The From Line
Sending, Managing & Monetizing Email
Written for Publishing Executive by Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso CEO
Melody Kramer’s recent piece, “When newsrooms don’t own their data, other companies profit” on Poynter should be a hard and fast wake-up call for publishers. Kramer, a former digital strategist at NPR and former visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, offers several insights from publishers about how newsrooms collect then give away data programmatically without fair compensation. Most of the examples she provides are related to behavioral data, however “data fleecing” publishers stretches way beyond link tracking and location check-ins.
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The power of conversion lies in several factors such as the overall look of your site, the content, and the user-friendliness for your visitors. Here are some conversion tips that you may find useful.
Take a walk in their shoes: Pretend you are a customer on your own website. How will you navigate the site and will you know where to go to? Can you easily find what you are looking for? Think like a customer and try it on your website. This can help improve the overall user rating for your website and convert visitors to buyers. If customers feel comfortable with their user experience, they are likely to engage deeper and return after their initial visit.
Content is king: Conversions have a lot to do with quality content on your website. Your articles must be engaging. It you have to make it controversial or funny to attract attention, then by all means do so. There should also be a call-to-action button on your website so that visitors can become customers.
Check out your competition: Keep your competition close by checking them out. Sometimes, you can pick up a lesson or two from them and incorporate it into your website. It does not hurt to research the competition. You have to be on top of your game and keeping an eye out for changes in the competition is a normal thing to do. Check out the strategies they are using and devise your own plan to implement changes accordingly.
Honesty is the best policy: Do not be shady when it comes to your terms and agreement. If you are mining data from your visitors, make sure that it is clearly stated in your Privacy Policy. Once threatened, your visitors will lose faith and likely not return. So it is best to be completely transparent.
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Permission based marketing campaigns require that potential consumers give your their permission before directly marketing to them. Opt-in marketing is a branch of permission marketing that is most widely known for its application toward email campaigns. The term "opt in" itself means that a contact has agreed to receive information from you. This is an important aspect of email marketing.
Clients that opt-in to receive messages from your company are more likely to be interested in your products. Getting your contacts to agree to receive information from you on a regular basis is the first step in establishing a customer base.
Companies that use a permission based approach toward marketing are 200% more likely to convert contacts into sales. Opt-in marketing lists are filled with people that have already expressed a personal interest in your product or service. On top of that, your contacts are more likely to identify with your brand over time. The familiarity of your brand will build trust. As more people are familiar with a trusted brand, sales of their product or service are bound to climb.
Adding an opt-in email subscription sign up link to your page adds value to your blog or website. This approach allows you to stay in contact with website visitors since the have already expressed interest in your product or service simply by visiting your page. Opt-in marketing campaigns also allow website visitors the opportunity to learn more about your company and it’s approach before making a purchase decision.
Moreover, Opt-in marketing lists are naturally generated by the intergration of social media networks. Social media has grown into an international platform for business and social exchange. The amount of sales that are generated from social media can determine the success or failure of entire companies.
Companies that build a strong presence in social media are in a perfect position to capitalize on opt-in marketing. Adding an email sign-up box to your social media pages or posting a signup link for your friends can greatly increase the success of your venture. By integrating your opt-in marketing campaign into your social activities, you gain the opportunity to interact with people that are truly interested in your product.
To learn more about how opt-in marketing campaigns can be beneficial to the growth of your company contact us.
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Ongoing customer acquisition activities are a necessity of every business big and small. For some, pivoting customer acquisition strategies can seem overwhelming. However, just keep in mind the below three things while creating the underpinnings of your new strategy in addition to increasing your productivity and ROI:
1. Think value when looking for customers. Never mind worrying about how much each lead costs, but rather have your long-term goals in mind. If you are being stingy on your marketing budget when it comes to purchasing leads, it can really have a negative effect on your long-term customer acquisition plan. Instead, keep the value of each customer you obtain in mind and how that will impact your business over time. Although it might cost more in up-front costs to obtain quality leads, it is worth it in the long haul for your business.
2. Continue to test. Increasingly, there are new marketing strategies coming about that will enable you to track your efforts and how effective they are as well as any resources you have used. Although testing does not necessarily increase your customer base, it does reduce the costs of obtaining new customers, and lengthens your campaign run, so you can see more results.
3. Keep your current customers happy. When your customers have a good experience with your products and services, they are more inclined to spread the word about them to friends and family. Keeping your current customers satisfied will do wonders for your customer acquisition marketing campaigns since customers who are happy do a couple of things; they return and they refer.
Contact us here at RegReady for more information on acquisition marketing and increasing your customer base.
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There’s a consensus among marketers that one of the hardest things to do is to continually grow a quality opt-in list. Aside from using RegReady to help aid you with this process, below are some quick tips to ensure your gaining quality of quantity. Remember, building an opt-in marketing lists of highly responsive subscribers is no different than starting any type of quality relationship.
1. Be transparent and outline benefits
Be upfront and clear on your sign-up page or welcome email what you will be using your subscribers’ email addresses for and the frequency of your sends. Of course in order to gain quantity it is important to outline all the benefits associated with your opt-in email communications program. Use short bullet points to outline your email’s value. Once your audience feels is comfortable with your value proposition they will convert to subscribers.
2. Incentivized opt-Ins = some nuggets and lots of crap
Incentives work well for quantity, but not necessarily for quality. If you’re incentivizing opt-ins with discounts or contests, make sure you clean these addresses in real time with a service such as LeadSpend. Many subscribers use temporary or disposable email addresses in addition to fictitious ones for curiosity purposes.
3. If you do use incentives, create urgency.
Adding a time limit or countdown to a free incentive always helps to increase your opt-in rate. If your audience is convinced that the time limit is legitimate, they will make an instant decision, rather than waiting. Advanced online marketers use this approach all the time with success.
4. Know your statistics
Once your site has achieved predictable traffic patterns, your opt-in rate should remain steady. This is when you should test different placement, incentives, etc. Test one variable at a time for the exact amount of time and evaluate if there is an increase in conversions. Conversion rats for blogs tend to be higher than other types sites however, if you are just sending traffic directly to a squeeze page without blog traffic, expect these rates to be lower. Your goal should be to always find ways to attract quality subscribers that will become engaged and loyal customers.
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