Category Archives: Stuff you need to know - Page 4

How to know if your email marketing is working

Posted by on December 19, 2011 No comments

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?

Pay per click or SEO?

Posted by on December 12, 2011 No comments

Pay per click, or SEO?

Doing one without the other is dumb.

PPC is fast and snappy – but can be expensive and worse, unprofitable.

SEO is ‘free’ but slow.

And when Google decides to tweak its algorithm, anything can happen to your listings.

PPC is a great way to find out what ‘converts’ for you (when I say convert, I mean gets an enquiry or  a sale).

Then, you’ll know what to concentrate on when it comes to SEO.

This is really important because SEO results move at the same speed as icebergs. Fortunately, your PPC campaign will put you on the right track before you squander months down a blind alley.

Here’s a short video on PPC I did with Drayton.


 

Here’s the example we’re talking about.


The screen shot above shows a completely flat graph except for a small spike. That spike shows where a client decided to have a go on the content network.They soon pulled out, and you can see why on the bottom line below.

Ouch! They got 618 clicks for £900.66 – and got just four conversions (enquiries, not sales) from it.

That’s £225.16 per enquiry – not good when you consider the software they sell costs £40 to £200.

Anyhow, we could see diamonds in their adwords dungheap, so we cajoled them into testing the content network again but with three simple tweaks – and I mean really simple.

Here’s what happened.

They spent £234.57 to get 86 conversions. That’s £2.73 per enquiry.

A great result! At that cost all they need is a strong auto responder series to make a comfortable profit. (If you’re not using one yet, check out aweber now).

By the way, these people are still smarter than most. They use their conversions to good effect on the search network – and they were savvy enough to create two campaigns: one for the search network, one for the content network. Remember, it’s a different ball game on the content network so your ads need to reflect this – that’s why you need separate campaigns.

Still with me? Then grab the ’51 ways to shaft your competition’ now.