7 Tips To Help You Sell More Online
When you sell products online, you must try to maximise conversions. This will yield better revenues, higher profit margins and a more successful business. Many businesses will concentrate on the traffic levels of your store. While this might work, it’s harder to increase traffic than it is to improve conversion ratios.
So, here are some of the top ways that you can sell more online without trying to raise traffic levels.
1. Improve Your Website’s Speed
For every second it takes your site or a page to load, you’ll lose 7% of your revenue. By the time it takes your site four seconds to load, you’ve lost a quarter of your potential revenue. This is often because customers are fickle. They want a fast site because they see this as professional and that you’re investing in your business.
Slow sites also suffer from poorer traffic levels. Therefore, reducing your website’s loading time can help you sell more through better conversions and more traffic.
2. Improve Website Design
Many small businesses who’ve been operating for a long time haven’t updated their website for a while. Yet an improved website design can help you convert more people. You should do A/B testing of pages to see what content converts people better.
In addition, you should ensure that the new website is mobile-friendly. This allows those using mobile devices to shop on your store.
3. Create More Content
Research has found that those who blog more frequently generate more leads. In fact, blogging at least once every other day can improve lead generation by up to 70%.
To make the most of your blogging, you should combine it with other digital marketing content like email marketing. At the end of the page, or as a pop-up, you should offer the visitor a chance to subscribe to your mailing list.
4. Subscribe More People To Your Mailing List
Your email marketing list is an ideal opportunity to sell more online. Research has found that email marketing is one of the top ways to sell more online. For every $1 you spend, you’re likely to get more than $38 back. It offers more returns for a much lower cost.
You should subscribe more people to your mailing list through several campaigns. This includes having competitions, lead magnets and pop-ups on your website/social media.
5. Create Urgency
One tactic that will help you sell more is to create urgency. This is when the customer is persuaded to make the purchase quickly for fear of missing out on something. There are several ways that you can create urgency on your website. The first way is to add a countdown timer to your site to tell people how long they’ve got until a sale goes offline.
Another way is to show when there is limited stock. You could also add elements such as telling people how many times a product has been bought in the past few hours.
6. Free Shipping Barriers
Customers love free shipping, but that doesn’t mean that all your orders need to have free shipping. Instead, you can actually charge for shipping unless the customers has more than a set order value in their basket. For instance, free shipping could be offered for orders over $50.
To make this more successful, you should consider adding a free shipping bar on your site. This is a progress bar that sits near the checkout or other location, that shows how much more customers need to add to their cart to get free shipping.
7. Social Login
You can also add social login to your website. Social login is when a customer can setup an account on your site, and log in, using a social media account. These are very popular because they save time and make it easier for the customer.
There are numerous apps that can help you with this and you can have it that customers can utilise one of many different social networks to help.
Conclusion
Selling more from your website is very important. You have to maximise sales in order to generate the best profits. Above are seven of the best ways you can improve conversions and therefore sell more on your website.
Have you tried any of the above tactics? What other ways can you think to improve sales on your website?
Let us know in the comments below.
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The Importance Of Sending Welcome Emails
When someone subscribes to your mailing list, you need to provide the right impression to your new contact. There are several factors to this. The first is to maintain the terms that you signed the subscriber up to (posting frequency, type of content, etc.). Another way to develop the best impression is to send a welcome email to your new subscriber.
What Is A Welcome Email?
A welcome email is the first email that a new subscriber receives after confirming their subscription to your list. There are many brands that send a message that just thanks the contact for subscribing, but this is a wasted opportunity to convert or engage the audience quickly.
Here are some of the ways that you can use a welcome email for your business.
1. Confirm Subscription
One really important reason why you should send a welcome email is to confirm that the person has successfully subscribed. This is a great idea because sometimes people don’t realise when the process is complete. This can be frustrating for the audience and they can lose interest in your brand.
Alternatively, they can forget completely about your brand. This can mean your messages are later sent to the spam folder because the subscriber believes you’ve subscribed them without their permission.
2. You Can Start The Sales Process
Email marketing is one of the best ways to sell online. For every $1 you spend, you’re likely to get back about $38. This excellent ROI makes it one of the best performing sales avenues but it still takes some time. According to statistics, it can take between five and twelve interactions with 80% of your leads to achieve a sale with them. The subscription process and welcome email can take two off that.
Plus, if you’ve recently sold to the customer and as part of the sales process they subscribed to your mailing list, this is the perfect time to get them to re-order or add to their order. You could cross sell or upsell products that are based on the original process.
3. You Can Make Purchasing An Urgent Matter
If you want to shorten the time between subscription and purchase, then you need to change the mentality of the audience. They are subscribing because they aren’t in a position to complete a purchase and want to think about it. However, you need to make them believe that they don’t have that long.
To do this you need to create some urgency.
There are a couple ways of doing this. The best, and most frequently used method, is to use a coupon within the content that is unique to the subscriber, can be used online once and within a set period of time. The period of time creates an urgency.
4. You Can Create Brand Ambassadors
More than 80% of audiences are more trusting of their peers than they are of your marketing content. You need to leverage that if you want to be successful. So, why not use the welcome emails as a way to get your audience to share your content and attract people to subscribe to your mailing list?
All that is required is a social media share button embedded into your welcome email campaign and encouragement for the reader to click on it. Most social media channels can be supported and used, with Facebook and Twitter being the top two issues.
Conclusion
Your welcome email is one of the most important emails you’ll send to new subscribers. It will not just confirm that they’ve subscribed, it’s also a chance for you to shorten the sales process to make your email marketing more profitable and rewarding. You can also extend your welcome email into a drip marketing series that can help you automate email marketing while achieving sales.
Do you have a welcome email? Do you utilise a welcome email?
Let us know in the comments.
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Starting A Business – The Best Email Marketing Tools To Consider
When starting a business, you’re going to want to get going with a mailing list as soon as possible. Repeat customers are an important part of your revenue stream. Without them, you can find customer acquisition costs higher and your profits lower.
Plus, the strain of finding loads of new customers can be challenging and stressful.
The added benefit of starting a mailing list is that you can build anticipation for products/services before you start. This can mean that as soon as you launch, you can start selling.
However, if you’re looking to start a business with a mailing list, you’re going to need some top email marketing tools. Here is a selection of the best tools on the market.
1. Email Marketing Software
Using sites like Fluttermail can help you start your business’ email marketing list. It gives you a place to collect your contacts, either manually, or via an additional software program, and send campaigns to your audience.
Email marketing services can help you navigate around several legal aspects. For instance, not breaking GDPR and anti-spam legislation across the world. They can also enable you to produce aesthetically pleasing designs that can help you convert your audience into buyers.
Finally, email marketing software is really good for statistics. They have the technology to properly track subscriber actions whether it’s by opening an email or clicking on a link.
2. Spreadsheet Software
While it might seem outdated to use spreadsheet software, it is a really useful tool. For one, it allows you to keep statistics within one simple page for campaigns over a period of time. In a spreadsheet you can start to manipulate the data to show trends within campaigns and with audiences which can help you plan your next series of campaigns.
While there are some manual operations with this, it can be a great way to push your business forward.
3. Signup Software
If you want to use email marketing to promote your website, services and products: you need to subscribe people to your marketing list. If you’re using a CMS, like WordPress or Shopify, then you can use a plugin to add this functionality to your website. Some plugins are free, but some of the best are premium and require you to pay either an up-front or subscription fee.
However, most tools can automatically add subscribers to your list. And you can segregate the lists to make them more effective in the long-term. Segregation can be based on the audience’s behaviour or demographics. But you need to match these to a certain type of customer and then send customised campaigns to different segregations.
4. Grammar Software
One of the biggest failures in marketing isn’t getting the message to the audience. It’s getting the message in a clear format to the audience. And the largest barrier to this is grammar and spelling. Many marketers, new business owners and others, send content out with simple grammatical errors in the content.
While the odd mistake is to be expected (no-one is perfect); that doesn’t mean you can relaxed about your content.
You should check all content to ensure that is free from errors. You can use grammar checkers like Scribens and Grammarly to check your work. Both have free options that can help. However, always double check their recommendations as they aren’t perfect solutions.
5. Image Software
Images (and videos) are an important aspect of marketing. Research has shown that conversions are higher when you use images and video in content. Therefore, ensure that you have image (video) editing software as part of your email marketing tool box.
You can then add special effects to images and videos to make them look more professional and improve the quality of the results.
Conclusion
When starting a new business, you’ll want to begin with building a mailing list. Ideally, this should be done first, before the launch, but even if you have launched, the same tools are needed. Use the list above to collect a tool box for your email marketing campaigns that will help you sell your products and services.
What tools do you use? Have we missed something off?
Let us know in the comments below.
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Email Campaign Branding – Best Ideas For 2020
As 2019 draws to a close, you can look forward to the next year with excitement and a desire to take your business to the next level. You’ll want email marketing to be part of that journey. Research has constantly shown that the ROI of any email campaign is going to be higher than other digital channels.
There are many reasons for this, but email being permissible marketing, and the ability for it to be segmented so it’s more relevant, are two key reasons for its success.
Of course, if you want the best success in the new year, then you need to brand your email campaigns. There are several advantages to this.
To start with, it helps to distinguish you from other brands. This can be important in very competitive markets. Another advantage is that you can set customer expectations that can be a very positive experience for them.
Finally, it allows you to focus your email marketing campaigns in one direction. This can make it quicker, and therefore more cost effective, when creating campaigns.
So, what are some of the best email campaign branding ideas for 2020?
1. Create A Learning Environment
An interesting option is to create a learning environment within your email campaigns. This can be based within your specific niche or to do with your products. Learning is an important stage for your business, as educated subscribers will make better informed decisions and you’re giving away free information, which will help build a strong identify and relationship with leads.
This also works because you can use video sharing sites like YouTube to host videos and use that as another marketing channel. Plus, you can reuse the videos in a drip marketing campaign later on or connected with a certain landing page.
2. Build A Campaign That Features Current Customers
Brand your campaign by featuring the work that some of your customers do, using your product/service. This is a way of building peer recommendations without actually allowing customers to directly talk to each other. You can tailor peer recommendations to current deals/offers or a recent event.
This is a great way to build sales as 81% of customers will trust the recommendations of a peer. In addition, it will allow you to create a lot of content without much work as the majority of content will be created by your customers.
3. Create A Common Dictionary
One of the biggest things that can cause problems with campaigns is when emails have different language used between them. For instance, calling a house a home in one email but a residential building in another. This can confuse audiences and can cause other branding issues.
So, sit down before the new year and come up with a branded dictionary that you can use in emails and staff can use with customers when engaging with them on social media, in-store or on the phone.
4. Tell Stories With Campaigns
Another branding option is to tell stories in your campaigns. This could be customer journeys, product development journeys or how staff are doing at your business. Stories can draw audiences into your emails and get them emotionally involved.
Look for ways to make your campaigns highly emotional. The more engaging they are for your audiences the higher your campaign retention will be. Also, customers will be more excited about seeing your campaigns land in their inbox.
Conclusion
As you see out 2019, think about how you can re-brand your email campaigns to make them perform much better in 2020. A great campaign can take your business to the next level. Just what branding will you use?
Will you be changing your email branding in 2020? What will you do to take your brand to the next level?
Let us know in the comments below.
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How To Add Your Blog Post To Your Email Campaign
Blogging is a very effective way to get potential customers to your website. Research has shown that regular publishing of content on your company blog can improve lead generation and revenue. However, many website owners rely on social media and SEO in order to generate traffic for blogs.
These aren’t the only two ways.
You can utilise your mailing list to bring in audiences to read your content. There are two reasons why this isn’t currently done.
The first is because blog writers generally discount blogs as a way to bring in people unfamiliar with the brand to introduce them and then convince them to subscribe to the mailing list. The second reason is that business owners often see email as a way to sell with audiences and to do little else.
The Number Of Touchpoints In A Sale
The problem with these two assumptions is that it ignores a fundamental rule about selling. That in 80% of cases, it takes between five and twelve interactions to make one sale. That is a lot of touchpoints to cover. Yet sending an email and reading a blog would actually count as two.
It also ignores the potential of blog posts to sell to customers. After all, if you’re using blogging to generate leads, you’ve already used them to sell to your audience.
Therefore, email marketing and blogging should be combined. But how can you do that? Here are some simple solutions that can help you integrate the two.
1. Blog Summary Email
Either by using an RSS feed, or by creating a manual summary, you can send audiences a list of recent blog posts. Within the email, contain a blog title, blog excerpt and a featured image for each blog post. Then create a link to each individual blog post.
This allows your audience to select which blogs they’re interested in and read those in full on your website. This is a simple way to build blog traffic, but you can sometimes find that busy individuals give your RSS feeds a low priority.
At the same time, if you don’t publish a lot of content, like two or three a week, then this methodology doesn’t really work. However, if you publish numerous articles per week, this is a great option for your brand.
2. Summary Within Other Emails
A common tactic is to include a ‘blog post plug’. This is like having a general email with a section of it dedicated to promoting your latest blog post. This is a simple and sometimes effective way to get people to read your content; but it comes with a couple of problems.
The first is that it makes your emails more cluttered. The second is that it can devalue your main message and people forget your messages as they read your content. Therefore, you might lose revenue for extra traffic.
3. Dedicated Emails
This is a common tactic where a blog post has its own email sent out. In the email you can sell what the blog post is about, why it is important to read and other critical information that the audience needs to know. A lot of companies use this tactic and some to great effect. But you’ve got to make sure that you’re publishing high quality articles that aren’t going to be duplicate content from other sources.
If you don’t have a lot of blog posts being published then this is the best option for you. It can also add a little personality to your marketing and get people to like your content more.
Conclusion
Email marketing and blogging should be connected more. By using different methods, you can market your blog to your subscribers, bring them back to your brand and sell them your value proposition. However, you must select the right strategy for your brand. This is based on your end-goals and the level of blogging you do.
Do you blog? How many blogs do you write per month?
Let us know in the comments below.
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Top Industries That Benefit From Email Marketing
Email marketing has been the most effective digital marketing platform for over a decade. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the return on investment is on average $38. However, while all businesses and industries can benefit from marketing via email, some industries will have better results.
The industries which do better aren’t always because their audience use email more. It could be that businesses in those industries are better at utilising email for promoting their businesses. Here are some of those businesses that are performing well, and why they are doing better.
1. The Hospitality Industry
When looking for hotels, travellers like to focus on prices and reviews. Those marketing hotels are using this to their advantage. If a user searches through hotels on a site and then doesn’t make a booking, the company will then send an email listing hotels with their prices and a link to reviews.
One example of a hospitality business that will do this is Airbnb. They use software that can send emails quickly when certain behaviours are triggered. This is when they’ve searched for a place to stay, but not made a booking.
If no booking is forthcoming on the first email, then the company will send another email offering alternatives to those in the first email.
This is a great example of not just email marketing, but also automation. The emails are also perfect, because, according to research, they give the audience exactly what they want: prices and reviews.
2. Retail
Ecommerce and other retailers are bound to be big players of email marketing. Sales can be directly linked to email marketing activity and therefore, organisations can track results. This often offers more justification for email marketing than other industries that cannot directly track sales to emails.
Retailers also benefit from the huge amounts of data they can collect and use in marketing. For instance, previous purchases can be tracked to specific groups of customers and then emails sent that promote related products.
They can also be used to remind customers to make purchases on a regular basis or on a repeat basis. The biggest winners in this industry are the large retailers who have more data available to them. They also have a vast audience to send emails to that allows them to multiply potential revenues from email campaigns.
However, smaller retailers are also seeing the benefits.
3. Wedding Industry
A surprising industry that is doing well with email marketing is the wedding industry. However, the industry has one massive benefit and that is time. Email marketing sales require trust between the company and the audience. Trust requires time to build up and thanks to the average engagement length of 14.5 months, the wedding industry has a lot of time on its side.
Many businesses in the wedding industry start by sending helpful tips. Then, once trust has been gained, they can start to sell products to audiences. Some of the best in the industry don’t sell their own products, but instead rather use their trust to sell products and collect affiliate payments.
Another advantage of this is that most of the work can be automated. Therefore, costs for the email marketing campaigns are limited and campaigns can be continuously improved upon.
4. Luxury Brands
Vivid storytelling and stunning photos are the perfect marketing tools for those selling luxury brands. And email is the perfect tool for projecting those two tools onto audiences.
Luxury brand sellers can send audiences photos of their products in use and display them in the wide environment to promote use and give context to how they will fit into the lifestyle of the audience.
As email marketing is also low cost, the ROI of email marketing for luxury brands is much higher.
Conclusion
Email marketing is great for all industries, but there are a few that are using it to great effect. The examples above can help you to refine your email campaigns for future success. Just because your business isn’t in one of those industries, it doesn’t mean that you can’t perform just as well.
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7 Reasons Why You Should Clean Your Email List Regularly
The value of your email list is only as good as its health. One of the most important, regular tasks of any email marketing campaign is to ensure that you perform maintenance on your mailing list. During maintenance, you should be removing any contacts that regularly bounce or aren’t responding to campaigns.
Here are seven reasons to make cleaning your mailing list a regular task.
1. It Saves Costs
The more people you have on your mailing list, the more it will cost you to run it. Normally this is not done on a per subscriber price. For instance, those with 999 subscribers on Fluttermail cost $17 per month, while those with 1001 subscribers cost $29 per month.
Research has found that about half of all subscribers are inactive. Therefore, a simple maintenance task can keep you in lower level pricinhg tiers.
2. It Improves Analysis
There are many reasons why subscribers become inactive. One reason might be because they’ve changed email addresses. If you have emails being sent to an inactive account, then you can’t analyse campaigns accurately because these dead accounts are skewing results.
Removing dead accounts allows you to focus on people who at least semi-regularly open your email campaigns.
3. Gives You Opportunities To Sell
While removing inactive subscribers is important, it shouldn’t be the first thing to do with subscribers who aren’t opening mail. Some people do read subject lines and go straight to your website to make a purchase. Therefore, when identifying those who aren’t responding any more, you should look to create a re-engagement campaign. Research has shown that inactive subscribers are worth about 32% of active subscribers.
This should encourage people to tell you they’re still interested in hearing from you. Those that don’t take any action can then be removed from your list.
4. Find Malicious Emails In Your Subscriber List
It’s important that you find those on your mailing list that are spam or malicious accounts. These email accounts can cause your business real harm. Email addresses within these categories should be removed without question.
Malicious email accounts can often be spotted manually because they don’t have corresponding names with email addresses or weird email addresses (i.e. XtrebleYU@domain.co.uk).
5. You Can Remove Subscribers That Have No Value To You
Sometimes people subscribe to your business’ mailing list who have no value to you. For instance, if you sell only in the US, Canada or another country and you get subscribers from the EU, Russia or another area, then you can remove those subscribers.
Those that aren’t of value to your organisation are just costing you money and skewing your statistics. They’re also getting irrelevant content which won’t help with your reputation.
6. Its Easier To Do It Regularly
When you have thousands of subscribers on your mailing list, if you only check them rarely, then it will take up a lot of your time. Instead, checks done on a regular basis take up less time and allow you to be more responsive to changes.
Regular checks can be scheduled every one to three months. It shouldn’t take any more than a few hours work, but it can save hundreds of dollars a year.
7. It’s Good For Compliance
There are lots of email marketing laws that protect consumers from illicit marketing emails. While subscribers might have signed up, that doesn’t always mean that they want to receive marketing content. They just don’t read the sign-up details properly. In addition, some subscribers might try to unsubscribe from your mailing list, but don’t complete the process.
By regularly scheduling in maintenance for your mailing list, you can remove people who have no interest in your marketing content and comply with legal requirements.
Conclusion
Maintaining your email marketing list is really important. It can help your business to be more effective in marketing, finances and compliance. Therefore, you should always be looking at doing maintenance every one to three months.
When was the last time you completed maintenance on your email list? When do you next plan to do this?
Let us know in the comments below.
Image via Pixabay.
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Making Email, Social And Content Marketing Work Together
Social media, content marketing and email marketing should support each other for you to get the best results.
Digital marketing is about attracting, convincing, and selling to customers. There are many ways to do this, but one thing has been clear for a number of years: that it takes more than one or two interactions to sell to the majority of customers.
In fact, research has shown that 80% of transactions are not made until the 5th and 12th interaction with a brand. This can be hard to achieve on one channel, which is why you need as many channels as possible, working together to create a sales funnel that creates those necessary interaction points as quickly as possible.
Why Use Multiple Platforms To Market Your Product
There are many who believe that one sales channel is their only way to achieve sales. However, this is a flawed system. If you used emails exclusively, you might need to send 12 emails to get them to buy. If you send one email per week, that’s 12 weeks to generate the sale, a long time, and that could mean you lose out to a competitor.
However, if you use a mix of platforms, you might catch the eye of the consumer at several points of the day. For instance, when they check in on Facebook and see some of your content (organically or paid) they are making an interaction.
When they are doing some research, with good SEO work, they might see some of your content on the subject and then read it: another interaction point. Therefore, when you next send an email, your potential customer isn’t just on interaction point one, they are on interaction point three or four.
However, if you don’t have these marketing channels aligned, you might be doing more harm than good to your marketing. Instead, you need to find a way to combine them into one campaign that’s mutually beneficial.
How To Combine Platforms Into A Single Campaign
The first step to combining platforms into a single campaign is to ensure that each platform is connected to the others. You don’t want each platform to just connect to another, you want to include as many platforms as you can from the other platforms.
So for instance, on a piece of web content, whether it’s a landing page, downloadable content, or blog post, you need to connect it to your social media accounts and mailing list. On your emails, you should direct them to a landing page and also social media profiles.
The challenge is on social media. Here, each piece of content should refer to just one link, e.g. a mailing list, or web content. But generally, with your social media campaigns, you should refer to all your other platforms equally.
You’ll then need to find a way to direct audiences to the next platform. This can be done with a good call-to-action. A good call-to-action should include:
• Urgency
• Definition of the action you want them to do.
• Time delay.
• An interesting offer and/or promise.
Finally, you need to consider how each piece of content is connected to the next. You want to take the customer on a journey where each interaction is another step in a single journey. So, if you sent an email about cooking a holiday meal, you could have call-to-action about the desserts or games for the festive meal. As long as it’s relevant and adds value for your customer, then you’ve got some good content. Here you have at least two interaction points.
Another good example of this would be offering people tips on social media about cooking, and linking that to a landing page where they can subscribe to a mailing list for ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. This scenario has at least three interaction points.
Therefore, by connecting marketing on all channels, you can cut down the time to sell from up to 12 weeks to under three weeks.
Conclusion
Selling online can often mean that you have as many as 12 interactions before your customer makes a purchase. This can take a long time if you only use one platform to sell. Instead, you need to combine social media, web content and email marketing campaigns to minimise the time it takes to sell to your customers.
Do you combine your marketing platforms? How do you ensure they are aligned?
Let us know in the comments below.
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5 Ways To Turn Emails Into Engaging Experiences
Make your emails more interactive with readers!
Emails are one of the best ways for you to create an experience for your audience that will sell. In fact, email has been found to be the best sales platform online for over a decade. Audiences trust emails when they’ve subscribed to a list, and they enable you to offer relevant content.
However, there are many missed opportunities when it comes to selling via emails; especially when audiences are looking for an engaging experience.
So how do you make more of your emails and engage you audience? Here are five techniques to try in your next campaign.
1. Start Designing Emails That People Want To Read
Before you start implementing new software or strategies with your email campaigns, you need to create effective emails, to begin with. There are several ways to do this without making to many changes to your campaigns.
These tactics include:
- Stop using jargon or inside-industry talk.
- Use engaging subject lines, preheader text and titles in the email.
- Use personalisation.
- Ditch the passive voice.
Use these tactics and you’ll start to see better open rates and readers spending a longer time on your emails and landing pages. You might see a higher click-through rate too.
2. Use Videos Within Your Email Campaigns
Videos are highly engaging and very memorable. They can also be attached to email marketing campaigns with ease. This makes them valuable, especially as 81% of people have been persuaded to make a purchase after watching an explainer video.
As emails are already highly effective at selling, adding video to the mix will increase their effectiveness. At the same time, you can improve your reach online by having the videos hosted on YouTube. Every subscriber who watches your video will then count towards the views count, and the more views you achieve, the more your video will be promoted.
Videos should be short, so try for under two minutes, and have a clear call to action at the end.
3. Use Polls, Surveys And Quizzes To Engage With Audiences
Users love polls, surveys and quizzes; especially if they’re not serious, a little bit fun, and don’t give too much information away. For instance, if you sell a range of dolls, you could have a fun quiz matching the audiences’ personality with the dolls’ characters.
Polls are also great, as people get rewarded by seeing their votes count for something. For example, you could offer subscribers the choice of what new flavour you will develop next, or what video you will create. These interactions help you to see what audiences are looking for and guide your content creation strategy.
4. Send Emails At The Right Time
You know what makes emails really engaging? Them being delivered at the best time for your audience. If they are in the mood for reading your email, and have the time, they will read your email. But if you send it at a time when they are too busy, it could be lost.
There are few ways to determine the best time for sending email campaigns other than A/B Testing. This should be done almost continuously. It doesn’t hurt to segregate your list either into different groups that read their emails at different times.
5. Keep It Short And Simple
Another really good way to get your emails to be engaged with, is to keep them short and simple. The less information you have on the email, and link to a landing page, the more click-throughs you are going to get.
However, you will only achieve a better click-through rate if your original premise has several elements including:
- An emotional need from the audience.
- A relevance to the audience.
- Ease of access to the audience.
- Something to intrigue them that the next step is different.
Conclusion
Email marketing is really effective and with a few tweaks you can boost their effectiveness and earn more revenue from your campaigns. The five simple tactics above can help you get that better engagement experience for your audience and make your campaigns generate great returns.
How do you make emails engaging? How do you determine what an engaging email is?
Let us know in the comments below.
Image supplied by Pixabay.
Read post 1 Comment. Tagged in: audience engagement, email marketing, Email Strategy
Making Non-Profit Emails More Effective
How to make your nonprofit emails more effective
Just because you are a non-profit, it doesn’t mean you can’t have an effective email campaign that grows awareness for your good cause and builds donations to help you continue with your activities.
Here are several ways to create better-performing emails for your non-profit.
1. Tell A Story
People love to hear about stories. That’s why reality television is so popular and how so many celebrities like the Kardashians have grown their brand – they’ve told a story about their lives. The same can be said about your brand and its good work.
You can tell the story of how you have helped people with your non-profit. Have you helped to educate people so they can start new jobs, support themselves, etc? These are fantastic real-life stories people like to read and interact with.
2. Tell Them Why You Need Donations
Research has consistently found that giving a reason for why you are making a request can improve positive results. Therefore, consider telling people what you are spending their donations on.
There are numerous ways you can do this but try not to be too general. Saying that you need donations to continue your good work is less likely to work than being specific about a project you are running.
For instance, you could state that you are looking to raise funds for new equipment. Name the equipment, what it is used for and how it will benefit your activities. This way, people can see how they are directly helping your non-profit.
3. Give Rewards For Interaction
Some people like to be recognised for their contribution to good causes. That doesn’t mean that they want a badge, pin, teddy, etc. for every donation they make. Sometimes recognition can be just as good. Therefore, consider ways that you can reward your patrons.
It might be something as simple as regular newsletters about a particular project, membership to special content created just for donators, or public recognition of their contribution. These can be simple to maintain.
Another thing to consider is that not all contributions are monetary. Some are based on spreading the word of your business. This can be just as rewarding for your business because if one person introduces three new donators to your non-profit, then you have three times as much towards your next project. Rewarding this person should be done, even they haven’t contributed funds themselves.
4. Test, Test And Test Again
Another important aspect of email marketing is A/B testing to ensure you are getting the most from your non-profit’s emails. Something as simple as the time of day you send emails can have a significant impact on the results.
You want to A/B test your email marketing campaigns to ensure you are getting the best results. In reality, testing is unlikely to ever stop as there are numerous tests that should be carried out such as:
- Time of sending.
- Colour of buttons.
- Language used.
- How you address subscribers.
- Subject lines, pre-header texts, etc.
5. Use Images And Videos
Text is harder and more time consuming for readers to digest. Therefore, text-only emails are going to have poorer results than those that include images and videos. Ensure you are always including something that is relevant to your email.
Videos can also be kept on YouTube or another video sharing website that can give you long-term benefits. Images can also be used on a website where they can contribute to your search engine rank.
Conclusion
Your non-profit needs to generate interest and donations to operate. Email marketing is a fantastic way to help with both of these, but they need to be effective. With the right words, images and other elements you can sustain your non-profit and continue to support good causes.
Do you operate a non-profit? What email marketing tips do you have?
Let us know in the comments below.
Image supplied by Pixabay.
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