How to Incorporate Email Automation into Your Business

The name of the game is “engagement”, and email automation has become an industry cornerstone for modern marketing mechanics. Building your audience can be difficult, let alone locating prospective consumers. Email automation nurtures relationships, and it increases platform revenue. Its best quality rests in its free-flowing approach to consumer outreach, keeping your resources free for bright horizons, new projects and great opportunities.

Generating a great email automation platform is easy, and the following aspects—when created with care—will create long-lasting email marketing solutions in little time.

Cornerstone One: Contact Base

Once you’ve obtained potent email automation software and have defined your company’s goals, it’s time to begin. Above all, every business is defined by its consumer base. Your contacts, here, will reflect your future consumers. Focus on placing each contact into a single platform.

Mobility isn’t possible without unified action, so importing all contacts is vital. Scour your other services, files, phonebooks and preexisting contacts. If your provider provides contact management tools, learn them first. Harnessing contact management tools will fortify your resource base. As with most projects, working top-down will supply mobility. Generate a healthy contact supply before anything else.

Cornerstone Two: Your Consumer Relations Management

B2B and B2C email marketing campaigns have changed. Where simple, bulk-content emails defined earlier email generations, modern approaches require intensive consumer relations management (CRM) solutions to remain effective. Combine your trigger-based, drip and bulk emails to coordinate with one another, and target key processes, like generating online forms and lead scoring.

Automated platforms thrive upon consumer outreach, and your solutions are only as potent as your ability to contact the right consumer at the right time. Channel your social, tracking and landing page resources to identify the most effective CRM solutions.

Cornerstone Three: Segmentation

Segmenting your consumer base from acquired data will aid most processes. When developing your email automation platform, consider acquired contact data. Additionally, take a look at previous campaign interactions, site activities, social data and other contact information data. Like CRM solutions, segmentation is only as effective as its fuel sources.

Effective segmentation can be used to send targeted campaigns, explore new contacts and effect automotive processes. Additionally, it can be used to create custom forms. These forms can target website dynamics and emergent consumer bases, empowering your campaign outside the email realm.

Cornerstone Four: Dynamic Content

Automated campaigns need to be reactive. Quick, accurate responses are generated from intensive behavioral and contact data. Once you’ve obtained a healthy supply, it’s time to trigger emails based upon contact interests, actions, behaviors and economic influences.

To do this, you’ll need to conduct split testing. Split testing engages different contact groups based upon clicks, opens and ROI. Studying your consumer base will lead to a larger consumer base, and dynamic content based upon RSS-based data, conditional atmospheres and even eCommerce platform health can create living, breathing email campaigns.

Cornerstone Five: Real-Time Insights

Similar, yet separate, from dynamic content is real-time consumer insight. As the world changes, the Internet reflects consumer interests, attitudes and market segment residence. Governing an effective email automation campaign requires flexible reactions, interactions and trend contact. Once you’ve fortified your email campaigns home base, you’ll need to take things to the field. You’ll need to access a variety of reporting options.

Stay informed. Examine ongoing trends, specific campaigns, shifting news resources and real-time activity streams. Sometimes, an automated email platform can’t do it all. In some cases, your ability to identify new directions from behavioral, interactive and contact-based data will determine your brand’s newest impact. In any realm, effective marketing relies upon consistent, yet particular data. Your campaign, when empowered with reliable insights, won’t only be effective. It’ll be unrivaled.

How to Incorporate Email Automation into Your Business

Five Tips For Selling to Knowledgeable Shoppers

Product knowledge needn’t limit marketing efforts. For many consumer knowledge enriches product and service involvement—heightening relationship scope while enabling new selling opportunities. Understandably, knowledge is an invaluable asset to retailers, online businesses and wide-reaching companies.

It’s difficult to sell to unknowledgeable consumers, but it’s also hard to gage an informed consumer’s wants, needs and limiting factors. To effectively sell to knowledgeable consumer spheres, consider the following tips:

Tip One: Answer Knowledge with Knowledge

Of course, the consumer’s knowledge dictates product sales, service information and capacity for new deals. While your consumer may know you, you might not know them. Understanding from both sides complements effective transactions, and a fully understood consumer is healthy for prolonged business relationships.

Sure, they might know your brand inside and out, but do you understand their motives, their purchasing patterns and even geo-specific behaviors? Knowledge increases options, and knowing your target consumer’s culture, community, lifestyle and related purchases is necessary to enhance feedback and connectivity.

Tip Two: Read the Competition

Informed consumers have felt out alternatives. When a buyer’s opportunity cost sense kicks in, they might opt for marginal cost decreases, slightly better benefits or even attractive packaging. The informed consumer isn’t necessarily nitpicking every product and service—but they’ve definitely scoped out related brands.

Know your competition, and understand why consumers might opt for greener pastures. Your marketing goals should be based upon product outreach, consumer groups and market slices, but your competitors are on the lookout. Consider your brand’s shining aspects, and capitalize its finer edges. Often, product marketing is a game of comparisons, and your target market makes numerous comparisons when informed of each product’s benefits.

Tip Three: Identify Your Niche

Related to industry information and defining competing benefits is defining your own niche. If you’re not marketing specialty or luxury products and services, defining—or creating—a niche will win over nervous buyers. Assuming your average consumer is well-endowed with product knowledge, industry foresight and market tactics, having incomparable benefits is a winning tactic.

If your brand’s benefits can’t be purchased elsewhere, the informed consumer will know. Flex your brand’s creative power, and specify its special qualities. Sure, every company has limitations, but niche benefits exist in many forms.

Tip Four: Avoid Sensationalism

Sensationalism is marked by global trends. Clothing styles, home décor options and even cultural amenities constantly change—and many companies unwittingly subscribe to “the next big thing”. Unfortunately, companies failing to be first are often last when new trends hit. It’s better to lead a pack than to follow.

Weigh your options, and develop a keen eye for global trends. If you want to shift your products to developing trends, do so carefully. Make careful adjustments, and consider losses associated with the trend’s disappearance. While some trends become solidified market needs, others are, simply, popular movements.

Tip Five: Develop After-Sales Services

The modern marketing world is defined by one-on-one, consumer-to-company relations. While social media and mobile technology increase, mass marketing has become relatively specific to singular relationships. Without customers, you’ll lose business. Consumer follow-up is important, and the informed consumer can become a powerful ally when invited to a prolonged relationship.

Customer retention yields best-possible profit scales in many industries, and answering queries, complaints and questions can solidify an otherwise doubtful consumer relationship. Remember: Your consumer is knowledgeable. Answering the questions they do have will increase your brand’s worth. It’ll increase its utility.

As your business grows, be adaptive. Consumer knowledge has increased greatly due to mass communications and Internet research possibilities. Don’t fear, however, as the consumer does want to be pleased. Maintaining your brand’s quality, integrity and positive industry impact can create a healthy, long-lasting purchasing environment.

Five Tips For Selling to Knowledgeable Shoppers

RocketResponder Resend Feature Will Boost Your Email Open Rates

When you send an email to your list of subscribers then one of two possible things will happen…it will either be opened or it won’t be.

Some of your list will decide to open and read your email and others won’t open it.

However it is not as cut and dried as that. Let’s take the group of people who did not open your email.

Here are some possible reasons for them not opening it:

– they looked at your subject line and decided it was not for them

– they looked at the subject line and thought it might interest them but they were too busy to open it

– they decided that they would open it when they had more time but it slipped their mind to do so

– they had so many emails that day that your email just got buried and was not seen

– they didn’t have time to check their emails at all when you sent it and it was not seen

These are just a few examples of things which can affect email open rates and you can probably think of more.

The interesting point is that all of the above groups of people (except those who made a conscious effort not to open the email) are potentially still interested in your message.

This means that if you send it again there is a good chance that at least some new people will open it second time round.

For example a response from your list could be: “Ah that’s the email I meant to look at but never got round to opening. I will take a look at it now before I forget again.”

These are the people who will most likely open it second time round and they are worth targeting.

With this in mind RocketResponder now allows you to give people a second bite at the cherry when it comes to opening your emails.

RocketResponder Resend allows your email to be sent a second time to those subscribers who failed to open it first time round.

When you compose your email simply check the resend email box, set how many days later you would like it sent again and RocketResponder will do the rest.

Once your chosen time interval is reached, then the original email is sent again to those of your subscribers who didn’t open it first time around.

We were getting an increase of around 30% in open rates when we tested the feature on our own lists. I have seen other reports about resending emails where anything from 20% to 50% and higher boosts to open rates were reported.

The bottom line is that it works and many of your subscribers will be thankful for the second chance to take a look at something they missed first time round.

 

RocketResponder Resend Feature Will Boost Your Email Open Rates

3 Ways to Use Remarketing to Make Your Online Sales Explode

Businesses both large and small have increased access to analytics and can gain more perspective on consumer behavior than ever before. The findings from this data helps organizations craft ads specifically targeted to prospects and converts.

Just a few years ago, only larger, data-centric organizations were able to invest in data mining, but small businesses across all industries now have access to the tracking tools necessary to take advantage of digital remarketing, according to Raj Beri, vice president of WanderWe. Jeni Garret, founder and CEO of The Woodhouse Day Spas states, “According to Google, 96 percent of consumers visit a website without completing the [buy] action, and remarketing helps to encourage those lost conversions to come back. It is great for small business owners because it has a lower cost per acquisition, so with the impression conversion rates, you are able to move people through your sales cycle faster and for a much lower cost.” The conversation does not need to end when prospects leave the site. Keep it going with some helpful tips.

1. Go Multi-channel.

The campaign should run across multiple channels. People online can jump from FaceBook to YouTube and more in less than a second. It is important to grab them where they are and this means incorporating a multichannel approach to target your audience. Most are on mobile devices and this is an important element to factor in when creating your strategy. The Millennial generation divides their attention across multiple channels and are have the largest purchasing power since the Baby boomers. Tarc Business Review reveals that 71% of Millennials use social media networks daily and spend over 5 hours daily on social media platforms. They are not spending all of that time on a single channel. Ads need to be where they are.

2. Segment Lists.

Tailor your remarketing efforts with segmentation. A segmented list allows business to respond to the drives of leads at different stages of the conversion process. While some need further information, others may have simply abandoned the cart. This person was just about ready to purchase and then left the site. Reengage them with a different ad that speaks to where they were.

3. Test and Adapt.

Run tests periodically. Even though there are expected standards that should be followed, there remains some guesswork involved in how it all applies to your audience. Phrasing, calls to action and a specific motivation within a subset of a target audience can alter the outcome of a campaign. Learn what works and appeals to different types of leads. Remarketing advertising can bring in more leads to your website but the website needs full functionality to keep their interest.

Regularly audit your website. Landing pages need to perform well with calls to action that have high conversion rates. If you notice a high bounce rate in an area, it’s time for some copywriting magic. The best ads in the world cannot help a website that is poorly constructed, lacks responsive design or has reduced functionality. Viewers don’t want to wait for pages to load or find out that internal links don’t work. They had better be able to view everything necessary on any gadget that allows for such. This oversight is a sign of being unresponsive to their needs and no wonder they leave for the competition. Analytics and A/B testing of ads and pages allow businesses to understand what messages call to their audience and develop ways to engage them along the different stages of the conversion process.

Go broad with the exposure of remarketing ads but go deep with your message and testing to hit a home run with your online sales.

3 Ways to Use Remarketing to Make Your Online Sales Explode

Best Strategies to Generate Leads Using a Blog

Is your company already publishing a blog? Are you looking to generate more leads? Now that you already have a consistent number of blogs being published each month, take advantage of that publicity. You can use your blog to generate a large number of leads simply by providing high-quality, informational, and engaging content. You can utilize the following strategies to help increase the number of leads you are getting from your blog and cash in!

Here are some strategies that will help you capture more leads using your blog traffic:

Add an Opt-in Form in Your Blog Pages

Your blog pages are filled with areas that you can use to add advertisements, calls to action, as well as mailing list opt-in forms. Places like your sidebar, header, footer, or at the end of each blog posts are excellent places to put in opt-in forms or ads.

Companies like Rocket Responder have added mailing list opt-in forms at the foot of their posts as well as in their sidebar. Other companies have chosen to use their sidebar and end of their posts to promote subscription to their newsletter and blog, as well as free trial sign up forms. While it seems like you’re exaggerating by putting your forms in so many places around your blog, but it actually gives visitors more opportunities to actually notice the forms. For example, if a visitor comes into your blog and reads one of your blog posts he or she may not even glance over at the sidebar or header, but if they were impressed with your content they will certainly notice a call to action at the end of the post.

The key thing to increasing your inbound leads is to put your opt-in form throughout your blog so that you can capture your reader’s attention and their contact information.

Create Free Downloadable Marketing Content

In order to get the most benefit out of your blog you will have to create additional marketing content. By creating free downloadable marketing content such as whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, and templates you can increase the number of leads you capture. You can promote your free content through your blog as well as through your social media. This will allow prospects to download your content in exchange for some information about them, such as name and email address, and information about their business. Once you have their information you can slowly build a relationship with the prospect until they convert into a customers.

In order for this strategy to be effective you will have to produce content that is relevant to your target customer base. You don’t just want to attract subscribers, you want to attract individuals who are actually interested in your products and services.

Offer Incentives for Those Who Share Your Content

What is better than using free content to increase your inbound leads? Getting new leads thanks to word of mouth from those first prospects! Some companies, offers a free ebook or gift card for anyone who refers five people that fill out a form for a digital copy. This allows them to make an additional 5 leads for every single lead that comes in for the free coloring book.

Consider what would incentivize your visitors to refer more leads and test your idea.

Use a HelloBar

A HelloBar is a code that you plug into your website which will then put a bright colored bar at the top of your website. On that bar you can add a call to action that links to a product or a service, or leads to a mailing list opt-in form. You can also use it to promote free content or push your newest promo.

Select a call to action that is relevant to your target prospect.

Add a Popup to Your Website

It may sound counterproductive to most, but the truth is, popup forms and calls to action draw the most attention. While you may think that popups will increase your bounce rate, it is actually quite the opposite. A study on bounce rate responses to popups done by Dan Zarrella, showed that bounce rates on his website did not increase when he added popups. However, when he removed the popups his subscription rates decreased significantly. Even a respectable blog like Social Media Examiner uses popups. Popups can be added various ways, such as through code or a plugin. Popups that offer free content and clearly tell visitors what they should do often receive the best conversion rates.

Try these lead generating strategies in your marketing plan and monitor closely to determine if they help increase your inbound leads.

Best Strategies to Generate Leads Using a Blog

The Beginner’s Guide to Email Automation

Imagine the nicest, friendliest, and helpful person you ever met is now in charge of sending and answering emails for you. This is the kind of person that is bright and cheerful, always helpful, never crabby, does not get tired, and is available 24 hours, seven days per week, for immediate responses.

This is the goal of excellent email automation.

Here are the top five tips for those new to email automation:

1. Use Personality

Just because the emails are automated does not mean they have to be cold or robotic. Look at these two different approaches of how to respond automatically to an email request ….

Response #1

Your email was received. Do not reply to this email because this email address is not monitored.

This is boring, robotic, and not good at all.

Response that is Better

Hi,

This is Carol. So nice to hear from you! I usually respond to emails personally within 24 hours after I have enough coffee, so please give me a bit of time to answer. In the meantime, please click this link to confirm you get my responses insert link here . It also has a discount coupon for your next order just as my way of saying thank you for contacting us.

I look forward to speaking with you,

Carol

Notice the difference? Both are auto-replies, but the second one has a personality. “Carol” may not even exist and may simply be an imaginary person. However, she is nice, friendly, and immediately encourages a business transaction. Then the email request may be routed to anyone who will read the request and make a response as Carol’s assistant.

2. Make Great Subject Lines

There are two reasons to use the subject line carefully. The first is that email-filtering systems will filter out stuff that is an obvious sales pitch and the email goes to the junk folder never to be read by anyone. The second reason is a great subject line makes it almost irresistible to open and read the email.

Here is an example:

Subject Line #1

Work at home. Make tons of MONEY!!!!!!

This subject line is easy for email filters to recognize as a spam.

Subject Line that is Better

I broke my ankle

Both emails are about working from home, but the second one has the reason in the subject line why someone would work from home and sounds much friendlier.

3. DO NOT USE ALL CAPS!!!!!!!!!

All caps is SHOUTING and excessive use of exclamation marks has the reverse of making it seem important, it reeks of high-pressure sales tactics and is a major turn off.

4. Opt-Out is the Law

Under the CAN-SPAM Act emails must have the following:

1. No false or misleading information in the email header


2. Subject line must be about the email


3. If the email is an ad, say so


4. Include a physical postal address


5. How to opt-out from receiving further messages


6. Honor opt-out choices quickly


7. Monitor third-parties who send emails for you

What this means is the header that says where the email comes from should say the correct company not something else. The subject line must relate to the email content as we gave in the example above about breaking an ankle, with the email saying that because of a broken ankle the person started working from home. A subject line of “Your daughter was raped” for an email about a car wash promotion would be illegal.

If the email is an ad, just put “this is an advertisement” somewhere. Make it easy for opt-out and take this one step further. We love to include these two opt-out options. 1) Click here to opt-out to immediately stop receiving further emails from us, and; 2) Click here to opt-out and tell us how stupid we are at the same time. Negative feedback is really helpful as well.

5. Work with a great company like RocketResponder for the best results in your email automation campaigns.

The Beginner’s Guide to Email Automation

Don’t Let Poor Customer Communication Kill Sales

Nothing is more critical to the success of your small business than customer satisfaction. Typically considered a key indicator of performance, customer satisfaction is simply the percentage of your total customers who report that your service meets or exceeds their expectations. If you’re in a competitive industry, customer satisfaction is what sets you apart.

In small businesses, effective communication serves as a vital component of your customer service program and ongoing customer satisfaction. Poor communication can lead to confused customers who don’t receive the service they expect. To make matters worse, that same poor communication can mean you never get the customer feedback to enable you to fix problems.

Poor communication can eventually kill your sales. To keep that from happening, focus on three key areas for your communication: print, broadcast and online; in-person and phone; and internal.

Print, broadcast and online

Your website, print advertisements, TV and radio ads, email marketing and social media presence should effectively communicate your brand promise. That is, they should make it clear the benefits your product or service offers to customers, how you’ll deliver those benefits, and what you’ll do if customers aren’t satisfied.

Poor communication in your advertising and marketing channels can lead to customer confusion about what to expect, notes the Houston Chronicle. For example, an unclear returns policy may lead to customers stuck with products they don’t want.

You can also commit poor communication by omission. After a sale, it’s critical to reach out to customers for feedback about your products or services. With this valuable information, you can make improvements and upgrades that help you increase sales.

For online customer service, superior communication skills are a must. Staff members who respond to customers in writing must be strong typists, and their grammar and spelling must be excellent. They also need the ability to effectively handle complaints and questions while remaining pleasant and professional.

In-person and on the phone

When customers and prospective customers call your business, make sure they aren’t trapped in select-a-number prison and can reach a live person. Once they’re talking with a human, they should receive courteous, prompt service.

Your company representatives should have strong customer service skills, including active listening and the ability to speak professionally and clearly. They should be empowered to solve problems up to a certain level; beyond that level, supervisors should be accessible to step in.

In-person customer service certainly can present challenges. Customers can be irate, unfair and even verbally abusive. Your customer service staff members must have thick skins and strong problem-solving skills. Understand that poor word-of-mouth can cost you, and be prepared to issue refunds sometimes even when the customer is at fault.

Internal communications

Often, customer service personnel feel that they’re between a rock and a hard place. They may have strong communication skills and work hard to make customers happy — but poor communication from management leaves them without the information they need to achieve customer satisfaction.

Make sure your staff are up to date on all policies and procedures, particularly those that affect customers. A company intranet should include all current information, and any changes should be highlighted through emails and memos posted in visible locations. Managers also should verbally reinforce important information with staff.

Your company can have the most customer-friendly policies possible, but if the information isn’t shared with your front-line people, it won’t matter. Make sure staff members are equipped with the information they need to provide the best possible customer service.

Don’t let poor customer communication damage your sales

As customer service increasingly moves online and goes mobile, communication is more important than ever. Take steps to ensure that online, in print, via broadcast and in person, you clearly spell out your brand promise — and follow through.

Don’t Let Poor Customer Communication Kill Sales