The steps to financial freedom are here. Visit our site if you want to be financially free and live a wealthy lifestyle
As we head into the 2020 presidential election year, experts are forecasting a record-breaking amount of money spent on political advertising. With new avenues to reach voters, including a slew of social media platforms and OTT devices, campaign ad dollars will likely shift from traditional channels. Here are six key insights from the race gathered…
As we head into the 2020 presidential election year, experts are forecasting a record-breaking amount of money spent on political advertising. With new avenues to reach voters, including a slew of social media platforms and OTT devices, campaign ad dollars will likely shift from traditional channels. Here are six key insights from the race gathered…
If you’ve had trouble picking a niche, this episode is for you. I spoke with Pamela Slim, business coach and author of the best-seller, Escape from Cubicle Nation and her latest book, Body of Work. We talked about how to develop the language to attract the right people and repel the wrong people to your business. If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
Email marketers share their advice for nurturing subscribers, how to make email a two-way street for communicating with subscribers, opt-out practices and security tips to protect your email marketing lists.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
If you’ve had trouble picking a niche, this episode is for you. I spoke with Pamela Slim, business coach and author of the best-seller, Escape from Cubicle Nation and her latest book, Body of Work. We talked about how to develop the language to attract the right people and repel the wrong people to your business. If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
Every year, 80% of new year’s resolutions fail by the time February rolls around. Launching your email marketing strategy shouldn’t be one of them.
That’s why we created a simple, 7-day challenge to help you dominate email marketing in 2020.
By the end of it, you’ll have launched the most important parts of a successful email marketing strategy. And the best part? You only need 30 minutes or less each day to complete this challenge.
(Don’t have an email marketing platform? You’ll need one. Set up a FREE email marketing account in AWeber.)
This step is often overlooked. Many people use different email templates every time they send an email. Or, they never fully customize a template to match their brand.
But branding an email template and using it consistently are important. Your brand sets you apart from your competitors. It allows you to be unique and develop a personality for your business. It builds credibility and trust between you and your subscribers. Your subscribers can see your content and immediately tie it back to you.
Step 1: Choose your email template. Find an email template that works with your brand and your message. A plain template is often better than one already filled with colors and background images, because it’s easier to make it your own. Then, add your logo to the top or bottom of the email. (Inside AWeber, there are 8 NEW email templates you can easily customize to fit your branding. Choose the template format you’d like. Then drag and drop to add your images and build the layout you want.)
Step 2: Add your brand colors to your template. Don’t overdo it! Too many colors can be distracting. Try adding your brand colors in just a few places, like your call-to-action buttons, header image, or headlines.
For example, in the welcome email of AWeber’s FWD: Thinking newsletter, we incorporate our brand colors by using a header image with AWeber’s green and blue gradient and a call-to-action button with our brand’s shade of blue.
Homework: Watch this video on How to Design an Awesome Welcome Email.
To do: Choose an email template and add your logo and brand colors to it.
A confirmed opt-in message is an email you send people immediately after they fill out your sign up form. It asks them to verify they want to subscribe to your emails by clicking a link or button in the message.
Confirmation messages are optional but strongly recommended. They serve as proof that your subscribers definitely want to be on your list. So internet service providers (like Gmail and Yahoo!) may deliver more of your messages to the inbox when you use confirmation messages. Plus, it prevents subscribers from signing up using fake email addresses.
To make your subscribers more likely to confirm their subscription, you can follow these common best practices for confirmed opt-in emails:
Homework: Read Writing Confirmation and Welcome Emails People Love.
To do: Set up and customize the subject line and content of your confirmed opt-in email. (If you’re an AWeber customer, you can follow these directions to complete this step.)
Sign up forms allow your subscribers to easily join your email list. You can promote your form by adding it to your website and sharing a hosted sign up form with your audience. Hosted sign up forms allow you to share your form anywhere, even if you don’t have a website.
Homework: Read 9 Inspiring Sign Up Form Ideas to Grow Your Email List.
To do: Write your sign up form copy and build your form using ideas from the homework post you just read.
A welcome email is the first message subscribers receive after joining your list and confirming their subscription. And it gets a lot of attention — on average, open rates are 4 times higher and click-through rates are 5 times higher than other emails, according to marketing research company Experian. You can take advantage of this above average engagement by crafting an excellent welcome email.
Your welcome email should:
Once you draft your welcome email, take some time to personalize it! Personalization makes your subscribers feel you’re writing a message specifically to them. Something as simple as including your subscriber’s first name in the subject line or body of your welcome email can boost opens and clicks.
Homework: Read The One Email You Should Always Send and How Personalization Can Help You Connect with Subscribers.
To do: Write and build a welcome message for your subscribers using AWeber’s Drag and Drop Email Builder.
You wrote your welcome email. Your next step? Automate it. That way, your subscribers will receive it immediately after they sign up for your list.
Simply create an automated series for new subscribers in your email marketing platform. Here’s how:
Your email marketing system does the rest!
Homework: Read Email Automation 101: How to Use Automation.
To do: Create a welcome series using AWeber’s automation platform Campaigns and add in your welcome email. (Here are step-by-step instructions for setting up your own welcome series in AWeber.)
Your list is set up and your confirmation and welcome messages are ready to go. Now it’s time to put your hard work to the test and start to grow your list!
An easy first step is turning you social media followers into email subscribers. People who follow your brand on social media have already shown they want to hear from you. And there’s no better way for them to stay up to date on your latest content and sales than joining your email list.
Post a link to your hosted sign up form on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and ask your social followers to subscribe for exclusive updates.
Homework: Read 7 Expert Tricks to Grow Your Email List with Social Media.
To do: Add your sign up form to your Facebook profile and tweet out the hosted URL to your form.
Reach out to the people you already know, like colleagues, friends, or family members. Ask them if they want to sign up for your email list.
Let them know what content you are offering and explain the benefits they would receive if they sign up.
If they say no, maybe the content you’re offering just isn’t for them. But maybe they know someone it would be perfect for. You never know until you ask!
Homework: Read How To Get Your First 50 Email Subscribers in Less Than 30 Days. Use the fill-in-the-blank copy template in this post to easily reach out to people.
To do: Contact 5 people you know. Send them the hosted URL to your sign up form and ask if they’d like to join your email list or share it with someone they know.
Congrats! If you completed this 7-day challenge, you’re well on your way to launching a successful email marketing strategy.
Want more content like this? Subscribe to our FREE weekly email newsletter FWD: Thinking for email marketing tips from the pros.
Ready for your next challenge? Then try this: Create a lead magnet — a freebie you give subscribers when they sign up for your list. Lead magnets can increase the conversion rate of your sign up form.
For example, author and productivity expert Paula Rizzo offers a free List Making Starter Kit in return for signing up for her email newsletter, which she sends via AWeber.
Homework: Read How to Create a Lead Magnet in Less Than a Day.
To do: Build a lead magnet, add a link to it in your welcome email, and mention it on your sign up form.
The post The 7-Day Challenge to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing in 2020 appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
If you’ve had trouble picking a niche, this episode is for you. I spoke with Pamela Slim, business coach and author of the best-seller, Escape from Cubicle Nation and her latest book, Body of Work. We talked about how to develop the language to attract the right people and repel the wrong people to your business. If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
As we head into the 2020 presidential election year, experts are forecasting a record-breaking amount of money spent on political advertising. With new avenues to reach voters, including a slew of social media platforms and OTT devices, campaign ad dollars will likely shift from traditional channels. Here are six key insights from the race gathered…
As we head into the 2020 presidential election year, experts are forecasting a record-breaking amount of money spent on political advertising. With new avenues to reach voters, including a slew of social media platforms and OTT devices, campaign ad dollars will likely shift from traditional channels. Here are six key insights from the race gathered…
A decade is a long time. I mean, just think back to the end of 2009.
Barack Obama was about to enter his first full year in the White House, Farmville was the flavor of the month with 83 million monthly users on Facebook, and Avatar had just hit movie theatres worldwide, becoming — at the time — the highest-grossing movie ever.
But even then, ten years ago, people were already starting to make big predictions about online video, and its potential to change the world of marketing.
Not all predictions come true — but, as we reach the end of the decade, it’s fair to say that these ones certainly did.
If any marketing trend can lay claim to being the defining tactic of the last ten years, video is surely up there.
A decade ago, video was an expensive, pie-in-the-sky luxury. Since then, it’s become a staple — an accessible, affordable must-have tool to help attract audiences, explain products, and support customers.
And now, as we once again march forward into a brand new decade, new research conducted by Wyzowl strongly suggests:
Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey is an annual report, now in its sixth iteration. Every year, we ask a range of questions — many of them the same from year-to-year — to evaluate how the video marketing landscape is changing and growing.
This time round, our survey was taken by a sample of 656 unique respondents, consisting of professional marketers and consumers.
85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. This is actually a slight decrease from last years figure (87%) but still represents a highly significant number, which has generally grown since 2016 (the first time we asked this particular question in this way.)
What’s more, 92% of marketers who use video say that it’s an important part of their marketing strategy — the highest percentage of any year since 2015.
Perhaps most strikingly, 88% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI — a 5% increase on last years figure, and a world away from the lowly 33% who felt that way in 2015. This could well be attributed to greater understanding of how to use video, as well as how to track and quantify its impact.
As you might expect given all the above, all the signs suggest that usage and spend are on course to continue their growth in 2020.
99% of current video marketers told us they’ll continue using video in 2020, and 95% plan to increase or maintain their spend.
What’s more, from the people who told us they don’t currently use video, 59% told us they expect to start in 2020.
The net result of this is that we can all expect to see more noise and competition for audience attention in the coming 12 months. And, given that 92% of video marketers feel the level of noise and competition increased noticeably in 2019 … that’s a lot of noise!
Of course, while this is a challenge, it isn’t an insurmountable one. It simply raises the bar in terms of content quality. Video needs to be well-planned, and very well-executed.
You’d be forgiven for looking at these numbers and feeling that video might be on the verge of reaching saturation point. Most of the data points around usage, spend and consumer opinion are in the 80s and 90s — where they’ve held, consistently, for a number of years.
But the good news is that there still seems to be underutilized opportunities for marketers to explore around video.
Unsurprisingly, YouTube and Facebook are the most widely used platforms among video marketers — used by 85% and 79%, respectively.
But some of the lesser-used video tactics also seem to be reaping real results for video marketers.
Most notably, for the first time ever, LinkedIn has emerged as the most successful channel for video marketers, with an overwhelming 87% of LinkedIn video marketers describing it as an effective channel.
TikTok — often cited as a video platform with huge potential (and not only by Gary Vee) — remains largely untapped, with only around 1 in 10 video marketers having given it a shot. Out of those who’ve tried it out, though, 66% report having seen success.
There are flops to go with the success stories, too, though. Snapchat continues its poor performance of recent years. Only 11% of video marketers say they’ve used Snapchat as a video channel, and, out of those, less than half report success, making it comfortably the lowest-performing video marketing platform for the third year in a row.
Video looks set to continue its ten-year overnight success story into the coming decade. These stats paint a picture of a media type that’s almost universally popular among both marketers and their audiences, helping achieve a number of incredibly important goals.
You can check out the full report — with plenty more data points — and get a downloadable version by visiting Wyzowls State of Video Marketing 2020 page.
