Increasing Conversion: Why Email Marketing Still Works

Many marketers believe that social media and SMS (text messaging) have replaced email. But email marketing reaches people in ways that other marketing efforts can’t because:

Image of a young woman who is excited to receive an email

Does email still work for your target market?

  • Email marketing is more personal. You can segment your email subscribers based on demographics, past shopping behavior, and specified preferences. You can give email messages a personal touch (using the recipient’s name or sending them a birthday discount) that just isn’t possible with Facebook or Twitter.
  • Email marketing assumes a greater level of commitment and trust. People tend to guard their email addresses closely. They only give them out to people and companies they really want to hear from. And that means you have a greater opportunity to earn loyalty by providing valuable content.
  • Email marketing is a sure thing. You can be pretty sure your marketing message will reach the intended recipient. True, they may not read it or relegate it to a spam folder,  but for the most part an email is more likely to be seen than a Facebook message (which may or may not appear in the newsfeed) or a Tweet.
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Use Traffic Segmentation to Improve Your Conversion Rate

When you’re analyzing your website in Google Analytics, how do you choose which data to include? What makes a given metric useful or not useful? And at the end of the day, are your reports focused on outcomes and actionable recommendations?

Let’s face it. We’ve all created analytics reports that look like this:

Unique Visitors13,538
Total Conversions286
Total Revenue$11,154

 

Then we sit back and contemplate the data and wonder how to squeeze more conversions out of those 13,538 visitors.

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Landing Page Testing: First You Need A Strategy

What’s your game plan?

How many times have you read that you should be “ Testing your landing page headlines, call to action buttons, copy and images,” hundreds of times, thousands?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m firmly in the testing camp – but talking about testing tactics and techniques before you think about your strategy is putting the cart before the horse.

In order to create a landing page that reaches its goal of achieving high ROI and persuading the greatest number of buyers to act, you must create an optimization strategy that goes beyond tinkering with headlines or optimizing at the page level.

Landing page optimization objectives must begin with big-picture goals, which then filter down to drive optimization efforts at every level.

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4 Tips for Identifying Your Ideal Customer

You need to hit the bullseye when you target customers - The word Customers with a target in place of the letter O and an arrow making a direct hit

Would you know your ideal client if they walked through the door?

 

If your ideal customer came walking through your door, would you recognize her?

Ideal clients are a bit like the Holy Grail of marketing.

You can spend lots of time and resources searching for them, but they can be hard to find if you don’t know precisely what you’re looking for.

Creating an image of your ideal customer enables you to narrow your marketing efforts as you seek to reach those most likely to buy.

 1. Become a Specialist

If your target market is “everyone,” then you not only have a business model that will likely limp along or fail entirely, but you’ve also misunderstood the goal of marketing.

 Your marketing efforts don’t need to convince everyone that you’re the solution to their problems. They simply need to identify the people who need or want what you have and convince them. To do that, you must narrow your focus by becoming a specialist.

 Find a niche that hasn’t been filled and become the very best provider of that product or service.

 2. Do Your Homework

Do you know how your ideal customer looks, feels, and thinks?

  • What she reads
  • Where she shops
  • How much she makes
  • How old she is
  • What movies she likes
  • What music she listens to
  • What does she do in her spare time
  • What are her secret dreams
  • What’s her darkest secret
  • What does she love about her job or business
  • What keeps her up at night
  • Why is she looking for your type of business

Flesh out a picture of your ideal customer. Study the demographics and psychology of the people you are targeting in order to determine what motivates them and how you can best present your business in order to grab their attention.

 3. Write a Description

I’m taking an ad writing class from Howie Jacobson.   As part of the class, we had to create an avatar which we will use as we write our ad copy.

Once we’ve described our avatar, Howie is having us each write a diary entry from our avatar’s perspective – using their words – to describe the feelings and emotions compelling him  (or her) to start a search for our product/service.

 It’s a really interesting exercise, because it forced each of us  to take off our marketing hats and pretend to be our ideal client. To walk in their shoes, think like they might think, and then express it in a diary or journal entry sounds easy, but inhabiting your ideal client is hard work.

 You don’t necessarily need to write a journal or diary entry for your ideal client, however you should be able to write a very clear description – capturing both their external and internal selves.

 4. Create Different Personas

Remember that within your target audience, you will find a number of different buyer types, or personas. Take the demographic information you’ve identified and flesh it out using different psychological profiles in order to create a variety of customer personas. Then, use those personas to determine how you should present information on your website and in your ads.

Your ideal customer may be just out of reach. By taking these four steps to identify him or her, you can bring that customer within the scope of your marketing efforts, increasing conversion rates and earning the right to be heard.

Related Articles:  Target Market – Defining your Niche  

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8 Elements Worth Testing on Your Product Detail Pages

Your product pages are your website’s sales team. Just like any sales professional, the ability of your product pages to present your products, their benefits, features and desirability will have a substantial impact on your website’s sales numbers and ultimate success.

A robust testing program on your most active product pages will give you insights into your visitor’s behavior and preferences. Use these insights to more closely align your pages to your visitors needs and desires – thereby increasing your sales and profits.

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Is Your Sign-Up Form Invisible?

A dull, predicable form can become part of your website’s background. Your visitors may look right at it, but never actually “see” it. What visitors don’t see, they don’t complete.

Use these 5 examples to generate ideas and give your sign-up form a face lift.

1. Social Triggers Helps You Get Traffic and Sales Using Psychology

 

Social Triggers Sign-up Form

Source: www.SocialTriggers.com

  • Title – all lowercase type is interesting and different.  The offer (get updates and it’s free) is pretty common –  so nothing to make it stand out
  • Copy  – now we get into the interesting stuff –  learn how to use psychology to get traffic & sales – An interesting offer designed to tweak curiosity which will generate sign—ups.
  • Form fields –  just your email –  couldn’t be easier
  • Call to action –  Sign-up!  Clear what to do but no reinforcement of what’s in it for visitors. – Nice job with the testimonial which delivers social proof, does reinforce the feeling that the visitor is getting something special and will encourage sign-ups.
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Does Your Small Business Really Need a Website?

Little blue figure with the word "choices" It seems like a silly question to ask in today’s day and age, doesn’t it? But many small business people and independent professionals, such as insurance agents, wedding photographers, and even web designers, have started a website without even really knowing why.

When they started their respective businesses, they simply took it as another necessity–another item to check-off of the to-do list.

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Are You Losing Customers Because of these 5 Small Business Website Mistakes?

Mistake 1 – Failure to Quickly Identify Your Audience

Who is your target audience? When you know who you’re talking to, you can determine the best way to talk to and take care of them. When you immediately clarify who your website is for, you’re telling those ideal customers to pay attention. You’ve got something specifically for them.

Very few business owners do a better job of this than my colleague Kyle Hunt.

Marketing and Sales Problems Web Screen Shot

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