be certain that what you’re doing is working, go by the numbers. Before you even start, determine what metrics you’ll study to determine success or failure.

When you embark on a lead nurturing campaign, slow and steady wins the race. Deliver informative and engaging information to your leads on a regular and consistent basis and over time you will convert very happy buyers.

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Types of Content You Can Send via Your Email List

Many people get stuck trying to figure out what type of content to send their subscribers via email. But, today there really is no limit to the form in which the email can be sent, so you are less limited by the types. You can send videos, text, beautiful HTML newsletters and more. The types of emails you should be sending via your email list include all of the below but this list is not exhaustive. You should be able to get some ideas, though.

1. Welcome Emails – You should always send a welcome email to explain to your audience what to expect from being on your email list. Tell them how often they’ll get messages from you, plus what type of messages they’ll get.

2. Thank You Emails – Whenever someone signs up, or you have a huge response to an offer, send a thank you to the entire list. It will make those who took you up on the offer feel great and make those who didn’t more curious about the offer.

3. ECourses – An email is a great way to send lessons about how to do something to your audience. You can make a series of emails that give tasks to them on things to do that ultimately leads them to a goal.

4. Promotional Emails – While you do not want every email you send to be promotional in nature, you do want to promote; that’s how you’re going to earn money. Use the other emails as a way to build up to a promotional email.

5. Announcements – If you have a new blog post, new video, new eCourse, new anything to offer your audience, or even some personal announcement to make about your life (when relevant), then you should send an announcement to your list.

6. Newsletters – Having a regular weekly or monthly newsletter is an important component to having a profitable email list. There are many different things you can include in a newsletter, such as a reminder of other emails, blog posts, round-ups of information and so forth. All of these will work very well in a newsletter.

7. Advice – If someone asks a question in person, in a coaching call, on a message board or email, sometimes you can turn it into a message to send out to your email list. Giving advice to everyone on your list about something will add a lot of value to the list members.

8. Educational – One of the things you should do for your list members is to educate them on your niche, which is something they’re interested in. Tell them about problems and solutions that would be of interest to them.

Sending a variety of types of emails via your email list, and in different forms, will keep your audience excited to open each email that you send to them. Pick a few of these types of emails to send to your audience. Test out how each one does in terms of getting opens, click-throughs, and results.

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14 Ways to Build Your Email Lists

Building an email list is crucial to the survival and advancement of your business. It doesn’t matter if you have an online business or a bricks and mortar business; email marketing is an exceedingly effective form of marketing and should never be overlooked. It is, in fact, one of the most effective forms of marketing that has ever existed. Here are fourteen ways to build your email list.

1. Create Value-Filled Content – While they won’t see the content until they subscribe and open the email, the content needs to be very well written, engaging, and relevant to the audience. You want them to love it so much that they keep opening and that they share your emails with their friends.

2. Make Emails Sharable with Social Icons – It’s easy to add social icons to your email messages now, so be sure to do that. Add that to your email at the bottom, but also add a CTA asking your readers to share the email.

3. Create Segmented Email Lists – The more focused each email list is, the more relevant the messages can be for the subscribers. By segmenting your lists when people make a purchase or click through to answer a CTA, you can make each email much more customized.

4. Create a Lead Magnet – Some sort of incentive is very helpful for getting people to want to give up their email address. However, you should be very careful to make the incentive specific to your target market, to avoid visitors who just want the freebie and have no intention of ever buying anything.

5. Create a Sign-Up on Facebook – Facebook is a great place to add an email sign-up form. You can create a CTA on Facebook easily, and people who will follow you on Facebook will likely want the information you have in your emails.

6. Host a Contest – Contests can be a great way to get more people to sign up for your email list, especially if you run an affiliate contest on a product or service that you’re offering. In addition, you can give people a chance to win one of your books or products if they sign up, share, follow, and like.

7. Create YouTube Videos – YouTube videos are a great way to attract more visitors. They have a lot of built-in viewers who search for things, so create short videos directed toward your audience.

8. Use Creative Twitter Welcomes – You can get software to send automatic welcome messages to people who follow you on Twitter, like SocialOomph. While people complain about them, they’re still effective. Although if you are able to send personal welcome messages by hiring a virtual assistant, please do.

Link to Social Oomph – https://www.socialoomph.com/

9. Conduct Interviews – Find people who need to interview experts in your niche and pitch yourself as a guest. Most of the time when you are a guest you’re expected to bring with you an offer to their audience. This offer can require an email address to receive it.

10. Host a Webinar – Webinars are on fire right now, and a great way to build an email list fast. Everyone who wants to attend the webinar has to sign up for your email list. People see personal webinars as valuable and are more willing to give up their email address for them.

11. Find Joint Venture Partners – Partner up with others to do a multi-person webinar, or host another type of event such as an in-person event. When each of you promote to your own lists, it helps build all your lists.

12. Publish a Book – A physical book or an eBook published via Kindle is a great way to get your name out there as an expert. The book can mention your email list and website too. You can even provide a special landing page for book buyers.

13. Speak Offline – Host or become a speaker at offline events. This works especially well if you do have a physical book to show to people. If you have a good talk, you can get people clamoring to sign up for your list.

14. Paid Promotions – Try using paid promotions on Facebook to collect email addresses, by giving away something free or requiring an email to watch all of a video.

Using these methods will build your email list. You should do all of these methods (although not all at one time) over the course of your business to help build your email list. Keep building the list – never stop. Because the larger your email list, and the more targeted it is, the more successful you’ll be.

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Nine Ways to Market Online via Email

Email marketing is one of the most important and effective forms of marketing to ever be invented. The conversion rate for appropriate email approaches four to seven percent over time. That’s because a new client needs to see a brand seven to eight times before they trust it enough to buy something. Email is the perfect way to do that.

1. Use the Right Software – There are many different types of email marketing software available but you need to read the fine print to be sure that you can do what you want to do with it. It’s safer to use a cloud-based service than one you use that is self-hosted, although those exist too. Both provide code for your subscription form.

2. Autoresponder Series – No matter what else you do when it comes to online marketing, when someone gets on your list be sure to send them something no less often than weekly. Less than that and they’re going to forget about you, and they might even think you’re spamming them because they forgot. Set up triggered emails in the service to go out on a regular basis.

3. ECourses – A great way to fill up your email marketing autoresponder is with an eCourse that delivers daily or weekly with information and assignments for your audience. This is not only a good way to teach them something but also a good way to suggest other products.

4. Easy Recurring Content – Autoresponders offer the ability to set up easy recurring content that goes out on a triggered basis, either by actually setting a date or by setting an interval.

5. ENewsletter – Some marketers use newsletters to send information to their audience. Newsletters are often larger and also available on the site in HTML so a subscriber can view them via email or on the site. A newsletter can go out monthly or more often. Be sure to tell your audience how often they’ll get the newsletter so they know what to expect.

6. Craft Effective Headlines – It’s very important that headlines and subject lines be specific, keyword rich, and something the audience will want to open and see. Don’t be tricky or too cheeky as people don’t click through unless they know what’s inside.

7. Personalize Email – Autoresponder technology allows you to personalize an email based on the information you’ve gathered from your audience. You can collect first name and email, and then you can send your email to, “Dear Sally,” instead of no one.

8. Use Double Opt-In – It’s really important to use a double opt-in procedure. This means that the person subscribes at your website, then they agree that they subscribed via their email. Using this method offers proof if it ever comes up that you are not sending SPAM.

9. Don’t Forget the CTA – When you send emails to anyone for any reason, you should include a call to action. It might be to share the newsletter with others, to like you on social media, to try out software you recommend or something else entirely.

You simply cannot have a good online marketing plan if you don’t involve yourself with email marketing. In fact, everything else you do marketing wise should all lead back to building your email list. A targeted email list will enable you to give yourself a raise whenever you want one.

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What Types of Free Gifts Can You Offer to Subscribers?

The freebie is a popular way to entice a new subscriber to offer up their information so that you can put them on your email list. It’s still a great way to get someone to sign up. The important thing about a freebie is that it should be useful, valuable and of the same quality as the things you sell to your audience.

If it’s a lesser value, they may not realize it and they will think this is an example of the type of work that you do and not buy your products or services. If you are serious about getting more clients, your freebie needs to be the example of what your audience expects. However, never make your free gift something that you have to produce separately for each person; that would be too difficult and take too long. You want it to ideally only cost you something to produce one time.

EBooks – This is a great gift to give away, especially if you use one you normally sell so that it has a perceived value to the visitor. If it’s something you normally sell on your website or elsewhere, then the visitor feels a lot of incentive to get the free item.

Software – If you create any type of downloadable tools, software, plugins, or apps or have permission through private label rights to use them as freebie giveaways and it’s something very useful for your audience, this is another really great free gift to give your subscribers. This works best if the freebie is something your audience can use in conjunction with your products or services.

Reports – A report is just a short eBook that is more focused on solving one problem, instead of an overall “how to” like a book would be. If you had a website about vegetarianism, you could for instance offer a free pantry check sheet, conversion or substitution chart for your readers to use.

Coupons – People do like getting discount coupons, so if you can offer your visitors a coupon code for signing up for your email list that is a great freebie to offer. Don’t discount your work too much, though, because that devalues what you do.

Videos – Offering a video lesson or videos of a live event as a freebie is a great way to repurpose videos that you’ve made. Just load them up to deliver to the people who sign up for your list.

Checklists – An awesome freebie to give your audience are checklists to use that you’ve tried and put together especially for them.

Charts – There are all sorts of charts you can provide your audience depending on your niche.

Bundles – You can put together a compilation of all of the above if you want to offer a really outstanding freebie to your list subscribers. This is a great way to give them an overall sampling of what you do well.

Getting people to opt in and subscribe to your list is an important part of making your online business or the online marketing of your offline business successful. The money is still in the email list, no matter what other channels exist for marketing your business. Get your audience on your list and you can give yourself a raise whenever you want to.

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Why Email List Segmentation Is Important

Consumers today are smart. They do their research before doing anything else. They know who your competition is, and they’re all too ready to jump ship and move to them if they have to. Any slight can seem like a big deal and the ease with which they can change course is increasing each day due to the global economy we live in. You have to compete in some way, and it cannot always be on price. If you compete on value instead, you can end up the top choice of your market every time.

* Helps Your Messages Become More Targeted – When you know that your list has already taken some action such as downloaded your lead magnet, or purchased a specific item, then you can focus on sending very specific emails to them that not only discuss the purchase they made, but also discuss the next steps they can take.

* You’ll Increase Sales – By sending more relevant messages, you’ll ensure that your list members feel special. This will then help develop that “know, like, trust” connection that is so important. Thus, you’ll increase sales.

* You’ll Increase Conversions – It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to make a sale, or get people to join a contest, or join you on social media. A more targeted list will mean more conversions all the way around.

* You’ll Avoid Marketing to Unresponsive People – Sometimes people initially join a list just to get a free thing you’re giving away. They have no intentions of acting further. So, if you move those who do act into another list, you can then market more aggressively to the unresponsive ones or even remove them from the list.

* Your Emails Will Be More Personalized – When you have a specific segmented list, whether it’s due to behavior or demographics, the messages can be much more specific. You can discuss the things they have done, or name something personal about the group they’re part of (women, men, moms, dads, etc…) and that makes them feel important and included.

* Subscribers Are Less Likely to Leave – People think they’re on the wrong list if they see marketing messages or educational messages about a product or solution they’ve already purchased. That makes them leave the list. In reality, you want them to leave, but to a new list that’s more appropriate.

* You’ll Improve Response Rate – When an email is more targeted due to segmentation, you’ll see a huge improvement in response rate for things you ask them to do, such as fill out a survey. The reason is that they feel as if the information is more directed to them and not just generic for everyone.

* Different Forms of Marketing Work for Different People – Another reason that segmentation works so well is that each type of person responds to different forms of marketing. You can determine this by their behavior. If you segment based on behavior, you’ll notice an enormous increase in ROI moving forward.

When you segment your list, you can send more personalized and relevant messages to the list members. This will cut down on unsubscribes, and you’ll see an increase in return on investment. Your autoresponder software has features that will help you segment lists for best results. As always, follow the laws regarding spam in your country.

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