Month: August 2015

How To Generate More Prospects With E-Mail

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When it comes to e-mail campaigns, you’re only as good as your list. If you’re sending your e-mail to the wrong prospects, you’ll get nowhere. And, Internet service providers, spam monitors, and e-mail security services have set standards for what constitutes an acceptable e-mail campaign. So ongoing maintenance of your e-mail list is a must if you’re looking to engage the best prospects. You want your spam complaints, undelivered messages, and unsubscribes to each be under set thresholds to avoid account suspensions from your e-mail platform, penalties, fines, and otherwise lackluster marketing results. Use these four tips to get you going.

1. Invite Prospects to Opt-In

As you are building your e-mail list of hot prospects, it’s important that you ask them to connect with you via e-mail by opting in. A great place to do this is on your website. A small teaser add is usually sufficient with an option to submit their name and e-mail address. Ideally, once your prospect has opted in, it’s a good idea to send a follow-up confirmation e-mail where they can click on a link to start their subscription. This double opt-in process ensures you have a valid e-mail address.

 2. Don’t be Afraid to Purge

In order to have the best e-mail list, you have to remove prospects that aren’t bringing anything to the table as well as clean up any errors. Look for the following issues on your list and fix or remove as appropriate.

  • Incomplete e-mail addresses, bad addresses, dormant ones, or those with typos
  • Duplicate e-mail addresses
  • Two or more soft bounces
  • E-mail to individuals and not generic addresses such as info@company.com
  • Inactive subscribers or those who’ve been on your list for years
  • Honor unsubscribes promptly

 3. Ask to be Added to Address Books

Prospects who subscribe to your e-mails should be more than happy to add your e-mail address to their address book. But, they likely won’t do that unless you ask them to. The reason it’s a good idea to do this is because you want to make sure they receive all of your e-mails and that they don’t go in to junk mail.

4. Keep in Touch

A good rule of thumb is to e-mail at least once a month. This keeps your prospects engaged, but it also enables you to clean up your list by seeing how many bouncebacks you get.

How do you clean your e-mail list so you’re reaching the best prospects? Share your ideas with us.

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Get The Attention Of Your Prospects: 4 Keys to Successful Content Creation

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The success of your content marketing depends on your ability to reach your target audience and “speak” to them in a meaningful way. These four tips really work to focus your efforts.

  1. Keep your fingers on the pulse.

The only way you can truly know what your customers’ world is like and what they want from you is to get into the trenches and meet with your customers. I’ve found that most customers welcome and appreciate the contact, and you always learn valuable information you just wouldn’t be able to learn anywhere else. Be flexible with how and where you meet with your customers: buy them lunch, a cup of coffee, meet at their office, ride along with them on their sales calls, etc.

  1. You be the judge.

Take an honest look at your content and ask yourself if it would speak to you (and what it would say) if you were the customer. If it doesn’t work for you, it most likely won’t work for your customers either.

  1. Start with what you’ve got.

So many businesses are so focused on finding the next big thing that is going to help them increase sales that they forget all about what they mostly likely have right in front of them that is very powerful: data. When you take the time to analyze the data you collect, it will tell you important information about your customers.

  1. Put a plan in place.

If you’re talking to your customers and looking at your data, then you’re ready to map your customers’ buying or engagement journey. The importance of this step is that it allows you to prioritize your content based on what you know are your customers’ wants and needs and what will get them to the sale.

Let us know what you do to create impactful content.

How To Design Your Website For More Leads And Profits

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websiteIs your website underperforming and if it is, what can you do about it?

To help determine the performance of your website, start by establishing the following benchmarks:

  1. What is my site’s domain authority?

Do Google and the other search engines see your site? Are your pages properly indexed and optimized? Domain authority helps indicate how well your site performs in a search engine. This tool provides your site with a score between 0-100.   There are several online tools that will look at your site and provide you with this score. Let us know if you need help with this, and we will happily assist you with providing your site with its domain authority.

  1. Where is the traffic to my website coming from?

Google Analytics provides you a tool that will show you where the traffic is coming from. Generally categorized as free and paid traffic, Google separates traffic by referral (coming from other sites), direct (paid traffic), organic (free search), and social (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter).

  1. What is the net traffic to my website?

Google Analytics provides the number of visitors to your site. Calculating the number of net visitors is the number of visitors subtracted by the back rate or bounce rate. The back rate is the number of visitors who leave immediately after they visit the site. The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

  1. What is my site’s conversion rate?

Conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors who complete your desired action. That could be filling out a form, purchasing a product, or calling a telephone number. Simply, conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the net number of visitors to your website.

Establishing these benchmarks is important to setting goals that will help improve the performance of your website. And, the beauty of website performance improvement is that you can increase revenue without increasing advertising spend!

Our white paper How To Improve Your Website For More Leads and Profit is full of additional ways to turn your website into a powerful lead generator. To request your free copy, click here.

Have you had success turning your underperforming website around? If so, tell us how you did it.

How To Use LinkedIn As A Powerful Lead Generation Tool

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linkedin_long     LinkedIn LogoLinkedIn provides many opportunities for you to build your professional presence online. LinkedIn also works excellently as a powerful networking tool, enabling you to build professional relationships like never before when you join applicable industry groups. In my User Guide: How To Use LinkedIn As A Powerful Lead Generation Tool, you learn everything you need to know to get started using LinkedIn to drive leads. To request your free copy, click here.