These days, consumers have become extremely skeptical of marketers and marketing campaign, resulting in many traditional venues losing their credibility along with their effectiveness as monetization channels. One channel that managed to retain its effectiveness is email, or to be more specific – newsletters, by virtue of the medium being largely permission-based. If you’re tired of losing a lot of time and money on traditional online channels like pop up and banner ads and want to try your luck on monetizing a newsletter, here are a few key points that you need to remember:
Always Be Relevant
The main reason why banners and pop up ads no longer work these days is because of lack of one key thing: Relevance. Regardless of how good an offer is or how gorgeous the design of the ad is, it’s going to be fighting an uphill battle if delivered through banner or pop up ads because it’s no longer relevant to the interests of the person browsing the site.
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Using colors to inspire specific emotions among people is a common strategy in marketing. This is why companies care so much about the colors they use on their logo and ad materials. You can use the same strategy for newsletters. But first, you need to know exactly which colors inspire which emotions:
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Even if you already have an effective online listbuilding strategy, you’re still missing out on a lot of quality leads if you don’t expand your strategies offline. There are a lot of quality leads that you can get offline, primarily because when people give out their contact details in the real world, they’re more likely keen on actually receiving your newsletters. This is in contrast to online opt-ins, where people usually have a “spam catcher” email account for random sign-ups.
So if you want so supplement your online listbuilding strategy with things that are not part of the digital world, here are a few tactics that you can employ:
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Email marketing is all about progressing upwards – it doesn’t matter if you’re already enjoying a decent ROI, you still want to increase your returns and the day you’re content with being stagnant is the day when you should start looking for a different line of work. That being said, while most email marketers already know about the tricks of the trade when it comes to boosting an email list, there are a number of ways that are frequently overlooked despite being effective. Here are some of them:
Get Help From Friends and Family
Never underestimate the power of your personal network, especially if you’re in the early stages. Some of your best supporters and evangelists will be family members, relatives, and friends. Don’t be ashamed to ask for their help in promoting, and get them to sign up too. If you’re going about things the right way, there are no worries about sending them spam. If you are worried that they’re going to get annoyed with the emails, then you have an entirely different set of problems that you need to address first.
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Running a successful newsletter campaign requires you to constantly track, monitor, and assess various key metrics, which can all be used to show whether a specific campaign is doing really well or would require tweaking. Admailr and Emercury, as email service providers, provides a wide variety of reporting tools that help you assess the performance of your newsletter campaigns based on the following metrics:
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Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the metric that gauges the percentage of emails that were not delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Basically, they’re emails that “bounced” back. Monitoring the bounce rate is important because it will help you distinguish between the two kinds: soft bounces and hard bounces. (more…)
As an email service provider, Admailr cares about its customers’ newsletters and wants to see everyone enjoy a healthy growth rate. Even the most cynical of critics will have to admit that the ESP will benefit if its clients succeed in their business. Naturally, we take steps and conduct studies designed to reveal problems related to newsletters, as well as possible solutions.
This time around, we’re going to point out bad newsletter habits that have a tendency to stunt growth. Most of these are overlooked by people because they tend to be more personal than business-related, but they can be very debilitating and could cause many businesses to stagnate. So if you’re having problems getting your newsletter to take off, you should look inward and see if you have any of the following:
Being Too Self-Centered
We’re not saying that you should be altruistic and care about your subscribers at the cost of your bottomline – that would be silly. Everybody – even your own subscribers – already know that you’re in it to earn a profit, and nobody’s going to hold it against you. When we say self-centered, we mean it in the context that you’re always looking at things from your perspective, never even minding the customers. There is a big difference here, and in order to understand it, you have to think of one simple thing: who buys the products and services you are selling?
The customers. So when running a newsletter, you don’t design, create, or present things based on what would make you buy. You do all of those things while thinking of what would make the readers buy. You treat them well and they give you their business in return. It’s a quid pro quo status that has served as the backbone of business and marketing since the dawn of time. It doesn’t have anything to do with altruism.
So if you want to see growth in your newsletter, widen your vistas and check your ego at the door. You need to serve the interests of the people that’s bringing in money.
Overcomplicating Things
A common problem among stagnating newsletters is that the authors of the email have a tendency to overcomplicate things. They flood the readers with unnecessary specifications, use esoteric jargon, or make the readers jump through hoops just to get to the meat and bones of the email. Sometimes it’s done because the author wants to impress the readers, and sometimes it’s done because the author simply doesn’t know better. Doesn’t matter, they both result in readers being alienated.
The point of a newsletter is to present information and encourage readers to do something. And you want to get from point A to point B as fast as possible and with the least amount of complications. This ties in with the point about narcissism: always keep in mind that you need to help the readers do what you’ve always wanted them to do, there’s no need to hit them over the head with your expertise or knowledge.
Inconsistency
Any kind of business will suffer from inconsistency, but newsletters are particularly vulnerable to this due to their inherent need to “tame” the readers. You have to build familiarity with them and get in their good graces, and you do that by being consistent with schedules. You want to build a rapport in which they know when they can expect to receive the next newsletter. If you’re inconsistent with sending out mails – either because you’re lazy or because you’re not productive enough, you’ll find that the readers won’t warm up to your mails and will most likely treat your content with distrust.
Lastly, Riding the Bandwagon
In marketing, it’s always a race to present readers with valuable information that they have never seen or encountered before. If you have a habit of riding on the bandwagon, chances are you won’t see much success because all you’re doing is presenting something that people have already bought from someone else. It worked for the previous guy because it was new, but by the time you get on with yours it’s going to be yesterday’s news and readers have already moved on to the next big thing.
It is no secret that one of the most powerful ways of improving your relationship with subscribers is by rewarding highly engaged customers, mainly because the effect is twofold: first is that it encourages and motivates said customers to continue giving you their business, and second – it encourages them to promote your services to their friends and acquaintances, because they start to feel like your success will benefit them as well and become invested in ensuring that it continues that way.
Click here and learn how a simple text-based ad on your newsletter can earn you extra income.
However, very there are still a lot of marketers that have yet to jump on the location based promos bandwagon, which is understandable given the fact that the technology to pinpoint a user’s location only became widely available with the advent of mobile devices. If you’re part of this group of marketers, now is the time to start rewarding your newsletter subscribers with location-based promos, and here are some tips on how to do it right:
Don’t Creep Out the Users
First things first, you have to address the very thing that prevents many users from trusting marketers – don’t creep them out. Make sure your location based promos are logical and doesn’t come out as an invasion of privacy. For instance, it doesn’t matter if the technology allows you to know if a person is currently inside a public comfort room – don’t push promos during that time even if the ads are highly relevant (like, say, discounts on hand cleansers or tissues.) there are times and places where even the most willing consumer won’t appreciate being reminded that they can be tracked.
Make Sure the Promos are Worth It
When it comes to promos and discounts, it doesn’t matter how relevant the promos are to the location, you have to make sure they’re actually worth the effort of taking advantage of things. Now, situations may vary so you’ll have to use common sense for this one, but a 5% off on a $5 cup of coffee isn’t too enticing to customers. We can go back to one of the most basic principles of promotional marketing here: make sure you’re providing something of value.
Learn The Different Types of Location Based Promos
There are different approaches to location-based promos, and it will do you well to learn which ones can apply at any given time. For instance, you can push promos for establishments and places that are nearby (e.g. a free meal on a nearby fastfood) or you can push for promos that are relevant to the location (such as promos on skiing products on a location that’s near a ski resort.)
Treat Impulsive Shoppers and Fence-Sitters Differently
Here is where newsletters really shine: using past behavior, you can get a good idea on which users are impulsive shoppers and which ones tend to research first before purchasing. This is important because there’s a big chance that they carry the same behavior in real life, so when pushing location based promos to these users, you have to treat them differently. For instance, impulsive shoppers may respond better to promo CTAs with a “Buy It Now!” message while fence-sitters tend to respond more to CTAs with a “learn more about this…” message.
Be Honest
Last but not the least - be honest. Newsletter owners and their subscribers already have a sort of gentleman’s agreement over their relationship, in the sense that users already know – and accept – that your main priority is to make a profit. The only thing that they expect from you is to respect the time they give you by not outright screwing them over, so when you provide promos, make sure they’re really valuable and aren’t manipulative schemes to eke money out of users without giving something in return.
It’s a given that businesses these days use e-mail in some form or another, it’s still one of the simplest yet most powerful channels for communication in the digital age so no organization in their right mind will do without it. However, what many don’t realize is that the medium also has uses outside of just communication. With a properly set-up email list, a company will have a very effective way to build their brand, nurture a relationship with their customers, and ultimately increase their bottomline.
Many companies already have their mailing list, but the potential is being wasted because they keep pumping out newsletters that are only being ignored (or worse, reported as spam) by the recipients. To truly maximize the use of your email list for your brand, you have to ensure that the emails will reach their target, and will be opened and read- and that’s just the first few steps.
The biggest thing that companies miss out on is the amount of data that recipients intentionally provide when they sign up for the email list. These can be used to segment the lists based on a wide variety of factors, to ensure that readers will receive mails that are custom-tailored to their preferences, and therefore relevant. This alone will do wonders for your mails’ chances of getting read and opened, which in turn will have a significant effect on your brand’s recall on customers – as opposed to mails that won’t get opened.
Another one companies need to remember if they want to maximize the potential of emails for branding is consistency. HTML emails allow you to customize the look of each email, and email marketing service providers let you design, customize, and improve the layouts significantly without having to do it every time you send out a mail.
Consistency in this case means you have to ensure that the layout of the emails are consistent with the look of your website, of your marketing materials, and your products – whether it’s color scheme or the use of logo and fonts. This will go a long way in establishing the image of your brand in the minds of customers.
Lastly, you need to remember that email lists these days are no longer confined to the inbox. There are various tools and services available to ensure that you can tie in your newsletters with several social networking sites. This ensures that you have a revolving door of eyeballs and that you can reach potential customers on social media, simply by allowing your mailing list members to act as evangelists – usually through “forward this” or “share this” controls on the newsletter itself. What’s even more beneficial about this is that having multiple channels for communication will help build your brand’s image as up to date with the times and willing to meet customers halfway.
Newsletter owners already know how to get people to provide their own email address and full names, and it’s actually the easy part. What’s difficult is getting people to provide more in-depth information, like birthdays, ZIP code, preferences, etc – because people are naturally paranoid over giving out their personal info over the net.
This is a shame, because it’s those same personal data that can be used by newsletter owners in order to provide better service and content that is relevant to their interests. If you’re one of these newsletter owners who are struggling to get people to fill out their profiles on a regular basis, you need to learn how to motivate subscribers to give more information about themselves, here are a few things you can try:
Optimize Your Signup Form
Of course, if you want people to do something, the first thing you have to do on your end is make it easier for them to accomplish. When it comes to signup forms, make sure that they’re not a chore to fill out even if it has fields for all the extra info you want.
You might want to put yourself in the position of the user this time: when filling out forms, what are the ones that you’d wish were easier to accomplish, ones that made you abandon the form entirely, or ones that made you just pick the first one just to get things over with?
For instance, instead of having the user scroll through a lengthy list of months, years, and dates just to provide his birth date, you can simply give him 3 blank text boxes where he can provide his birthday in the 00-00-0000 format. Or instead of a blank text field for gender, just give him a drop down or tick box for all four choices. The point is, make sure your signup form doesn’t take up too much time or effort to fill out.
Create a Promo That Incentivizes Keeping Info Up to Date
It’s common knowledge in the industry that the best way to make people do something is by providing incentives, and promo campaigns are the most popular means of doing so. It’s actually very easy, you can send any offer – whether it’s free coupons, a free software, an exclusive ebook, or discount codes – as reward for keeping their info up to date.
Just send them a newsletter with an enticing copy (and probably a graphic here and there) telling them what’s in store if they keep their information up to date, and then give them the link to the update profile page, which in turn provides the link to the reward upon completion.
Lastly, Explain the Benefits of Providing Extra Information
As mentioned above, users are generally paranoid about giving out personal information. They are afraid that once their personal info goes online, it will open the floodgates on spam and identity theft. So your job as a newsletter owner is to allay their fears and explain the reason for asking extra information – that it’s actually meant to make their experience better and will in fact prevent spam, because the newsletter that they will receive from you will be relevant to their interests and not random sales pitches. Lastly, don’t forget to provide a disclaimer that you’re not going to use their info for anything else or give it away to third parties.
Out of all the technologies that have helped the marketing industry, none have done so much more than email, which provided a platform that is fast, inexpensive, and has data gathering tools already included in the equation. E-mail provides several ways to gather precious client data, the most powerful of which are email marketing surveys and polling.
Surveys and polling are by no means new – even before the Internet existed, marketers were already using snail mail and the telephone to conduct polls and surveys. What email did is provide a means to bypass both snail mail and telephone, thereby removing two methods that many customers deem intrusive and annoying, while at the same time increasing the speed and efficiency of the data gathering activity.
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There are times when doubling your conversion rates isn’t achieved through increasing the number of newsletter subscribers, but rather convincing more of your existing subscribers to buy. What most marketers don’t know is that it’s a lot simpler than they think. There’s no need to manipulate, coerce,312-76 or even hypnotize readers into doing things that they don’t want to do – all you need is a little understanding of psychology and how to flick mental “switches” that will help convince people to buy. These psychological triggers have been there all along, and knowing what they are will allow you to double your sales. These include:
The Fear of Pain and The Desire for Pleasure
These are actually two items, but they are grouped together because they are basically the two most powerful driving forces in all human behavior. Every time someone does something, it is done in order to avoid pain or to gain pleasure. These two psychological triggers are so powerful that one can cancel the other in some situations, such as when a person does backbreaking, torturous work (did not avoid pain) because he wants to enjoy the pay he’ll get for the work (wants to gain pleasure) or when a person avoids delicious food (did not seek pleasure) because it’s bad for his health (wants to avoid pain.)
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350-080 relevant to your subscribers, or (2) get access to tools and features that will help you create better newsletter that could convert more leads to customers. (more…)
