Author Archives: Al - Page 5

How to know if your email marketing is working

When are your prospects most excited about what you can do for them?

When they enquire – or a week or so later?

They are the ‘hottest’ the second they get in touch, so three points:

  • Send them your strongest follow up immediately after they enquire (more on this below).
  • Never leave it a week before mailing them again.
  • Send more mails as soon as you have something useful or relevant to say.

If you can think of 7 tips or gems your prospects will benefit from, you’ve got 7 emails sorted. Send them in the next 7 days. Really – it’s the only way you can stay on their radar.

The biggest reason why people are afraid to mail so often is they think they’ll be bothering, not helping their prospects. This is utter madness. Help them and they’ll gladly look out for your mails.

Fortunately it’s easy to see whether you are being helpful or not.

A good click through rate is around 20% on an email (that’s when they click a link in the mail). If you’re near that, your prospects found the mail useful and relevant.

So here’s an example of a great mail:

Clearly, the prospects on this list find the content useful and relevant (43% click through) so I moved it up the list. It’s now the very first email a new prospect gets.

Now here’s another one.

This one bombed. It has a click through rate of just 4%. Not good – so I pulled it from the autoresponder sequence.

And that’s all there is to it. Go through your autoresponders after they’ve had time to breath for a week or so. Weed out the weak ones. Move the good ones up the list.

The mail with the best click through should be the first in the series, the second best click through rate should be number two…and so on.

Repeat this weekly until all your mails are getting that 20% ish click through rate – then you’ll have a really healthy amount of repeat visitors on your site, going to specific pages that sell hard.

Keeping tabs on your autoresponders in thsi way gives you a really tight follow up process as well as showing you what appeals to your prospects – and that’s invaluable.

And it’s easy to do, too.  The reporting on Aweber is superb. If you’ve not got an auto-responder series on your site yet, have a look at Aweber right now – it makes it really easy.

Still sat there nodding? Then I suspect you’ll find the ’51 ways to shaft the competition’ helpful. Why not get it right now?

Lord Sugar – marketing genius?

I’ve never watched ‘The Apprentice’ but my wife loves it and bought me Lord Sugar’s book as a present.

It took me a while to pick it up – but once I’d started it I couldn’t put it down.

Below is an extract from a few pages that really struck a chord with me for a number or reasons:

“My idea of a good advert is something that shifts kit off the shelves, something that these creative geniuses seem to forget.” – Lord Sugar.

I couldn’t agree with him more. Most marketing directors however, prefer the stuff that massages their ego. Idiots.

If, like Lord Sugar, you prefer the stuff that sells, grab the ’51 ways to shaft the competition’ right now.