Why Doesn’t Email Get the Respect it Deserves?

You can build your Brand using Landing Pages, Email, Social Media, Blogs and apps as part of your successful Digital Marketing Strategy.  Of the items mentioned, do you know what is the most overlooked and most important element of any digital marketing program?  The answer is EMAIL.

Email is the foundation upon which you build the success of every other facet of your Digital Marketing Strategy. 

Email Makes Your Digital Marketing Strategy Work

Email is the glue that ensures that your digital marketing works and I want you to understand why email is so important.  I also want to help with ideas to improve your email, increase your use of email and how to make it more engaging for the recipients.

Build Your Email List to Make Your Digital Marketing Succeed

It’s a huge mistake if you underestimate the value of Email as the core you build your Digital Marketing Strategy around.  Email marketing has consistently proven itself to be the one marketing avenue that brings in the highest conversions for companies all over the world.  

There is a reason companies are always pushing to get customer email addresses.  No matter the size of your business, you can benefit from building an email marketing list.  

The faster you do it, the sooner you will start seeing the results.

Email Builds Your Brand Visibility

Marketing emails give you Brand visibility, direct customer engagement, and click-through traffic which all works to give you greater sales. Even social media doesn’t have the Return On Investment that emails do.

Let’s look at some email marketing stats:

• Radicati’s 2016 – 2020 Email Statistics report stated that email will be used by 3 billion people by 2020.
• In 2018, 80% of business professionals in the United States stated that their email marketing drives their customer acquisition and retention
• eConsultancy reported that on average, companies are attributing 23% of their total sales to the email marketing channel, compared to 18% in 2013. This equates to a proportionate rise of 28% in just one year.

That’s a significant increase in sales from emails over a short period of time, and it proves that email is a more powerful tool than ever.

5 Quick Ways to Build Your Email List

You can quickly build your email list, choosing from many different methods.  The best approach is to incorporate one of the methods at a time so you can gauge how each helps build your successful Digital Marketing Strategy.  

Let’s discuss some of the most effective methods individually and learn how easy it is for you to embrace a Digital Marketing Strategy that will work to enhance your business reputation and your customer experience.

Build A Landing Page to Collect Email Addresses

If you have a website or product launching, you can create a simple landing page to begin building brand awareness.  Even better build several landing pages, give each Landing Page a unique domain and mission.

Learn How to Target Specific Visitors

This makes it possible to build your Email list quickly by targeting specific visitors.  Engage your visitors by placing an email form for people to be alerted the moment you launch, so they will be the first to know.

It Doesn’t Require Specific Skills to Succeed

Even if you lack the technical skills, using services like LeadPages you can have a Landing Page up in minutes, and begin engaging customers and receiving sign ups as soon as the Landing Page is live.

Your Landing Pages Must Load Quickly

The important thing about landing pages that many businesses don’t understand.  Your landing page needs to be fast!   I can’t believe how many leads are lost just because the landing page doesn’t load quickly.  

Use this free tool to diagnose your page speed and also ensure that you are properly hosting your website to avoid downtime issues.

Host A Webinar to Build Your Email List

Webinars are becoming more popular by the day, and it is no wonder.  They give people all the benefits of going to a conference lecture without ever having to leave their home.  It is convenient and a lot cheaper without the hotel and airfare.

A Live Presentation, Then it Lives on YouTube

Host a live webinar, and then put the recording on your website and on Youtube for people to view when it is convenient for them.  Not only is this a great content strategy, but it gives you an opportunity to create a sign up form that includes both email addresses and other important data.

Third Party Sites Make Webinar’s Easy to do

GoToMeeting and ClickMeeting make it easy to host, customize, record and invite people to your webinars.  The response to a single webinar can result in many emails from the live broadcast and later views of the archived webinar.

Offer Premium Content To Build Your Email List

Let’s say you are reading this post and you find it informative and interesting.  You finish reading and you find out there is a much more thorough, instructive version available.  

All you have to do is provide your email, then follow the confirmation link to this premium content.

Your Great Content Drives Your Email Acquisition

This is another great strategy for both content marketing and email acquisition. Usually referred to as content upgrading, it is guaranteed to get your reader’s attention, and their info.

Offer Emailed Incentives to Visitors

Before the initial release of Google+, Google invited a small number of users to sign up for information about the planned launch.  Those users invited their friends and followers to sign up to try Google+ before it’s official release.

Create Excitement Among Your Visitors

All the invites were sent using Email.  Google created a lot of excitement which made their Google+ launch successful.  

Give users the opportunity to send special offers to their friends if they provide their email.  The friend receives the offer, then provides their own email address, and passes it on.

Publish eBooks to Build Your List

eBooks provide a unique method to spread your content, enhance your reputation, build your brand, and gain momentum in your marketing campaign.  Offer your ebooks free for an email signup, and your email marketing list will grow very quickly.

Engage and Inform Visitors Building Their Trust

Your goal needs to be to engage and inform your visitors.  Ensure that you are creating well written ebooks with topics which visitors will find value in and enjoy reading.  

Don’t sacrifice quality and disappoint visitors with a poorly written product that only exists to build your marketing list.

Let’s Re-cap What’s Important to Email List Building

Building an email list is important to your business growth, and will lead to greater conversions than any other method available.  We have examined several effective techniques to build your email list.  

Don’t be Afraid to Fail

The most important thing to remember, don’t be afraid of failure.  Don’t be overly critical of your attempts to write your own content.  Edit and re-edit what you have written.  Then have someone else read it and ask them to edit too.  

Establish a Conversation With Your Visitors

Remember it’s not rocket science, you want to convey your message in an easy conversational manner that will engage and inform your readers.  Use the methods we have discussed in this article and tell the story your readers want to hear.

Are You Targeting the Wrong Audience?

What Is Your Target Audience?

With a market full of customers you need to determine the target audience for your business.  When you market your business, the biggest mistake you could make is thinking that your product is for everyone.  

Don’t shoot without aiming.  If you want to succeed and grow your business, you have to define who your ideal customers are with as much detail as possible.  Create stories that engage your visitors and get them to take action.  To do that you should follow our 6 steps to target your audience more effectively.

How Do You Find Your Target Audience?

Your online businesses faces a flow of irrelevant traffic on your websites.  Using the latest tools and techniques has helped many businesses drive traffic to their platforms if only for a  few seconds.  Conversion rates from that type of traffic is in most cases is negligible.

Using basic SEO skills coupled with a good content strategy you could get many random hits quickly.  But they would be of less value than a small number of hits from users who are actually looking for your services or product.  

Focus your time and energy into reaching out to those who are actually looking for what your business offers.

Define Your Target Audience

Defining the target audience for your business will assist your business strategies in many ways.  It saves your marketing energy that was previously being wasted to reach a larger but less interested audience.

The result is that you can generate the same revenue with less resources if you know what your target audience is looking for.

Who is Your Target Audience

Understand Your Target Audience

Your Target Audience in eCommerce is different from what you have in the real world.  You don’t have the same interactions with customers in eCommerce as you would at a physical store.  

Your judgment on a customers behavior and personality in a store provides information which is unavailable during an eCommerce encounter.  The challenge is to develop the same insights during an eCommerce transaction.

Imagine you have an online store for sportswear.  It’s important that you understand the lifestyle and behavior of people who follow sports on a regular basis.  

If you are a fan of what you’re selling in your store it would be easier to make assumptions about what your customer desires.  This removes the need for basic research as you already know what, how and when your customers want your product.

Picture Your Customer

As an online store for sportswear, you should have an understanding of your ecommerce target market. Make an individual profile for every user that visits your online store.  

Once determined who you have to focus on, your marketing decisions will become much easier.  You will be able to selectively target a group of similar customer profiles.

Customer Segmentation

With the customer profiles you created, you can categorize your ecommerce target audience.  Use demographical information, such as name, address, user behavior etc.  

Today’s practices suggest that businesses should make note of customers’ lifestyle, profession, and needs that are not being met.  This helps online businesses engage their visitors helping you to create your promotional messages.

Customer Feedback

Successful entrepreneurs have developed best business driving strategies while interacting with their customers.  It is common practice to record customer feedback immediately after completing business with them.  

Some online businesses take it a step further and offer a brief welcoming survey to new users, in order to learn their needs before the process begins.  Data generated from surveys and customer feedback can be graphically displayed to see where your ecommerce business stands and which segment can be improved.

In addition, due to regular communication with customers, you can also ask them to write reviews of your product or service on public forums.

Know Your Promoters

Once you have identified the target audience for your online store, the next step is to look after promoters of your brand.  Customer promoters are advocates of your business that help popularize your brand via word of mouth.  

It is general practice to leverage a satisfied chunk of your user base and educate it to build a strong referral base.  To accomplish this most companies offer incentives to their promoters.

Stalk Your Competitors

This is one of the most important details that businesses need to take care of.   It is common practice among industry giants to track their competitors and their strategies.  

This practice can be seen in everyday life.  Look at the example of a hand sanitizer that claims to wash away 99.9% of germs from your hands.  In response, a competitor launched an improved hand sanitizer that does the same in less time.  

Understand Your Competition

Similarly, online businesses need to be aware of products and services being used by their competitors. Sometimes, it is the same product or service, just the difference of strategy used in marketing to the right audience.

Therefore, keeping track of competitor’s audience is an efficient way of knowing what market should you take care of.

Evaluate Your Digital Efforts

Now that you know how to find your eCommerce target audience, it’s about time to evaluate your business plan and consider a few things.  Would your target market benefit from your products?  Would they truly benefit from it’s existence?  How can you trigger them to make the buying decision?

What Drives Your Customer’s Decision Making

Determine what drives the decision making among your potential customers and how often they can afford to do business with you?  Answering these questions should help you prepare your business strategy for your online businesses target audience.  

What’s Your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Don’t be Afraid, Digital Marketing Doesn’t Bite!  I Promise.

Digital Marketing Strategy, three words that strike fear into a lot of small business owners.  It may be difficult, deciding what needs to be done to successfully market your business in the digital age.  Let’s take a quick look at what should be part of your strategy. 

What does a Successful Digital Strategy Look Like?

Have you thought about what a successful Digital Marketing Strategy would be for your business?  Are you unsure of what you need to do to promote your business? 

Developing a Marketing Strategy that works for your business can be confusing since there are so many options available.  What will your effective digital marketing strategy look like?

What’s Your Best Digital Strategy?

Choose Your Best Social Strategy

We all understand the need for a website and what that entails.  Selecting the best Social Media choices to promote your business can be a more difficult decision.  What is right for your business, do you need to have a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?  Or are their other platforms better suited to spread your message. 

Ascend2 did a survey, with 190 marketing pro’s participating. Their report provides valuable data which you can use to determine your digital marketing strategy and budget. 

Let’s discuss a few of their findings to help you plan your digital marketing for the New Year.

Marketing Must be Tactically Effective

To have a Tactically Effective Digital Marketing Strategy, there are 10 areas which need to be addressed for success.  We will examine each area in the following paragraphs, read on to learn what it requires for you Digital Marketing Strategy.

Content Marketing Tops the Digital List

Which digital marketing tactics should you invest in?  Content marketing is the most successful tactic for a 58% majority of marketing professionals, while search engine optimization and email marketing follow with 50% and 47% respectively.

Content Marketing Attracts Prospects

Content marketing attracts prospects and transforms prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content.  Content marketing helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, and provides valuable information to consumers.  

It also creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales.  Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.

Content Marketing is Anticipating Needs

Unlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting an existing customer need for information, rather than creating demand for a new need.  As James O’Brien of Contently wrote on Mashable, “The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return.  Instead of the commercial, be the show.  Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.”  

Content marketing requires continuous delivery of large amounts of content, preferably within a content marketing strategy.  When businesses pursue content marketing, they focus on the needs of the prospect or customer.  

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s organic or unpaid results.  

Higher Rankings are Better

The earlier or higher ranked on the search results page, and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it should receive from the search engine’s users.  The objective is for these visitors to be converted into customers.    

Email Marketing is Huge

Email Marketing Defined

Every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.  It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness.  Marketing emails can be sent to a purchased lead list or a current customer database.

The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of developing a businesses relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.  

Opt-in Email Marketing

Opt-in email marketing, is often described as permission marketing, is advertising via email whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it.  A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm’s customers.  

Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products.  In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.

With a foundation of opted-in contact information stored in their database, marketers can send out promotional materials automatically using autoresponders which is also known as drip marketing.  

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service.   Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still popular, the term social media marketing is gaining in popular use.  

Most social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools, which enable companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns.   Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the public.

Establish Your Social Media Culture

Social media marketing includes the management of a marketing campaign, and the establishment of a firm’s desired social media “culture” and “tone.”  When using social media marketing, firms can allow customers to post user-generated content, known as “earned media”.  

Social Media is all about the conversations which you generate, the shares and likes are the gold you are looking for.

Landing Page Marketing

In online marketing a landing page, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online ad.  The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link.  

Landing pages are used for lead generation.  Actions that a visitor takes on a landing page is what determines an advertiser’s conversion rate.

Landing pages are often linked to social media, e-mail campaigns or search engine marketing campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements.  The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads.  

You Want Landing Page Sign-ups

If the goal is to obtain a lead, the landing page will include some method for the visitor to get into contact with the company, usually a phone number, or an inquiry form.  If a sale is required, the landing page will usually have a link for the visitor to click, which will then send them to a shopping cart or a checkout area.

By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and the conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement.

Super Charge your Marketing With Landing Pages

Landing Pages are the core of any successful Digital Marketing Strategy.  Your Digital Marketing Strategy goal is to engage more potential customers and build your Email List.  Relevant content is relevant to search queries and is the most important component of your Landing Pages. 

Your goal is to increase your traffic with Landing Pages, then engage those visitors and convince them to subscribe through your Opt-In Email form and build your Email List.   

Data Driven Marketing

Data driven marketing helps marketers gain insights and understand trends based on an analysis of the numbers.  Data-driven marketing refers to building on insights pulled from the analysis of big data, collected through consumer interactions and engagements, to form predictions about future behavior.

This is accomplished by understanding the data already present, data that can be acquired, and how to organize, analyze, and apply that data to better marketing efforts.  The intended goal is generally to enhance and personalize the customer experience.  Market research allows for a comprehensive study of preferences.

Analytics Tools Help Understand the Data

Analytic tools allow for targeted and personalized marketing to the customer.  Approaching an audience with a targeted campaign increases the chances of their conversion.  Marketers can now understand customer behavior and make informed decisions based on the data, thus allowing for a relevant targeting.

Data Personalization

Data Personalization also called customization consists of tailoring a service or a product to accommodate specific individuals.  This is sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals.  

Personalization Improves Satisfaction

A wide variety of organizations use personalization to improve customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics as well as for advertising.  Personalization is a key element in social media and recommender systems.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.

Digital marketing’s development since the 1990s and 2000s has changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing.  As digital platforms increasingly become part of marketing plans and everyday life they have gained acceptance.  

As more people use digital devices to shop online instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns are becoming more prevalent and efficient.

The Challenge is Content

Developing high-quality content, like original research, is the foundation of your content marketing.  SEO, email marketing, paid advertising, personalization, and more round out the rest of your digital marketing strategy.  As you plan for 2019, consider what content pieces you need to create to fuel your content marketing machine.

Your Strategic Priorities

Increase Prospects and Acquire Customers

Increasing sales prospects or leads, and acquiring more customers, will be top priorities for marketing professionals (64% and 55% respectively) in 2019.  This emphasizes the importance of marketing’s support of and alignment with the sales process.

Your businesses life and survival depend on embracing digital marketing and putting into practice the elements discussed here.  You can grow your business following the simple steps outlined here.  

Challenging Barriers to Success

Engaging Customers Online and Measuring Results

Engaging customers online and measuring digital marketing results are challenging barriers to success for 49% and 47% of marketing professionals respectively. The sales-related goal of increasing customer acquisition is also a barrier to success for marketers.

How Digital Marketing Effectiveness is Changing

The good news is the effectiveness of online tactics is increasing for an impressive total of 89% of marketing professionals.  So the investment that you make in digital marketing in 2019 is likely to provide results that you need to meet your goals.

Digital Marketing is not as Difficult as it Seems

It may seem like a daunting challenge to enact a Digital Marketing Strategy which will engage prospects and convert them into customers.  The one thing you need to remember, doing nothing is not an option.  

Take One Step at a Time

Enacting one step at a time, it is possible for anyone to embrace Digital Marketing and use it to build their reputation and their brand.  Start today, select the one facet which you feel the most comfortable with, and begin.  

Master that first step, continue and add another step to your Digital Marketing.  You’ll see results and reap the rewards from your efforts.