Email Marketing | smallbizdream blog

Practice Your Copywriting Skills with Small Business Dream

Small business owners rarely write their own copy. Most of the time, they have copywriters to do it for them. The great thing with copywriting is it’s a learnable skill. It’s not rocket science. You can start with a few basics and build your copywriting skills as a business owner.

Let’s take a look at copywriting and find opportunities to practice copywriting for your landing page, sales funnels, and email campaigns.

More Research, Less Writing

Copywriting looks a bit too easy. After all, you just need to find the right words to get more people to buy from you. But after spending hundreds of hours on your first copy, you realized you can’t just write a bunch of emails, send them to everyone on your email list, and expect to find more customers.

Copywriting is 80% research, 20% writing. So, before writing your copy, you’ll need to get these down first:

Value proposition. This answers the question, “What’s in it for me?” or “Is it for me?” To answer the question, you’ll need to do some research. Interview people, conduct a survey, look for customer reviews at Amazon, or visit forums like Reddit. Try to look at people’s problems and frustrations, and create your value proposition around those issues.

Target Audience. These are the people who will benefit most from your product or service, also known as your ideal clients. One commonly used method is to come up with a detailed buyer persona to guide your marketing efforts.

Customer Segmentation. Since you’ll be doing a lot of email marketing through your autoresponders, segmenting your email list is a must. Lay down a list of categories in your demographic such as age, gender, specific interests, brands, etc. This will come in handy when writing your email copy for your drip mails and email campaigns.

We won’t go much into the details like the length, type of language, and font size. You can find lots of video tutorials on copywriting over the internet. Instead, we’ll give you some ideas on how to practice your copywriting with our Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation.

Landing Page Copy

Internet marketers spend a ton of work on their landing pages, for good reason. Landing pages are essentially print ads and commercials on a web page, but they’re more specific to a given audience and allows for user interaction (call to action).

A well-written landing page copy can instantly double your sales and is way more cost-effective compared to traditional advertising. However, you can’t just read one article and write amazing copy for your landing pages overnight. You need to do some actual work and test things out yourself. Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation helps you become a better copywriter by giving you templates to experiment on.

Notice there’s no navigation like a typical website. Landing pages are more direct-response — visitors will either leave your page or take the offer (click the ‘call to action’ button). Your copy should state your value proposition in your title and copy text.

You can slowly improve your landing page copy by making a slightly different version of it to see if it makes any difference on your conversion rates. Small Business Dream provides an easy way to do your own A/B Split Testing or you can try our DFY (done for you) package and have our team of experts set it up for you.

Sales Funnel Copy — the AIDA Principle

For those who are new to sales funnels, AIDA stands for Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. These are sequential steps your visitors take in the buying process. Some compare this to a buyer’s journey.

Sales funnels are extremely versatile. You can use it solely for sales conversion or for many other purposes such as up-selling, cross-selling, one-time offers, customer acquisition, lead generation, and so on. You can practice your copywriting skills using Small Business Dream’s sales funnel template.

Begin with your title and value proposition, similar to a landing page. However, with sales funnels, you can take a step further. You’ll be able to narrow down your audience to a particular type of customer based on how they respond to your offer. They can take the offer straight away, choose a different option, or they can decide later, in which case, you can keep them interested by offering freebies, one-time offers, and newsletters.

Sales funnels are a bit slower compared to direct marketing, but the goal is pretty much the same. One advantage of using a well-executed sales funnel is that it almost guarantees high-quality leads and repeat customers every single time. Combined with a solid email marketing strategy, sales funnels are an amazing, must-have tool for your small business.

Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation offers a complete suite of tools designed to rapidly grow your sales from landing pages, sales funnels, customer acquisition, email auto-responders and more.

Email Marketing Copy

Email never gets out of style. Don’t believe it? Find any Android and iOS phone that doesn’t have a built-in email app, or any online service that doesn’t require an email account (think Google Play, Apple Store, etc.). However, getting people to open, let alone respond to your emails is more challenging than ever.

The problem lies with not being able to properly segment your email list and poor copywriting skills, e.g. sounding too robotic or salesy. The key to successful email marketing is to be relevant with your recipients. Hence, you have to be very specific with your email copy.

What’s truly amazing is that with Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation, you can fine-tune your email campaigns, drip mails, and follow-ups, all the while using automation. Set up a survey page, and automate certain tasks like sending them to your landing page, sales funnel, or switch to a different email series when clicking specific items on your survey page.

Another strategy we’ve talked about in our previous blog about the best follow up tips for small businesses is by giving value each time you send an email like a newsletter or links to highly informative blog articles. Once again, be very specific whom you’re sending to. All your email marketing efforts will be a waste of time if you’re just sending them out to random people.

Conclusion

Need help promoting your own business? We’d like to spend some time with you. We offer a FREE Sales and Profitability consultation where we identify key aspects in your business to rapidly boost your sales. Come visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our 5-step system to rapidly grow your sales and profits with less stress.

Creating an Email Strategy for Your Small Business

We’re all familiar with email marketing. It’s how we get our coupons, discounts, and newsletters from businesses all over the internet. Many of these emails are considered spam. So how do small companies without a big marketing budget do email marketing correctly to engage their audience and drive more people to their websites or into their stores?

We’ll answer the question with a proven strategy using sales and marketing automation. Here’s why you should consider creating an email strategy for your small business:

Half of the world’s population are email users. Estimates show around 3.8 billion email users by the end of 2018. Gmail users alone account for 1 billion email accounts, 75% of whom access them through their mobile devices. In fact, every mobile user has at least one email account for signing up on Google Play or accessing their social media account through Facebook Mobile or Twitter. One in two of your potential clients and customers are email users (give or take, depending on where you live), and by being able to connect with them, you could potentially increase your income by as much as 50%.

Stay on top of user engagement. Besides email, the internet has plenty of other platforms for connecting with other people around the world. But despite the popularity of social media, email still ranks as the best and the most preferred method of communication, particularly on anything business-related. One of the key advantages of having an email list is that, unlike Facebook or Twitter, you have more control over how your message is delivered to your target audience. You could spend hours creating great content for them, but it could quickly vanish from Facebook newsfeed or buried underneath by dozens of other posts within minutes.

Automate routine tasks more easily. Small business owners don’t have much time on their hands responding to every email. Fact is, they don’t have to. Some of the best sales and marketing automation have mailing lists, email templates, and auto-responders taking care of most of the work so they can focus more on things that matter. It might take some work initially getting more acquainted with the ins and outs and creating an email strategy. As you gain more experience, you’ll be spending less time with it, and begin to reap the benefits of using this sales and marketing feature for your small business.

Steps in Building your Email List Using Sales and Marketing Automation

Step 1:

Choose a sales and marketing automtion software with an auto-responder feature. If you’re just starting out with email marketing, you don’t need an expensive CRM like Salesforce, Hupspot, or NetSuite. There are plenty of options for business owners from email subscription service and lead-generation software. Small Business Dream offers service packages for small businesses who want to accelerate growth using this feature. Just remember to stay within the bounds on the proper use of this tool.

Step 2:

Set up an opt-in page or survey form. You can start with a very simple and straightforward landing page or survey form and add your bells and whistles as you get better. Small Business Dream can help you set up your first landing page and survey form. Share the link through your Facebook Page, WordPress, or your company website. Or you can have it the old way and add the contact yourself (be sure to get their email addresses). Another method is to put QR codes in conspicuous places to get your walk-in prospects and customers to your landing page or online survey. Offer freebies or discounts for taking the time.

Step 3:

Wait for confirmation from your subscribers. Double opt-ins is the preferred method of choice for email subscriptions because it accomplishes two things at once. First, it filters out low-quality leads, and second, it helps verify real users. This might seem tedious compared to single opt-ins, but you’ll have better chances of making more conversions over the long haul for getting high-quality leads. It consists of a few lines asking your recipients to confirm they’ve opted in to your mailing list by clicking a link, etc., hence a “double” opt-in.

Step 4:

Segment your prospects and customers. You may start with just a few categories at first. Later, you can add more details to your customer data to make it more granular. Small Business Dream allows you to segment your prospects and customers from your initial survey. For instance, you can include a list of brands, companies, or products on the survey form and Small Business Dream will categorize each contact based on which box your visitors have checked. The same applies for setting priority to every customer. You can update their category by giving out surveys periodically in order to stay relevant to them.

Step 5:

Create a simple email follow-up series. Take some time reading through the templates to see how each customer engagement progress seamlessly to the next, and so on. It usually takes some practice and experimenting to make sure it won’t sound robotic. As much as possible, we want to avoid the impression that they’re dealing with a robot secretary instead of a real person, by a adding a human touch to every conversation.

Conclusion

Having a mailing list for your small business is more of a necessity these days, now that our target audience is moving towards mobile. Take some time learning the ropes and start making your own email strategy.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your business through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Doing It Right: Integrating Social Media with Email Marketing

When talking about online marketing, these two will always come up in people’s minds: email marketing and social media marketing. This is for good reason.

First of all, email marketing has been around for nearly three decades since it was first used in the 90s as a cost-effective, direct response method to generate massive leads. It still does today.

2002 saw the birth of social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn. As more and more people started using them, social media marketing came along. It was an instant success, and for a time many companies began using it to promote their brands.

But now things have changed. The online space has become extremely competitive, and we don’t see them being used by online marketers the way they used to. They knew their previous tactics won’t work anymore and so they started to rethink their strategies just to stay in business.

Why is this so?

Common Issues with Social Media Marketing

The problem with most online marketers today is they took something very powerful and useful, and turned it into a mindless lead generating tool with no creativity, and no real intention of creating meaningful connections or establishing good relationships. They took “the old-school” method of advertisement and simply moved it online.

Most of the bad rap social media marketing got into is the so-called ‘pay-to-play’ tactics used to create a superficial (or even artificial) ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ with little or no interaction whatsoever. This obviously doesn’t work with today’s savvy consumers.

Read: How All the Social Media Experts Got it Wrong

However, some social media marketers use legitimate practices to get results, but it takes a lot of time and effort (try responding to all the comments to your posts or tweets and you’ll get the idea). It also takes talent and creativity just to get people to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ your post in social media.

Another issue with social media marketing is that you’re piggybacking on somebody else’s platform. If for whatever reason the social networking site decides to take down your social media account, goes under, or loses popularity, you’ll lose all your connections and you’ll have to start over from scratch. And as they say, ‘Own the racecourse, not the racehorse’ — don’t go all out on something you have no control over.

Why People Still Do Email Marketing Today

When social media marketing took off with just a million users to 1.7 billion worldwide, some believed it’s the end of the road for email marketing. The fact is, email marketing still ranks first as the marketing tool preferred by companies to conduct their businesses online.

Research shows why this is the case.

77% of consumers are more likely to respond to promotional messages in their emails than their social media accounts
66% of consumers purchased their products because of promotional messages and follow-ups from emails
44% of users go their emails to check with a company they know as opposed to 4% in Facebook

But here’s why email marketing still ranks first:

58% of people who go online check their emails FIRST, followed by search portal (20%), Facebook (11%), news site (5%), company website (3%), and others (3%).

Email marketing is still the online marketer’s best friend when it comes to lead conversion. If you’re into social media marketing, you might consider having an email marketing strategy as well.

Using Two Different Approach

Using social media and email marketing all at once is like having two different kinds of tools. Although very different, they can work together towards the same goal. Mostly, however, people have been using them for the wrong reason.

Online marketers need to understand the difference between communicating and mass sharing. Social media has always been used for sharing good reads, an interesting find, or anything that would start a conversation. Emails are most effective when following up with your fans or followers.

Here are 5 simple tips that you can use to integrate social media into your email marketing strategy:

Create a group on social media and invite people to join in. Spend some time on your social media home page’s look and feel. Run contests, or give freebies, and discounts for active fans and followers.
Time your posts well. Make them as ‘catchy’, relevant, and timely as possible. Hint: research have shown the average life span of a Facebook post to be around 3 to 5 hours.
For Facebook users, they can use ‘call-to-action’ (CTA) buttons to lead visitors and fans to their landing page.
For Twitter users, they can use Twitter cards to display their photos, and links to their landing page, app or downloadable content.
Export your friends’ and followers’ email accounts to your mailing list for your email marketing campaigns and follow-ups.

Small Business Dream is a sales and marketing tool designed to seamlessly integrate social media and email marketing for your small business. Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com and learn more about our Small Business Profitability Blueprint

4 Ways To Become an Email Marketing Ninja

Despite all the other methods of marketing and selling, email is still king of the road. It’s what drives a lot of businesses, both online and offline. And if you’re not using email to communicate and sell to your customers then why the heck not?

It’s probably because you’ve never really considered the power of a consistent, follow-up email sequences. Or maybe you don’t know how. It’s actually a lot easier than you think.

But first let’s take you back a bit. I’m going to take you back to the time you were overjoyed when you got email. There was that ping of anticipation, the little swirly icon, and then you’d click on it, and wait for it to open.

Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. Fast forward to present. Answering emails is probably the last thing you want to do.

The average person gets 84 emails a day, not including the Facebook Messages, the LinkedIn Messages, the Tweets, the Snapchats, and whatever else there is. There are probably a million things you prefer to do than wade through email wasteland.

It’s almost impossible to respond to 84 messages a day, let alone read them, so you have to be a ‘marketing ninja’ to stand out. You just need to train to do those back flips and karate chops!

How do you do that? I’m glad you asked. Luckily I’ve come up with a number of things you can do to become a master.

Strategy

Before you send a single email you need an overall strategy. Like anything else, if you fly by the seat of your pants then you’re not going to be effective. You have to always ask how it would benefit your audience. What message are you trying to send? Take your time to stop and think about your approach and execution.

It may help to first draw out the sequence of emails on a piece of paper, detailing every one you want to send to your customers or potential customer. Then write down the action you want them to take. You should strategize at least three months in advance and know exactly what you want to say. As your business changes, it’s possible to change your strategy. But as they say ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.’

Content

Obviously the content of your email is the most important part. Starting with your subject line. If your emails are boring, nobody will read them.
I know, the truth hurts sometimes. But if you train your customers that you’re awesome and your writing is going to be entertaining then you’ll have people salivating over your email content.

Another thing you can do is what in the ‘biz’ is called the open loop. That is kind of like writing an episode of Game of Thrones. And it can be that much fun to both read and write. The point of the open loop email is to keep your reader engaged and to end with a ‘cliffhanger’. Of course you want your readers to come away with a great story but there should also be a business moral that will lead them to buy for you.

The open loop is an extremely effective way of being a email ninja and one that most businesses don’t deploy effectively. Of course it’s just one type of content you can use. There are far too many to cover here.

Personalization

The more you know about your email list, the better and more ‘valuable’ it is. The more you can customize it to a specific person the better. If you know a particular person likes a certain beer, then you can craft a message around it. The same for coffee, restaurants or sports. Segmented lists and dynamic content really show your audience that you’ve thought about their needs and care about building a personal relationship with them, even if it’s automated. We’ll get into it next.

There are a couple ways of segmenting your email list. You can send your existing list a survey and then record those responses. You can create different landing pages each with a different message. Or you can run different contests to see which people respond to. Be creative!

Automation

This is by far my favorite tip. I love automation! Why? Because it makes life so much easier. Why do all the work over and over again when you only have to do it once? Your customers won’t know the difference unless you do it poorly. Remember to personalize it! (Hint we just talked about it!) If you personalize and segment your list correctly, then your customer will feel special and privileged.

There are many ways to do this. Most email marketing companies have a way you can create auto responders that will automatically trigger when you add somebody to a list.

Conclusion

With only 39% of retailers send personalized product information to their customers there is obviously great room for improvement! Just by adding good email strategy and follow up, you can double or triple your sales!