Understand Your Newsletter Subscribers’ Behavior Before Delivering More Emails
Below is a graphic compiled with some figures for current recipient’s behavior by Litmus, a company specializing in email testing and email marketing analytics. It’s clearly stated, for instance, why recipients would unsubscribe from mailing lists, how many clicks tracked in the “spam folder” rather than on the “unsubscribe link”, such as Gmail and Hotmail, and determined the relevance of mailing efforts.
How to Improve Email Open Rates by Making Great Subject Lines
Once you are creating your first email campaign, you’re gonna do everything you can to get your prospects to open your messages and actually click on your affiliate links.
However, that’s much easier in theory. It’s a crowd market and your potential customers probably have got many other online marketers trying to catch their attention.
The right way to break through the advertising clutter is to distinguish yourself from the crowd.So whenever you make a promise of good information in the subject line, your subscribers should be able to find exactly what they will get by reading your emails and going over your content.
The Following are 5 useful tips which helps to increase your email open rates by the end of the week:
Hook them in from the beginning
If you are kind of great communicator, you’ll use a straightforward subject line which brings out what your email is all about. Give your subscribers a good reason to read your emails. Let them know what they’ll find out,or tease them with benefits.
Below are some examples of subject lines which actually work:
- How to improve conversion rates by 50%
- Try this and you’ll receive far more organic search traffic to your website
Don’t tell them the entire story. Then you definitely won’t give your prospects an incentive to open your email.
Keep it short
The Subject line should never be too long. Keep it short and straightforward. Some email service providers, like Hotmail and AOL, truncate lengthy subject lines about 50 characters, while some others truncate at 80 characters.
80 characters isn’t that much. Actually, it’s less than a 14-character tweet. Practice creating subject lines which are short and sweet. You will not only enhance your email messages, but also improve your writing skills.
Here are 2 examples:
- Learn how to get 1000 subscribers in a week
- An amazing opportunity for stay-at-home moms
Stick to the topic
If your list is all about people enthusiastic about dog training, don’t try to send them offers about cats or fishes. If they like cats or fishes, they could just visit other sites. It’s a challenge all email marketers will face – how far is too far off topic.
Having said that, if you keep crossing the line, you might decrease the quality and liability of your list. Make sure that you and your subscribers know exactly what your site/your brand, is about. You need to only recommend offers which are highly related to your vertical. Staying on topic will improve your open rates. It’s also going to reduce the unsubscription rate if you didn’t satisfy their expectations.
Do NOT trick people
You could drive people crazy with tricks and anticipations. What would you feel if you find tons of emails that come promising riches but only containing a marketing message? Always pique their curiosity,make sure that your content gives on the promise included in the subject line.
Say something
I do believe you have found lots of subject lines which use words, but don’t say anything. You should definitely say something attention-grabbing in your subject line. Highlight a benefit. Suggest an easy and quick way to try something. You may even serialize your messages if they’re related to your business and the content of your emails.
To summarize, it’s very important to keep in mind that your subject line isn’t all you need. You still need to get your subscribers to click through your offers and make sales. So without good subject lines which motivates them to open their emails, you’ve got no chance to get those valuable clicks.
How to Get Started with List Building and List Management – Part 2
In the following paragraphs, we’ll focus on talking about some more advanced factors while building email lists.
Sign up Form and Data Fields
The more fields you have, the better your chances of marketing to him/her with success. However,there are disadvantages out there: If you ask visitors to spend too much time completing your sign up form, or, if you ask for more information which they are not comfortable giving away, they will more likely give up before hitting that most important ‘submit’ button.
How should you figure out that harmony between ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’ information? It will depend on your traffic sources, your niche, preferences of your audience etc. It could take some tests to find out what kind of form works best for you.
Single or Double Opt-in?
The main difference between them is that double opt-in needs subscribers to click the confirmation URL to be added to the list.
Double opt-in indicates your list will grow a bit slower, but quality and responsiveness of the list will be much higher: you will have subscribers who’re truly interested in what you are promoting, as they have taken the time to be sure they are on your list.
Then, your email marketing results should be much better on double opted lists. But again, requesting that 2nd action means you could lose many leads, similar to the sign up form.
Autoresponder or ESP
Autoresponder is a key part of successful email marketing and list building. Aweber, iContact, Mailchimp, ConstantContact, Interspire are some of the most popular ones used by affiliate marketers.
List Building and List Management
Getting visitors on your mailing list is the very first stage to list management, then the 2nd step will be keeping them on the list. The following are 5 useful tips on doing that:
- Find the Right People. You need to target prospects who might be interested in your niche. Which means, specialize your marketing concept so that it appeals to prospective customers, not just anyone.
- Tell the Right Message. It is critical to interact with your subscribers, otherwise they will probably forget who you are and/or totally lose interests. But always keep in mind, it’s just as essential to avoid sending too many emails or ask too much from your subscribers; whenever you communicate with them, don’t forget to give them something valuable.
- Get Personal. Email marketing technologies have progressed significantly. Almost all ESPs now allow you to easily customize each email you send out, such as the subscriber’s name, along with little extra effort on your side. Take full advantage of these functions to give your emails a personal touch.
- Get Professional. Go through your email text before you deliver it! And also be sure your links are working. Casual communication is extremely important to engage your subscribers, but visible typing and grammatical errors cause you to be unprofessional and even unintelligent. Although most people probably won’t discover, to some kind of prospects, that is a guaranteed NO.
- Get Inspiring. Here is the most essential part of all your messages: the Call-to-Action, the part where you get subscribers to complete what you need them to do, whether that’s clicking on a link or making a purchase. So spend some time to carefully think about your call to action (and pay attention to those call to action tips) to make sure your email has the maximum effects.
What Should You Split Test on PPC Landing Pages?
It’s a common knowledge that split testing on landing page is something essential when it comes to increase your conversion rate with PPC campaigns, here is a list of different elements of landing page/website which you should probably test so that you can understand what speaks better for your target audience.
Headline:
- Size, Color, Font
- Copy (keywords)
- Location on the page
- Sub-headline (Y/N)
Call-To-Action:
- Location on the page
- Copy on the button
- Color of the button
Copy:
- Format (Bullet points/Paragraphs)
- Structure
- Marketing tone (Emotional, Sales, Urgency…)
Form/Shopping Cart:
- Length of form
- Link location
- Content (required fields and such)
Trust Symbols:
- Trust logos (authority sites, brands…)
- Client logos
- Testimonials
- Case studies
And Many Others…
- Flash/Image/Audio/Video on landing page
- Colors on landing page
- Drop down/Standard navigation
- Contact forms
- Promos/Offers
- Featured products
- Conversion funnel (single/multi steps)
Mindset before split testing…
Determine what you’d like to achieve:
- Conversion action
- Discover your user’s intentions
Understand your value proposition:
- Product benefits
- Benefit of signing up now
Arrange your Testing strategy:
- What to test on each stage?
- What’s the purpose of each stage?
Split testing is something every marketer should be doing if they promote products/offers via landing page, especially in today’s economy. It’s a little complicated but will help you a lot when marketing with paid traffic, a small change makes huge difference sometimes.
How to Create Highly Targeted Campaigns with Facebook Ads
Facebook PPC is no doubt one of the most popular ad platforms for affiliate marketers because it’s a so huge traffic source with extremely active loyal users. The best part about FB ads is that you will have some very unique targeting features when setting up your campaigns, which you can’t find in any other ad networks. Anyway, here is the basic steps when it comes to create highly targeted campaigns in Facebook ads.
Location. Understanding where is your targeted audience will allow you to better market to them. When targeting on Facebook, you can select visitors by Country, State/Province or City. If choosing to target by city, you’re also able to include cities in a 10-50 miles radius close to those you’ve chosen to help expand your reach.
Demographics. Just like location, figuring out the age and gender of your target audience will let you maximize your marketing efforts. You can actually choose to target age groups or even an exact age match, just keep in mind that the more picky you are, the smaller your potential audience will be.
Likes and Interests. This unique feature of targeting will allow you to narrow down your audience determined exactly by what the name indicates. This is seriously one of the greatest parts which set Facebook ads apart from other major ad platforms, because you can leverage more additional personal information about what these potential customers like and don’t like, then you can put together all the information to make sure you’re hitting on the most profitable groups. When typing in keywords, you’ll see various groups and topics which you can choose from.
Connections. This part goes even one level further, which helps you not just find those who are actually interested in topics or groups that relate to your campaign, you can also find those people who are already involved with relevant groups, events and apps, or even have their friends who are involved.
Advanced Targeting. You can also target your audience by adding some more advanced requirements like birthday, marital status, education, language and type of work etc. For example, I’m sure many of you might have seen or heard about friends who saw lots of engagement ads, but when their relationship status changed to married, they would find tons of baby or parent related ads come flooding in.
At this point, you will have your “Estimated Reach” that helps you have a general idea about how many users you can probably reach, which will in return give you a rough estimation of ad budget when you start CPC bidding.
Budgeting. After you have set up your ad and decided who will be your target audience, then it’s time to set your budget. By default, the budget will be set by day, or you can set as a lifetime budget. However the minimum budget to get started is $1/day.
Even though Facebook is getting much stricter against affiliate offers, it’s still a great source of traffic and can be very profitable if done right. Take some time to do deep search through Facebook to identify the terms and groups which are the most relevant to your audience, and try to set up campaigns that are broadly targeted, then test them against those highly targeted campaigns with more narrowed audience until finding your best formula.
List Building and Monetization with PPV Traffic
Every affiliate marketer may be familiar with this phrase — ‘Money is in the list’. We do realize the importance of building our own email lists from day one and how powerful it could be when it comes to long-term business as it’s kind of permission marketing, which means we can market our audience constantly as long as they stay in the subscription, and without any compliance issues.
Despite the fact that email marketing is powerful and effective, some may think it’s an old school method and people hate to receive tons of emails every day from kind of strangers. Tell you what, email marketing is not Spam, we’re allowed to send them newsletters or promotional emails as they’re already pre-sold and somewhat interested in whatever you present.
How to build a targeted list quickly?
Having that said, then how? If you’re really good at SEO and are able to drive tons of traffic to your website, that’s great. Nothing can be easier than sitting around and looking your lists growing automatically. However, if you’re new to email marketing and have no idea where to go, then I’d suggest to invest at least $500 to start with PPV traffic. Here’s what you need:
- Auto-responder: Aweber or iContact
- Squeeze page: Customized landing page used to capture visitor’s name/email address or both
- PPV Networks: TrafficVance($1k initial deposit + referral), LeadImpact (Recommended), MediaTraffic, DirecCPV
Once set up, it’s time to do some research, choose your targets and start bidding. I’ll suggest to build 2 separate squeeze pages and split test the opt-in rates in help with some rotator scripts.
Single Opt-in or Double Opt-in?
There’s no exact answer to this question, everyone has their own results. Personally, as PPV is kind of interruption marketing, I finally choose single opt- in after many testing, and it’s proved that you’ll have a lower opt-in rates if visitors are double opted. Don’t mess around with building lists via PPC, media buying or other traffic sources, it’s totally another story.
How to monetize your subscribers while building lists?
Autoresponders offer great features which will allow us to market our visitors immediately. Say you’re going for single optin, then once someone submit their name/email, they’re redirected to an CPA email submit offer as kind of welcome gift. Advanced affiliates will even prepop the offer with their email address already filled in that single field. Awesome, right? Easy way to recoup some of ad budget.
As for double opt-in, Ryan Gray from IMGrind presents us his great roadmap about lead generation arbitrage which I think could be definitely inspiring.
Okay, I’m not willing to go any further, it’s up to you to be creative. List building can be lucrative but takes time and patience before you see some good results. So don’t just give up if you start losing some money, it’s part of success.
