Posts Tagged ‘List Building’

Meat and Potatoes for Your Affiliate Diet

May 9th, 2010

Think of banner ads as the spice in your affiliate diet. Sprinkle them around, but for a heartier helping of sales, you’ll need something more solid! Learn to give your visitors longer, more descriptive pre-sales text. Revamp your affiliate advertising using these simple steps:

  1. Pull the Reader in
  2. Introduce the Product
  3. Explain the Product’s Significance
  4. Tell the Reader to Make a Purchase

Pull the Reader in

To convince your audience that your text is worth reading, make your first sentence or two very interesting. Make a bold statement, say something seemingly ridiculous, or appeal to your prospect’s emotional side. Then, tie this grabber in with the rest of your copy.

Introduce the Product

What is the product you’re advertising? What does it do? Directly after your grabber, give a compact explanation of your product. Keep this explanation short, while still being very clear. This should still be a very short section of your text.

Explain the Product’s Significance

What will it do for me?

By writing your own copy, you can directly target your unique audience. Make the most of this opportunity! Clearly explain how your readers will benefit from this product.

No one knows your audience like you do. Suggest a variety of product uses just for them, and give examples. This is the time for details – make this section long and rich.

Tell the Reader to Make a Purchase

You’ve come so far – you’ve laid out exactly what the product is and how it will help your unique audience. Now, seal the deal – tell your readers to purchase the product! Include your affiliate link in this section.

This step may sound strange, but it’s necessary. Often, people hear about a product and are genuinely interested, but fail to actually make a purchase. A clear call to a simple action cuts down on buyer ambivalence. Don’t be pushy – just change your verb tenses to the imperative. Instead of:

“If you think that you fit this profile, you might want to think about buying this product.”

Say: “Click here to order an account today.”

Drive Sales – Use Long Copy

If you don’t feel ready to write long copy yourself, ask your affiliate program manager for help! Many companies release well-written articles by respected authors that you can reprint free of charge.

The novelty of the Web is wearing off. People online now are busy. Surfers won’t make a purchase unless you make a great case for what they’ll get out of it. And you’re not going to do that with just a banner ad.

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=-> Increase your sales using these types of methods, to get started you need a Aweber account.

Creating Your First Email List

May 8th, 2010

It may have dawned on you that creating an email list is a super idea.

Guess what? Your right, it is a super idea.

Why?

Because it makes money, plain & simple.


Can You Have More Sales, Too?

Helping over 75,000 businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber’s opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.

Take a Free Test Drive today!

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Building your first email address list is very easy and it will provide a dramatic sales boost for your business.
I could talk all day about the benefits of building and email list, but I’m not.
What you need to do is add your name and email address in the box above and all your questions will be answered.

Email Newsletter Open Rates

May 8th, 2010

Posted by Justin Premick of Aweber

Think you know the best day and time to send your email newsletter?

Ever wonder if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do?

Convinced your open rate is too low (or amazingly high)?

Some recent statistics pulled from all AWeber users may help you answer these questions:

What Kind of Open Rates Are People Getting?

If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.

Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:

If it goes up over a short period of time, more people are probably reading
If it falls over a short period of time, it’s almost certain fewer people are reading.

Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).

So, here goes…

Average Open Rate Last Month: 13.6%

When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?

You’ll often hear (at least, I often hear) that Tuesday is the optimal day to send, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.

Do the numbers back up that theory? Let’s see.

The breakdown of open rates by day of the week:

Monday
13.67%
Tuesday
13.21%
Wednesday
14.07%
Thursday
14.52%
Friday
13.25%
Saturday
12.09%
Sunday
13.26%

Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by open rates.

(While we’re breaking assumptions, I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time — email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.)

Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?

In a word: No.

Don’t break with your readers’ expectations just to try to follow the latest day of the week stats. You might actually reduce your open rate by doing so.

In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.

I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately.

Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.

Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

“It’s So Busy, Nobody Goes There Anymore”

To get at the other reason for not shifting your sending based on these stats, let’s paraphrase Yogi Berra (see above).

If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.

One possible reason for Thursday’s success last month may be that it wasn’t as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email:

Percentage of Newsletters Sent by Day
Monday
16.0%
Tuesday
17.7%
Wednesday
16.9%
Thursday
16.6%
Friday
15.2%
Saturday
8.8%
Sunday
8.8%

Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers’ inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences’ undivided attention.

My main point in showing these is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your audience.

Some Inspiration… And Some Help

Are you getting better open rates than this?

If so, GREAT! Give yourself a pat on the back…

…but don’t get complacent. Open rates aren’t the be-all, end-all of email metrics. They don’t guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Plus, there’s always room for improvement, right?

Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates:

Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email programs will display images from senders who are in the recipient’s contact list.
If you are putting pictures in your emails, use the ALT text for those images to pique readers’ interest in what the picture is, so that they enable images. Or, just directly ask readers to turn on images!
Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.

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=-> Learn how to setup your own email list, Increase your sales using these methods, to get started you need a Aweber account.

Do Your Customers Forget About You?

May 8th, 2010

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

  • The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
  • List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
  • List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

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=-> Increase your sales using these types of methods, to get started you need a Aweber account.

Holiday Action Saves a Sour Shopping Season

May 8th, 2010

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Usually, U.S. retailers earn 20-80% of their entire yearly gross during the holiday season. But this year, things are different. The sluggish US economy has prompted Deloitte Research’s Carl Steidtmann to fear “the worst Christmas ever” in the retail sector. Short of going door to door in a Santa suit, how can businesses increase profits and prevent a blue Christmas? Despite economic gloom, industry leaders have found that an e-mail follow up strategy can increase sales by a cheery 35%! To weather the ailing economy, use a follow up autoresponder during your holiday campaigns.

What Does It Do?

Follow up autoresponders follow up with your leads for you. You create a series of messages, and decide when they should be sent, (daily, weekly, etc.). Your autoresponder will send the messages to each new lead automatically. With no further intervention from you, your leads will remember you throughout the winter chill. And this regular reminding will mean more sales during the all-important holiday shopping season. Give yourself the gift of a higher conversion rate! Follow up automatically using these simple steps:

  • Offer Useful Information
  • Personalize Your Messages
  • Track Your Leads
  • Broadcast Tailor-Made Offers

Offer Useful Information

Write your follow up messages for your leads – not for yourself. You want to talk about your great service, but your leads just want to know what they’ll get out of it! At some point, you must have purchased something like your product. What were you looking for then? Was it information about pricing, styles, or holiday gift wrapping? Maybe just a clearer explanation of the product? Figure that out, and put the answer in your follow up messages. That’s what your leads want to know.

Personalize Your Messages

You don’t open postal mail addressed to “Current Resident”, and your leads aren’t going to read e-mail addressed to “Dear Internet Friend.” People are simply more likely to read messages that address them by name. Autoresponders let you use variables to personalize your messages. This way, you write just one message, but Lenny Lead reads “Happy Holidays, Lenny!” while Kate Customer reads “Happy Holidays, Kate!” Names are only the beginning of the personalization features available, though. In addition to full, first, and last names, some autoresponders let you add e-mail addresses, dates, or an ad category. The best even correct the capitalization in your leads’ names, giving your messages a much more professional look.

Track Your Leads

Get even better results from your snowballing list of leads by experimenting with follow up content and timing. Your experimentation will be much more successful if you have access to proper statistics. Only use a follow up autoresponder that offers detailed lead statistics. Look for live, graphical stats that show your incoming leads broken down by day / week / month, all of your active leads, and leads who have requested removal from your list.

Broadcast Tailor-Made Offers

To get more bang for your holiday buck, look for an autoresponder that also lets you broadcast extra e-mails to all of your leads. Some even allow you to send tailor-made offers only to leads who meet certain criteria. For instance, send everyone who’s been on your list for a month a special discount. Or, notify all leads interested in a certain product when a new shipment comes in. Follow up messages keep leads warm. Use periodic broadcasts to convert them to sales!

Prevent a Crummy Christmas

Businesses of all sizes have seen their sales grow by leaps and bounds because of automated follow up. Implement your follow up strategy now to make the best use of holiday leads! Then, enjoy the season – your autoresponder is following up for you!

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=-> Increase your sales using these types of methods, to get started you need a Aweber account.