Tag Archives: digital marketing

Taking the Relationship to the Next Level with Follow-up Messaging

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Let me ask you a question … Do your customers do everything you want them to do when you want them to do it?

If your clients are like my clients, the answer would be a resounding NO, not usually.

Just because we ask somebody to do something doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to do it – especially at the beginning stages in the relationship. That is why it is so important to use an email marketing system for follow-up messaging to build rapport and deepen the relationship with this new prospect, so they can feel comfortable making a small purchase from us.

Let’s step back and look at the entire process and where follow-up messaging comes in.

We have a user that hits our landing page… they like what they see so they decide to opt-in by giving us their name and email address.

Once they click the submit button two things happen;

  1. Their info gets sent to our email autoresponder.
  2. They get redirected to our thank you page.

On that thank you page we let them know a few different things ….

  1. That we received their info which creates a positive user experience.
  2. Their content will be delivered soon.
  3. Secondary action
    • relationship building – FOLLOW-UP MESSAGING
    • information gathering
    • sales generating

Once the new prospect makes that small purchase and finds out how great we are, the relationship changes.

It doesn’t matter how small that first purchase is, just getting somebody to write you a check or break out their wallet and put in their credit card numbers on your order form, turns that person from a prospect into a customer. We are 7X more likely to sell stuff to a customer than we are to a prospect.

The relationship building plays an extremely important part in the process.

  • Give great value with the lead magnet.
  • Build rapport and authority with our follow-up messaging.
  • Once they know us, like us and trust us, we make a well positioned offer that they’d be foolish to pass up.
  • Prospect turns into customer.
  • Later, rinse repeat.

We do that until our current staff is at capacity then we staff up.

That’s how businesses are built.

Now It’s Your Turn

Use the comments section below and tell me how your follow-up messaging has changed your relationships with prospects?

The Simple 3-Step Marketing Funnel

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When prospective customers visit your website, you obviously want to obtain their information so you can build a relationship with them and provide them additional information about your products or services in the future. This process is where they OPT-IN, and it actually needs three elements.

The 3 Elements of the Complete Opt-in Process are:

  1. Landing Page This is the 1st page users will see in the process. It will have a graphic of your lead magnet, a compelling headline, some benefit based bullets and of course – a place for people to enter their name and email address.
  2. Thank You Page This is the page that users are taken to as soon as they successfully enter their name and email address. This is a tragically underutilized page by most.
  3. Email Autoresponder  This is tool that has the ability to automatically send out email.

We just asked for some contact information so we need a place to store it. YES, you need an email autoresponder and here’s why. If you don’t have an email autoresponder, you will physically have to email your lead magnet and all the follow up to each person that requests your lead magnet. That would be a ridiculous waste of your time – it is extremely important that you sign up for an email autoresponder if you don’t already have one.

There are tons of options out there but the most popular ones are:

So here is what the entire process looks like when it’s all laid out, but let’s step through what happens in each phase of the process.

Step 1 -Your steady stream of perfect prospects hit your landing page and have two options – either they go away or they fill out the form.

  • If they go away … they got away and we’ll get them another day.
  • If they stay and fill out the form, 2 things can happen:
  1. If the person submits an error like a bad email address, or forgetting their name an error will appear on that page and ask them to fix it.
  2. If the data that was submitted is good – the web user will be automatically redirected to Step 2 – The Thank You Page.

This redirection from Landing page to thank you page happens almost instantaneously. I’m sure you all have seen this hundreds of times. At the same time that redirect is happening, the data from your landing page (name, email, etc) is ALSO being sent to your email autoresponder (Step 3).

Once somebody fills in your landing page form, they are redirected to the thank you page (usually to consume some more content) while at the same time their data is being sent to the email autoresponder.

Once the contact information is stored in your email autoresponder, you can then follow up with you prospects and hopefully turn them into customers eventually.

Now It’s Your Turn

Use the comments section below and tell me if you are using an autoresponder, or wasting your valuable time physically doing it yourself?

How to Attract Your Perfect Customers on Autopilot

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So whether you use infusionsoft, mailchimp, aweber or any of the 1000 other autoresponder software programs out there, the key is that we want to use a system that can do two things;

  1. Store contact data
  2. Automatically send out messages

Because there are so many different email platforms out there and they all use slightly different language, I want to talk about the basic functionality of the email system and come up with some common terminology to make sure were all on the same page.

Once you understand the process, then you can go to your respective software and perform the actions needed.

At its core, an email marketing system is really just a contact manager (like an address book or a rolodex if you still remember those) that was built to make it easy to send out emails.

You put names in and then you can send them email – pretty basic stuff.

There are two different types of email messages that most email marketing systems can send:

  1. Broadcasts
  2. Automated Messages

Broadcasts – these are messages that are created and sent out in real time like newsletters or holiday specials, etc. 

Automated Messages – these are messages that get created one time and then are automatically sent out based on specific criteria.

We’re going to be focusing on the automated messages because we don’t want to have to stop and send an email every time somebody opts-in to receive our lead magnet – it kind of defeats the purpose

So, for terminology we’re going to use the following:

Lead – this is the user that has opted in to our form.

List – this is the specific email list that was created for these users. Usually we will create a new list for each lead magnet so if you have multiple lead magnets, you will have multiple lists. The exception to the rule is infusionsoft, which uses a tagging structure. If you have questions about that let us know!

Message – this is an Automated email message that is sent out from your email system.

So let’s just start at the beginning and step through the process and see how the email marketing system plays a part.

The first part of making sure our client attraction systems can be evergreen (always working) is that we want our landing page software and our email autoresponder to be integrated (meaning they can talk to each other). So that whenever somebody fills out the form on our landing page, their name and email are automatically sent to your email autoresponder. This keeps us from having to manage the process. It can be running in the background while we focus our attention on other aspects of the business. Remember – the goal is to have a system that will attract clients any time of day.

The good news is – all landing page software programs will do this automatically with popular email systems – we just have to tell the landing page software, which list to insert the prospect into.

The steps of using an e-mail autoresponder are:

Step 1. List Creation

Go to our email autoresponder and create a list. Like I mentioned before, if you have multiple lead magnets you will likely have multiple lists so give the list a meaningful name because you will have to pick it out of a dropdown menu later.

Don’t use something like … Lead Magnet.

Instead Use: 5 Minute SEO Cheatsheet, 2015 Holiday Special or New Customer Free Evaluation.

Once you name your list you will have to put in some other information like:

  • sender name
  • sender email address
  • mailing address (needed to remain CAN-SPAM compliant)

Whatever the software asks for, you put it in and save it. BINGO, your list is created!

Now when you jump in to create your landing page, all you will have to do is select your new list in the integration settings. They’ve actually made it quite easy and if you have any questions at all on how to do this, all you need to do is visit the support center for your email marketing software and search for “create a new list” or something similar. I’m sure they will have videos showing you step by step how to do it.

Step 2. Create an Automated Message

Once that part is completed – the next thing you’ll need to do is create your first automated message.

  • In infusionsoft we’ll create a new campaign sequence
  • In Aweber you can either create a Legacy Follow Up Series
  • In Mailchimp you’ll create a workflow

All we want this first message to do is deliver the thing that your prospect just requested (your e-book, report, coupon, etc.) and try to encourage the user to actually consume the content.

It can literally be as simple as …

Hey Jim, 

Mike here from Black Dog Marketing. 

As promised, below is a link to the special report that you requested. This special report is all based on 13 years of personal experience in this space and this training method is guaranteed to deliver XYZ. Just click the link below to start your journey.

After you’ve have a chance to work with XYZ please let us know what you thought. I’d love to hear about your experience.

Talk soon, Mike

That’s it.

A few tips and tricks…

  1. Give your email lists specific names – once you have 5 or ten you’ll thank yourself.
  2. Don’t try to do too much in your first email.
  3. Always remember…Done > None.

As entrepreneurs, I know that we can sometimes tend to have a little perfectionism in us, but you have to fight it. Keep it simple, make sure the pieces are working together and then go back and refine over time.

Here are some links to three e-mail autoresponder software programs that I recommend:

Now It’s Your Turn

Use the comments section below and tell me if you use an e-mail autoresponder software?

Your Prospective Customer Has a Problem! An Irresistible Lead Magnet Can Solve It.

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The Law of Reciprocity basically states that if you do something nice for somebody, they are going to have a strong psychological urge to do something nice in return. In other words, if you scratch my back, I’m more likely to scratch yours back and repay the favor.

When you put a lead magnet in front of your perfect client, it is going to help them solve a problem they are having. You have made the first step – you have scratched their back first.

A LEAD MAGNET is any piece of valuable content, real or perceived, that we can give to a new prospect in exchange for their name and an e-mail address.

When people are searching online, they typically look for one of the two different things.

  1. Entertainment
  2. Looking to Solve a Problem

A lead magnet solves the problem they are having. It’s basically like walking up to someone in real life and helping them out of a sticky situation. It is an opportunity to flex your professional muscles and show this new prospect that you know your stuff, and from their perspective, they are loving you right now!

This makes the follow up conversation and eventual offer better received. It goes against what most people do online and this is how we stand out from the competition.

Why do we use Lead Magenets?

  1. To collect a name and e-mail address to continue conversations with our prospects even after they have left our sites.
  2. To qualify and segment leads so you can have different lead magnets for your different products and services you offer.
  3. To set up a sale down the road.

Now that you have helped a prospective customer out of a jam, chances are they will be more receptive to your follow up conversations. After all…they kinda owe you a little back scratch in return!

Now It’s Your Turn

Use the comments section below and tell me an example of a successful lead magnet you have offered and how it solved a problem your customer was having?

TRAFFIC: The Lifeblood of Your Marketing Funnel

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Chances are, you wouldn’t spend months planning an elaborate wedding with fancy decorations, a rockin’ band, 3-tier cake and enough food to feed a village – and not invite any guests. Sounds a little senseless, right?

It would be like crafting a genius marketing campaign for your business, and not introducing it to a crowd of prospective clients. Again, pointless…  

It doesn’t matter how good our marketing plans are built – if nobody sees them, they just aren’t going to be able to do what we need them to do.

Finding some awesome traffic sources is the solution to that dilemma.

Before we get started though…lets run through a quick definition of the term traffic to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Traffic is defined as: Any and all sources, both online and offline, that can be used to get YOUR MESSAGE in front of YOUR PERFECT CLIENT.

Here’s the thing that we need to get –

TRAFFIC IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF YOUR MARKETING FUNNEL

blood
We talk about the marketing funnel all the time but if this is your first experience with it…let me give you a quick Reader’s Digest breakdown.

A marketing funnel is just a graphical representation of our visitor’s journey through our marketing process – from a Prospect, to a Lead and hopefully all the way to a Customer.

The funnel has three stages in it and each stage represents a phase of the relationship we have with our customer.

Stage 1 – Introduction and Awareness

Stage 2 – Evaluation

Stage 3 – Conversion

Right now, we’re talking about traffic and putting our message in front of our perfect customer, so we’re really focused on the top section – Stage 1 Introduction and Awareness.

There are literally thousands of different traffic sources that we could use here, but who’s got time for that? We’re all busy professionals, incapable to doing them ALL (and I know there’s probably some of you that have done this, right? Trying to be on all the social media channels – and you end up going nuts trying to keep up.) We don’t want that – what we really want to do is find a couple of really awesome traffic sources and focus our time and energy there.

SO WHAT MAKES AN AWESOME TRAFFIC SOURCE?

There are actually 2 criteria for great traffic sources.

#1. Appropriate

We need to find the traffic sources that get us in front of our perfect clients – obvious!

#2. Reproducible

We need that traffic source to be reproducible. Meaning that we can go out to this traffic source anytime we want and get more traffic.

It is #2, the reproducibility of the traffic that allows us to scale our customer acquisition up and down as need be. This is what gives us the first of two major WINS in this type of system – CONTROL.

Now that you know why it is vital to focus on traffic when building your marketing funnel, it is time to start testing which sources work best for attracting your perfect client.

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN

Use the comments section below and tell me what traffic sources have worked best for your business and why?