How To Create The Perfect Email Marketing Giveaway
Becoming a winner would could be a powerful lure for new subscribers.
An email marketing giveaway is a perfect way to grow your email marketing list and engage with potential customers. Bryan Harris found that in 10 days, by offering a decade’s free access to software, he was able to accumulate over 2,200 email marketing subscribers. In fact, his campaign received a new email subscriber every six and half minutes.
When you consider the value of every single one of those subscribers, you can certainly see how an email marketing giveaway could be a lucrative campaign.
So how do you create the perfect email marketing giveaway for your business? Here are some pointers for you to get started.
1. Offer The Perfect Gift
This is an important consideration. The right gift can attract the perfect customers to your business whereas if the gift is too generic (i.e. Amazon vouchers), then you might not attract the prospects you want. Research by Bluewire Media found that templates and tools led to the best open and click-through rates.
Consider whether or not the customer is asking “what is in it for me?” when they read your email. When it comes to resources, templates and tools, something that helps with integration, is far more useful to them than ebooks, interviews, brain teasers or photo albums. While your own audience might react slightly differently, this is a good starting point to find out what your audience wants.
2. Maximise Shock And Place A Value On The Giveaway
To ensure your reach peaks at its maximum potential, you need to consider how you are going to give it shock value. This means that when your audience sees the headline, they will stop and pay attention.
So consider how you can create a headline that will really shock your audience. For instance, if you are giving away a year’s membership that is worth $2,000 a year what do you think will work better:
“Win a Membership Package”
Or
“Win a year’s worth of membership worth $2,000”?
By making sure you list the value of your giveaway you can add shock value and help your prospects realise how valuable your giveaway is.
3. Create A Landing Page
If you want a successful giveaway, you need to ensure there is somewhere for your audience to go and find out more information, read the rules and signup. A landing page is a perfect platform and it also allows you to drive traffic to the site from your Google and other search engines.
Consider the essential design elements when it comes to developing your landing page, a good heading, sub-heading, text and a clear call to action button.
4. Promote Through All Channels
To extend the reach of your email marketing giveaway, utilise all the digital marketing channels you can to promote the giveaway and attract a larger audience. Social media, PPC and email, are perfect channels for gaining awareness of your giveaway.
It is also important to spread new of your giveaway by word of mouth. Get your audience to share the giveaway on their social profiles to attract more people. Another option is to email others in your field who might be willing to share your giveaway with their readers.
The more people that can share your giveaway, the more subscribers you will gain. You can encourage both by offering extra entries for those who share your giveaway.
Conclusion
An email marketing giveaway is a perfect tool for increasing the number of subscribers you have. The challenges for your campaign are getting the giveaway to be desired by your primary audience and promoting that giveaway to the right people. There are solutions to this, but they require hard work, research and above all else, perseverance.
Have you run an email marketing giveaway campaign? What were the results?
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Determining Why Prospects Sign Up To Your Newsletter
Why are people signing up to your email list?
When you have an online business it is important to generate an email marketing list. According to numerous research projects, they are one of the best online sellers. The reason for this is that emails can be personalised to the reader, rather than generic social media, blog, video or podcast content that is created for the general audience.
One of the ways that you can customise your email marketing newsletter is by inserting the name of the recipient into your email. Doing this for the subject line and at the top of the email when addressing the recipient has been proven to increase open rates, avoid spam filters and increase conversions.
However, this isn’t the only way to increase these metrics. There is another, more successful customisation that will help your business achieve more from its email marketing campaigns: sending relevant content that the customer wants. The problem that many businesses face is how do they learn what information new signups want to receive?
Learning The Motivation
It’s all about learning the motivation of your business’ latest prospects for signing-up. By tapping into their motivation not only will you gain further insight into what they are interested in, but also see at what stage of the purchasing path they are at. The more urgent their need, the more likely they are going to want to speak to your sales team or receive that highly promotional email.
To gauge their motivation, you first need to understand that there are two types of marketing motivation: need and want. A customer might want to have something, but that doesn’t mean they can have it. For instance, they might want to go on holiday to a five star hotel but they can only afford a budget equivalent.
In contrast, a need is an urgent motivation where customers have to get something otherwise it causes problems. For instance, a customer might need a locksmith to repair the lock on their door.
Motivation can often be determined by the pages of your website a customer is looking at. If they are viewing your product information pages only, then it is more likely a want motivation as there is no urgency in their actions. Alternatively, if they are looking at prices and delivery charges, etc – then there is likely a need for motivation.
Learning What They Need Or Want
Both need and want customers can be marketed to. The need customers are just those that are further down the sales funnel and require less effort to convert. However, even with a need prospect you should find out what they want. This can’t always be determined by where they’ve been on your site. Either you have too many visitors / not the right software to marry up signup details with visitor activities or you don’t have specific pages and they were looking at all your products.
So what you should do is find a way to generate more prospect knowledge. One way of doing this is to use topic specific downloadable content. By offering many different ebooks or whitepapers that range in topics on all your products, you can determine what the prospect would like by what they’ve downloaded. For instance, if they’ve downloaded the window installation document, you can be sure that they’re interested in new windows.
Research by HubSpot has found that the more downloadable content you have the greater your lead generation is. The results also seem to be exponential, so generating lots of this form of content is almost invaluable.
With this information, you can then create email marketing content that can target their specific interests. This helps reengage your audience and attract more of them to click through to your website and make a purchase.
Conclusion
Knowing why someone has signed up to your mailing list includes finding out why they have signed up, what they want to know more about and how urgent the demand is. Then you can produce tailored content for them and can decide how quickly you should move towards the sale before a competitor beats you to it.
How do you determine what the customer wants? Do you segregate your email marketing lists?
Let us know in the comments.
Take Action:
- Create at least 5 downloadable ebooks to capture email addresses.
- Segregate your email marketing list based on urgency of product need and desire.
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How To Optimize Your Subscription Forms
Signing new people up to your mailing list is an important task of your email list maintenance routine. Offering something of value to potential email contacts and including a sign up form on landing pages, have both proven to be highly effective.
By optimising your subscription forms, you can improve your business’ website conversion ratio and generate more leads. This should then lead to greater sales and the potential for business growth.
Here are several tips on how you can optimise your subscription forms and see better results:
1. Move Your Form
Many of your website visitors will not read all the page’s content. Most will abandon the page before they have to scroll down the page. So while your visitors may share your content or even move to another page; if you don’t have visitors completing the signup form, the page has failed.
Therefore, the first option is to move the form so that it is above the fold and more visible to everyone who lands on the page.
2. Headline
There are a number of different ways you can encourage individuals to complete your forms. Calls to action are extremely powerful at helping guide your visitors. To make these more effective; make the call to action the headline on the webpage.
3. The Number Of Fields
The shorter your signup form, the more conversions you will have. At the same time, you’ll decrease the value of your offer if you don’t request enough information. So when designing your subscription form, think carefully about what information you really need and what the consumer will expect you to request.
There are a couple of aspects which can also help you decide how long the form should be:
a. The offer’s position in the buying cycle: the further down the sales funnel the more information you’ll want. If you are requesting information towards the top of the funnel, you’ll only need a name and email. Later on in the sales process you might want more information like company size and revenue.
b. How many leads you generate: if you have too many leads to process, then you should use lengthen your forms to decrease the response but increase the value of each lead.
4. Required Fields
Not all your signup fields are likely to be required. Nor will all your visitors want to complete every field, especially if they are short on time. You can encourage those short on time by highlighting what fields they need to complete and which are optional.
One of the easiest ways to identify important fields is to include an asterisk (*) next to the tags of those required fields.
5. Don’t Use Submit
The button your visitors use to send their information to you is more than a submission button – it is an opportunity to further sell your offer and prevent form abandonment. So make this button another call to action to encourage the visitor to complete the offer and signup to your email list.
6. Privacy Policy
Ensure you are providing your visitors with a chance to read your privacy policy so they can be reassured that you have their best interests at heart. This not only helps convert visitors to email subscribers, but it can also help with your site’s search engine optimisation as Google considers this very important and will rank sites with these pages higher than those without.
Conclusion
Optimising your email subscription signup form is an important part of your maintenance task. It is also an essential task for generating leads, as the more leads you generate from your site, the more chances you have to sell. This will allow you to grow your business and gain a better return on your email marketing investment.
What tips do you have for your email sign up forms? What have you tried to improve the conversion rates?
Let us know in the comments.
Take Action:
- Using the tips above optimise your email sign up subscription pages.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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7 Small Businesses With Great Email Opt-In Areas On Their Website
Having a great email opt-in doesn’t need to be as creative as you would think. There are a number of businesses out there who have excellent opt-in areas on their websites.
It is not just those who do well in the field of newsletters who use great methods to sign up for regular contact. This list of companies covers a range of different organisations in various industries.
Here are just a few of the best:
1. Fairfax Media
Fairfax media is a publication subscription company with a number of different physical and digital publications. Their digital publications are particularly good as they describe exactly what you will receive with each edition and give an example of what it will look like.
Their sign up process is easy, just requiring a name and email address and by giving their visitors a taste of what they can expect – this really does
2. First Digital
An online marketing agency – this company provides significant value when signing up to their newsletter by offering subscribers a chance to download a number of reports. The reports include useful documents such as social media case studies and search engine marketing support.
There is also an option where you can receive these reports without signing up to the newsletter.
3. The Warehouse
As soon as you log onto their website you are given the choice to sign up to their newsletter in a pop-up window. This gives users instant access to free information, the latest offers on the site and products available.
The only information that is required is your email address – giving visitors a quick and easy way to sign-up.
4. Grab a Seat
This organisation promises its users the very cheapest in airline seats. Their newsletter continues on with this promise by providing a guarantee that by signing up to the newsletter you will receive the latest offers and even faster booking times.
Their form requires a lot of information in order to sign up – however there is an option to use a Facebook account to auto-fill the information.
5. All Blacks Shop
Even the great national sporting team has a fantastic newsletter sign up at their website. Visitors are promised exclusive benefits and access to competitions, where they can win free products should they subscribe. The information to sign up is also pretty simple with just the email required.
The newsletter sign up is also very obvious on the front of the page – giving the sporting team more chance of converting readers into subscribers.
6. Real Estate
Real estate offers a host of benefits to those who sign up to their newsletter – including the ability to:
- Save homes to a property list.
- Receive alerts when a home matching their criteria is added to the site.
- Make notes on the homes on the database.
- Save your favourite homes on the site.
- Rate and tag homes on the database.
This is in addition to receiving the best tips, the latest news and trends in the market. Their sign up is quite simple with users only have to enter in a name, email and password. They also give users the chance not to receive the newsletter and just to sign up to the site.
7. Barfoot and Thompson
One of the biggest real estate companies in New Zealand is another in the industry with a great sign up list. This company doesn’t offer the same benefits as ‘Real Estate’ but it does have an easier sign up with only an email and a password required.
This site promises to send you the latest new properties and alerts about open houses in the area.
Take Action:
- Have a look through the websites above and see what style would suit your business best.
- Implement a really good opt-in page for your newsletters.
Conclusion
There are a number of organisations that offer various different ways to sign up for their newsletters. Each one is tailored for their audience – giving valuable content in exchange for the visitor’s details. What you need to do is apply the same thought pattern to boost the conversion of visitors to subscribers.
What offers do you have on your subscription page?
Let us know in the comments below:
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7 New Ways to Add New Subscribers to Your Email List
Email marketers are great at marketing products and services (either their own or a client’s), but not so great when it comes to marketing their own email newsletters. Think of your e-newsletter as a product or a value-added freebie. Then market it accordingly.
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