Tagged: email copywriting

Best Email Copywriting Tips 101 0

Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips – Emails Are Easy, Right?

Writing emails is easy, right? You just sit down, put in a quick subject line, bang out the body text, and hit send. It only takes a few seconds and doesn’t require that much thought.

While that may be true for the email that you’re sending to your best friend about your fantasy football league, that strategy doesn’t work for business and marketing emails.

Put simply, the business and marketing emails that get the best response are those that have been carefully, even lovingly, crafted.

Much thought has been put into them and they don’t get sent until they’re nearly perfect. The emails are personalized, relevant, and get the reader to take action.

Not so easy, right? It’s even a little intimidating. How can you know what makes for a great subject line and compelling body copy? Should your emails be brief or long? Should the subject line be simple and to the point or more creative?

That’s where we come in. In this eBook, you’ll discover the most effective principles of email copywriting. We’re going to talk about:

  • How to get inside the mind of your reader
  • How to craft the perfect subject line
  • How to create compelling body copy that gets readers to take action
  • How to personalize your emails
  • And more

By the end of this book, you’ll have a solid grasp on how to write outstanding emails that actually get results.

Ready?

Let’s dive in.

Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips

The Best Affiliate Tips

The Ultimate Goal Of Every Email

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of how to write killer emails, we need to first talk about the goal of every email you send.

Ultimately, your goal is to be engaging.

You want your emails to get the reader to do something, whether that’s reply, click a button, or something else. When it comes to business and marketing emails, you’re not sending them just for the purpose of keeping up with people.

 You want the reader to take action.

 First, you want the reader to open the email. That’s why you need to work hard on your subject lines.

 Then, you want the reader to actually read the email itself. This is why you must work hard to craft the body of your copy.

 Finally, you want the reader to take action, which is why you need a strong, compelling call-to-action with every email.

 We’ll talk more about each of these in detail, but it’s critical to get these things clear up front.

See, here’s the thing…

 Email is a two-way communication tool. Even if you’re emailing a large list, you want your readers to engage with your emails. You want them to feel as if you’re talking to them individually, not just blasting out an email to a large list.

 If you can’t get people to open your emails and read them, then ultimately you can’t make sense to your audience.

 As you read the rest of this eBook, keep this fundamental point in mind. It’s easy to get lost in the details and forget that the main point of your emails is engagement.

Step #1: Get Into The Mind Of Your Reader

First and foremost, it’s essential to get inside the mind of your reader. Most people don’t even take the time to consider the psychology of their readers. Rather, they simply dive right into their email, hoping that if they send out a large volume of emails they’ll generate at least some sort of response.

This is an ineffective technique. Remember, there are real people at the end of your emails. When you send an email without considering what your reader is thinking, you risk coming off as spammy.

Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips

The Best Affiliate Tips

So how do you get into the mind of your prospect?

First, keep in mind that you’re ultimately trying to convince an individual. A person is reading your email, and most people make decisions based on emotion, not logic.

When writing your emails, consider the emotional state of your prospects. What are their hopes, dreams, fears, and struggles?

Tap into those things. Help them see why working with you will alleviate their greatest struggles and fears, as well as help them achieve their goals.

Second, consider when you send the email. How does your prospect typically work? Are they the kind of person who will be in their inbox all day or do they only handle their email in batches?

While you can’t know this for certain, you should be able to make a fairly good guess about when to send your email.

Consider sending your email either early in the morning, to get their attention first thing in the day, or later in the day, so that they see it before they head home for work.

Step #2: Craft The Perfect Subject Line

The subject line of your email is like the headline in a newspaper. It’s what gets people’s attention. It creates curiosity in them and compels them to read the rest of the email.

A great subject line can result in a very high open percentage on your emails, while a mediocre subject line will almost always produce mediocre results.

How To Get Free Viral Traffic

 On average, most people get dozens of emails every single day. If you want others to actually read your email, you must get their attention right away.

Megan Marrs says this:

Your subject line is your first (and maybe your last) impression on users. In many ways, your email subject line is more important than your email body. After all, a great newsletter is worthless if it never sees the light of day.

So, avoid skimping on your subject line. If you want people to actually read your emails (which is the whole point), it’s essential to spend a fair amount of time crafting the perfect subject line.

So, what makes for a great subject line?

Here are eight formulas you can use to get the attention of your readers.

1. The Question

Questions make for outstanding subject lines because they force the reader to stop and think for a moment. They make the reader ponder how they will answer the question.

And they create a sense of curiosity. They make the reader want to know how you will answer the question as well.

For example, consider these subject lines:

  • Can you relate to this?
  • Do you feel like this too?
  • What do you think about this idea?
  • Do you feel exhausted without your morning coffee too?
  • Do you make the same mistake I do?

All these subject lines create what’s called a “pattern interrupt” for the reader. In other words, they interrupt the reader as they mindlessly scroll through their inbox and force them to pay attention to your email.

They also push the reader to click on the email because they want to know how the question gets answered.

2. The How To

People love to learn new things that are especially relevant to their lives. This is why DIY videos are so popular on YouTube. People have questions and they want answers. Using a how to subject line piques people’s interest, especially if it’s really relevant to them.

For example:

  • How to quickly get 1,000 email subscribers
  • How to get that nasty stain out of your shirt
  • How to make 10 sales every single day
  • How to win friends and influence people

Again, these subject lines interrupt the reader as they peruse their inbox. They cause the reader to think, “Is this something that I want or need to learn?”

If it is, they’ll click on the email.

It’s important to note that in order for the how to email to actually work, you must know your audience. In other words, you need to know what they want to know how to do.

As noted earlier, you need to be able to get inside the minds of your readers. If you don’t, your emails won’t be relevant.

3. Scarcity

People are always afraid of missing out on something good. In fact, there’s even a term for this fear: FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). You can capitalize on this fear in your subject lines. If you can create a sense of scarcity with your subject line, there’s a greater chance that people will click on your email.

Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips

The Best Affiliate Tips

What does scarcity look like in a subject line?

  • Only 2 days left!
  • Almost out of stock! Get yours now!
  • Only three hours left to register
  • This will be gone very soon
  • You’re almost out of time!
  • Only 4 spots left for a consultation

Your goal is to make the reader feel like if they don’t take action, they’ll seriously miss out on something. The more you can make your reader feel like things are urgent, the more likely it is that they’ll open your email.

4. An Announcement

Announcements trigger something in us. We want to be in the know, up to date, and always on top of things. We don’t want to miss out on any important information.

When you use words like “New” or “Introducing” or “Just Added,” you make people feel like there is important, breaking information that they need to know.

For example:

  • An important update to our app
  • New: a faster way to get paid
  • Introducing the best way to create beautiful photos
  • An invitation just for you

You want people to feel like they must open the email if they’re going to stay up to date on information. Think about your own life. You don’t want to miss out on critical information. In fact, there’s even a fear of missing out on critical information.

You want to create that same sense of anticipation and even fear in your readers.

5. The Numbered List

It’s no secret that people absolutely love lists. It’s why magazines constantly use headlines like “10 Ways To Get In Shape Fast.” We like it when things are quickly broken down for us to scan.

When things are presented in list format, we can easily get a sense of the entire thing.

You can take advantage of this by using list format subject lines.

EMAIL COPYWRITING

What would these subject lines look like?

  • The 4 best email marketing tools you need to be using
  • 7 ways to beat anxiety today
  • 15 ways to quickly build your email list
  • 9 methods for getting in shape quickly
  • 6 steps to overcoming the blues

List subject lines also tap into our desire to gain information. We know that because things are presented in list format, we’ll be able to quickly get information that we wouldn’t otherwise.

6. The Curiosity Gap

Websites like Buzzfeed constantly create curiosity with their headlines. They’ll write something strange in their headline and then answer it in the body of the article.

For example, they might say something like “You Never Knew This About Santa Claus.” Of course, this makes you want to know what you never knew about Santa Claus. You then have to read the article to find the answer.

You can use this same tactic with the subject lines of your emails.

 For example:

  • A little-known trick to bust belly fat
  • He asked me a question that I couldn’t answer
  • Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting this
  • Most people get this completely wrong
  • I don’t understand why this keeps happening

The subject line should create a question in the reader’s mind. What is the little-known trick to bust belly fat? What exactly weren’t you expecting? What do most people get wrong?

Then, in the email, you actually answer the question. It’s really important that you actually answer the question in the email. Otherwise, your readers could feel like they were duped by the subject line.

7. Surprise

Studies have shown that when people are surprised (in a good way), it lights up the pleasure center of the brain. We like to be surprised, and if you can surprise your readers with your subject line, there’s a much better chance they’ll open your email.

viral traffic

How can you surprise your readers? Make them laugh. Force them to think about something unexpected. Cite a surprising statistic.

Your goal is to force them to stop scrolling through their inbox and pay attention to what you’re saying.

A surprise subject line could look like:

  • What Elvis Presley can teach you about email marketing
  • Unexpected lessons learned from a bout with the flu
  • I’m so frustrated!
  • Warning: this email will self-destruct in 5 minutes

When people are surprised, they are also delighted. If you can delight people with your subject line, they’re almost sure to open your email and read the rest of it.

Again, it’s important that the body of your email actually match up to the subject line. You don’t want your readers to feel like you tricked them.

8. Personalized

We all love to hear our own names. In fact, in his hugely popular book How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie says that there is nothing sweeter to a person than hearing their own name.

You can use this to your advantage in your email subject lines. A recent study on subject lines found that including a person’s name increases the open rate by a whopping 14.68%!

Consider combining using a person’s name with other tactics on this list. For example:

  • Tim, Elvis Presley can teach you about email marketing
  • John, most people get this question wrong
  • I don’t understand why this keeps happening, Mary
  • Have you ever had this happen to you, Melissa?

It’s hard for a person to ignore something with their name on it. When you use a person’s name in the subject line (and the rest of the email), you compel them to open the email and read it.

Use Your Name In The “From” Section

Best Email Marketing Tips Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips

The Best Affiliate Tips

When setting up the “From” section of your email, be sure to use your name and not just the name of your company. You don’t want your email to look like it’s just coming from a company.

You want it to look like it’s coming from a person who actually cares about the recipient.

Yes, it’s fine to include your company in the “From” section but do it in combination with your name. For example, your “From” section could look like, “John @ Company X”.

Using your name also adds authenticity to the email. It shows that there is a real person behind the email.

A/B Test Your Subject Lines

A/B testing is simply testing one subject line against another to see which one gets the best results. When sending out an email you should always A/B test email subjects against one another.

Most email clients make it really simple to A/B test subject lines. Typically, you just enter in two subject lines and the email client will send out the email to a portion of your subscribers. Once a winner has been determined, the email will be sent to the rest of your subscribers.

Pay Attention To Your Preview Text

In addition to your subject line, it’s also essential that you pay attention to the “preview” text of your email. The preview text usually shows up next to the subject line in the email. If you don’t manually enter preview text, it will simply show the first line of the email.

Your preview text should also be created using one of the tactics above and should give people an additional reason to open your email.

For example, if you ask a question in the subject line, you could ask a follow up question in the preview text. Or if you create a curiosity gap in the subject line, you could write, “You won’t believe the answer,” in the preview text.

Step #3: Create Compelling Body Copy

Once you’ve crafted an extremely compelling subject line, it’s time to write the body copy for your email. In some ways, the body copy has to also do what the subject line does: keep people reading.

Each line of the copy should motivate them to read the next line. If your body copy is boring, people won’t make it past the first line. They’ll quickly delete your email and all your work will be wasted.

So how do you write compelling body copy? Use these tactics.

Get To The Point Quickly

From the outset, it should be very clear to readers why you’re emailing them. After all, they probably get hundreds of emails every single week. Why should they bother reading your email?

Avoid making the reader scroll through lots of text in order to figure out why you’re emailing them. Get to the point quickly.

Best EMAIL Copywriting Tips Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips

The Best Affiliate Tips

If you want your email to be read, it must be absolutely relevant to them.

 So why should they read your email?

  • Are you releasing an important new product?
  • Do they need to update some information?
  • Are you running a sale?
  • Are you opening up some new consulting slots?
  • Are you making an important change to your existing product?

One way to make your emails relevant to your readers is to begin by asking them a question. For example, if you’re a business growth consultant, you could open your email by asking, “What if I told you that you could double your revenue over the next year?”

Then you could move into the rest of your email where you announce that you’re opening new consulting slots.

Talk In The Second Person

Writing in the second person means using the pronouns “you”, your”, and “yours”. Doing this makes the copy about the reader, NOT about you. If you find yourself using the words, “I” or “We” a lot, there’s a good chance that you’re talking too much about yourself in the email.

You want the email to focus on them and not you.

Talk About Benefits, Not Features

You know why you’re sending your email, but does your reader understand why? Not off the bat. You need to give the reader a compelling reason to read your email and take action.

The problem with many emails is that they only focus on features, not benefits. In other words, they make an announcement or proclamation, but don’t tell the reader how that announcement benefits them.

promote affiliate Offers Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips

The Best Affiliate Tips

For example, let’s say you’re offering 30% off on a product or service. You could simply tell the reader that you’re offering a discount and that they should take advantage of it. But this doesn’t do much to convince the reader to take action.

Or, you could tell the reader the benefits of your discount.

  • What benefits will they get by purchasing from you?
  • How will it improve their lives?
  • Why should someone invest their money with you and not someone else?

Your goal is to paint a picture of the good life for the reader. You want them to feel like they would be foolish to not take advantage of what you’re offering. Show them just how much purchasing from you will make a difference in their lives.

Be Brief

Let’s be honest: no one likes emails that are overly long. If a long email appears in our inbox, we almost immediately delete it. Why? Because it’s simply too overwhelming to read. This is especially the case if we’re reading on a mobile phone. Long emails take way too much time to read and process.

In light of this, try to keep your business and marketing emails relatively brief. Ideally, you should be able to quickly summarize your main points and then let the reader click to a web page where they can get the full information.

Before you write your email, ask yourself:

  • What is the point of this email?
  • What action do I want the readers to take?
  • What will make this email a success?

If you find yourself sending an email that’s hundreds of words long, you probably haven’t sufficiently answered the above questions. Keep your emails succinct and to the point.

Delight Your Readers

Most emails are incredibly boring, right? They are purely informational, and most of the information is extremely dry.

If you can convey your message and delight your readers at the same time, there’s a much better chance that you’ll be able to get them to actually take action.

Email can be a great way to let your brand personality shine through and build a relationship with your readers.

How can you delight your readers?

  • Share a compelling story
  • Use GIFs and photos (which also serve to break up the text and catch the eye)
  • Use humor
  • Reference current events
  • Make fun of yourself (in an appropriate way)
  • Admit when you made a mistake

Overall, you want to add a sense of humanness to your emails. You want to let people know that there is a real person sending the emails, not just a nameless face at an enormous company.

Have A Compelling Call To Action

Almost every email should have a call-to-action (CTA). If your email doesn’t have a CTA, ask yourself why you’re sending it in the first place. After all, your goal should always be to get the reader to take action.

In your CTA, use actionable language. In other words, tell people exactly what to do. If you’re promoting a deal, use language such as, “View the Deal,” or, “Get In On This Deal.”

Also, make your CTAs very obvious. Make it clear what you want the reader to do. Don’t leave them guessing. If you want them to click a link or button, make it big and obvious. If you want them to reply to an email, ask them specifically to reply. If you want them to share something with friends, tell them to share.

Create-Affiliate-Marketing-Content Best Email Marketing and Email Copywriting Tips

The Best Affiliate Tips

Spend the necessary time crafting a compelling CTA. This, after all, is the point of your entire email – to get the reader to take action.

Optimize Your Emails For Mobile

Somewhere around 60% of all emails are read on mobile devices. This means that your emails need to be easily readable on mobile devices. How can you ensure that they are?

Follow these tips:

  1. Use a bigger font size. This simply makes the text easier to see on small mobile screens.
  2. Use lots of page breaks and white space. Huge chunks of text are very difficult to read on mobile devices. Break up your text as much as possible so that it’s easy to skim.
  3. Test your emails in multiple email clients. See how they look in GMail versus Apple Mail or Outlook. This will help you ensure that your emails look good no matter what platform they’re read on.
  4. Test your emails on different devices. For example, evaluate the look of your emails on Apple devices versus Android. Also, test the emails on tablets as well. You want to ensure that no matter what device is used, your email will look outstanding.

Step #4: Personalize Your Emails

We already discussed the power of personalizing the subject line of your emails, but you can go much further in terms of personalizing the emails themselves. The more you personalize the emails, the more likely it is that people will respond to them.

What are some effective ways to personalize emails?

Use The Person’s Name

Throughout the body of your email, use the person’s name at least once or twice (once in the subject line and once in the body of the email).

Obviously, you don’t want to overdo it when using a person’s name, but by including it a couple of times in the email, you make it sound as though you’re talking directly to your reader rather than to a large email list.

Be Conversational

As much as possible, make your emails conversational. Avoid talking in stiff, industry jargon. Rather, talk as though you were talking to a friend.

If you’re promoting something, promote it in a friendly way rather than an overly salesy way. Think about it as if you were recommending a product or service to a good friend rather than trying to make a sale to a complete stranger.

Campaign Monitor puts it this way:

It might feel silly at first but instead of writing for hundreds, thousands, or millions of people, pretend you’re writing the email for one person. Pretend you’re talking directly to one friend or one customer. Let them know about the exciting stuff you want to tell them and explain what you want them to do.

Focus On Them

This was noted earlier, but bears repeating. The focus of your email should always be the reader, not you. Don’t tell your readers all about what you’re doing. Rather, focus on how you can add value to the reader. Explain to the reader why your offer is so valuable.

Segment Your List

Instead of sending every email to every member of your list, consider sending different offers to different segments of your list. Why should you do this? Because not every email is going to resonate with every member of your list.

Consider these ways to segment your list:

 Location. Base your emails on where your readers live.

 

  1. For example, let’s say you know the locations of your email subscribers. If you sell bathing suits, it wouldn’t make much sense to send an email about discounted bathing suits to those who live in a location where it’s winter. That email simply wouldn’t be relevant to them.
  • Or let’s say you’re doing a meetup at a particular location. You could send emails only to those who live in that location instead of your entire list.
  1. Behavior. You can also segment your list based on demonstrated behaviors.
  • For example, you can send offers only to those who have opened your emails in the last month. This ensures that your offers are only going to your hottest prospects.
  • Or you could only send emails to those who have clicked on a particular link. By clicking on a link, they demonstrate an interest in a particular subject.
  1. Purchase history. For example, if they’ve purchased a particular item or service from you, you could send them emails about related items or services.
  2. Lead magnet. For example, let’s say you have two different lead magnets, one about losing weight and the other about healthy eating. You could send weight-loss related content to those who downloaded the first lead magnet and healthy eating content to those who downloaded the second lead magnet.

When it comes to segmenting your list, your goal is to make your emails as relevant to the reader as possible. The more relevant an email is to the reader, the more likely it is that they’ll read it and respond accordingly.

Achieve Email Marketing Greatness

One of the great temptations with email is to do things too fast. To simply bang out your email without giving it much thought. And while this certainly allows you to send more emails, it doesn’t allow you to send effective emails.

Effective emails take time, work, thought, and creativity.

In your emails, it’s important to:

  • Get inside the head of your readers, so you know what really matters to them.
  • Carefully think through your subject line to make it as compelling as possible.
  • Craft compelling body copy so that the reader wants to go through the entire email.
  • Personalize your emails so that they’re relevant.

If you don’t do these things, your emails will probably achieve mediocre results. Your open rates will be low, your click-through rates will be even lower, and your readers won’t be inclined to take much action.

If, on the other hand, you thoroughly follow the above steps, you truly can achieve email marketing greatness.

So, don’t wait any longer. Start crafting emails that get results today!

MARKETING TOOLS

 ALL IN ONE PROFIT : https://www.bestaffiliatetips101.com/aiop

 LEADSLEAP: https://www.bestaffiliatetips101.com/leadsleap

 Builda a Biz Online: https://www.bestaffiliatetips101.com/buildabiz

 List Leverage: https://www.bestaffiliatetips101.com/listleverage

 

EMAIL MARKETING & AUTORESPONDERS

 
 

How to build an email list? 2

How to build an email list with the best email marketing software [Getresponse] : The first thing you absolutely must do if you want to generate leads is to sign up for a service that will allow you to build a database of leads through a web form.

Most people simply use an autoresponder service such as MailChimp, MailerLite, aWeber, or GetResponse, but there are also services that will let you collect, store, manage, and search many different types of information if you need more details from your leads.

If all you need to collect is name and email, which is fine for most online marketing purposes, you can just use a simple autoresponder system.

Here is a list of some of the most popular autoresponder services. Each of these services is widely respected and most have similar features and pricing.

If you’re just getting started, MailChimp and MailerLite have free versions you can use for a while.

MailChimp

MailerLite

AWeber

GetResponse

>> http://www.GetResponse.com

If you’re looking to collect more in-depth information, you might want to go with a CRM, or customer relationship management, software. This type of software has in-depth information collection and management, allowing you to build a database of customer information that you can use for marketing purposes.

>> http://www.GetResponse.com

Agile CRM

Agile CRM is one of the most popular and powerful CRM systems out there, and you can start with a FREE account to give it a try. You can have up to 10 users with the trial, and you don’t have to enter any credit card information to get started.

Agile will let you set up autoresponder campaigns, perform A/B split testing, segment your lists, and even predict customer behavior in the future!

Best of all, Agile CRM has some of the Brest pricing in the industry, with plans starting at just $8.99 per month after the trial.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is one of the most well-known CRM systems out there. They have a hugely powerful suite of features, including syncing with over 200 other services from Gmail to BigCommerce, Shopify to Woocommerce.

Infusionsoft has extremely powerful analytics, a full-fledged sales pipeline built in, and much more.

The biggest drawback to Infusionsoft is pricing, which starts as $199 and scales upward. It’s a very powerful software, but the price may be a bit high if you’re just getting started.

Salesforce

Salesforce is another very well-known CRM. They have a huge arsenal of tools available, including

They have plans starting at just $25 per month for lead generation alone, so they are affordable for smaller companies who won’t have a lot of users accessing the software. If you don’t need the advanced features, you can make do with the cheapest plan just for generating leads.

Their lead management system lets you keep track of all the stages of customer interaction and transactions.

FreeAgent

FreeAgent is a very affordable CRM system that has a wealth of features, including email tracking, outbound call tracking, sales activity tracking, real-time alerts and updates, mass email send, calendar syncing, and more.

Plans start at just $29 per month, making it a great option for new companies and those who aren’t doing enough business to support the price of one of the more expensive options.

Once you’ve decided which system you’re going to use and you’ve signed up for an account and familiarized yourself with how it works, it’s time to move on to the next step—the offer.

Step Two: The Offer

Once you have chosen your system and set up your initial campaign, it’s time to think about creating your offer, which many people refer to as your “lead magnet”. It’s kind of like fishing, where your leads are the fish, and your lead magnet is the bait that lures them in.

Remember, this offer should appeal directly to your chosen demographic. You can’t expect to catch a catfish with a flashy lure meant for bass. While it’s possible, it’s not likely, and you’d stand a much better chance of catching a catfish with something that is known to appeal to them—such as chicken livers, or earthworms, or stink bait.

Try to think about what might appeal to your target audience. What would they be interested in learning that they don’t already know? What would they be interested in getting a discount on?

Most people create a special report as their lead magnet. It’s usually 10-20 pages, but may be up to 50 or so, depending on how much you want to say. Longer reports are more appropriate when you have a complex subject and aren’t selling information on the topic.

For example, if you’re in real estate and selling houses, you can give away a 50-page guide on how to find the perfect house, including information about stuff like zoning regulations, homeowners’ associations, utilities, road frontage, home inspections, etc.

But if you’re selling a course on SEO, a shorter report, say 20 pages, on a small segment of the topic would be much more appropriate, because you don’t want to give away all your information for free.

You can always outsource the creation of your lead magnet, or purchase a high-quality PLR product that you can use. This will save you a lot of time.

If you are in the Internet marketing or B2B (business-to-business) fields, you might be interested in signing up for the Automated List Profits monthly program, which delivers two fully-automated lead generation packages per month and includes a report, squeeze page, and thank you page. All you have to do is paste your opt-in code and upload everything!

You might also consider just offering a hefty discount coupon to leads, especially if you have a product that is in demand in your niche. This is especially useful if you have a recurring business model or a sales funnel with upsells that will allow you to use the initial sale as a loss leader and make more money on the back end later.

Once you have your lead magnet ready, be sure to add a link to it to your autoresponder service as a follow-up after people opt-in. You don’t want to have to send all those freebies out manually!

Check your autoresponder’s help files to find out how to set up a follow-up email that contains a link to your lead magnet. The process will be slightly different for each service, but it’s not difficult. It’s about as easy as sending an email.

Then it’s time to create the squeeze page to promote it!

Step Three: The Squeeze Page

Your squeeze page is your lead generation page. This is a web page created specifically to collect information from people and once they do, your autoresponder will direct them to the page where they can download their freebie.

How to build an email list

This page should be relatively short. It’s not like a long sales letter. People don’t need that much convincing when something is free, but they do need some. After all, they don’t want to give up their personal contact details unless they really think your lead magnet will benefit them.

For this reason, squeeze pages should have just enough information to entice the reader into taking action. If it’s too long, people will get bored and leave before they opt in!

Generally speaking, a squeeze page should consist of:

  • Headline – This needs to immediately capture their attention and persuade them to continue reading.
  • Sub-headline – This provides a little more information and works as your headline’s supporting agent.
  • Bullet points – Quick, digestible highlights about how your prospect benefits by subscribing to your newsletter, or entering your funnel.
  • A call-to-action – A direct prompt that instructs your prospect how to complete the process of signing up for your free offer.
  • Your lead generation form – usually generated by your autoresponder service or lead generation service with various form fields and a button to submit the information.

Quick Tip: ELIMINATE YOUR WORKLOAD
You can sign up to a service that provides monthly lead generation packages that include squeeze pages, high quality content that you can send out to your list, and everything else you need to start collecting leads and building your backend system.

Information to Collect

Most people collect only the name and email address of their leads, but you might need more information than that, depending on your niche market, and whether you wish to further segment your lists and identify potential customers through demographic based data.

The name and address of potential customers is probably enough information for general marketing purposes, but what if you’re selling a higher-end product or service like real estate or legal services, or something that requires one-on-one contact like coaching, you’ll want to begin collecting as much information as possible to help you better connect with potential customers.

In cases like this, it’s probably a better idea to ask for name, address, telephone number, and email. You might even need additional information, such as date of birth (if you’re selling something for adults only, for example) or even more detailed information, such as the breed of dog they own, or their income. You don’t want to ask for too much information—which will just cause people to get frustrated and leave without filling out your form—but you want to get just enough information to make sure they’re qualified.

In other words, what information do you really need to know upfront, and what can you gather later in the selling process?

Once your squeeze page is set up, and you’ve added the lead magnet to your autoresponder service, it’s time to start sending traffic to your squeeze page!

Step Four: Traffic

The three previous steps were pretty easy. Even if you create your own lead magnet from scratch, and you need time to learn how to use your autoresponder or CRM, you can complete the other three steps in a few days at most.

You might think traffic is the hardest part, but it’s actually a lot simpler than you think to get traffic! We’re going to take a look at a few of the best strategies for getting traffic, both free and paid.

Free Traffic

As far as free traffic goes, there’s only one method that’s quick enough to generate traffic starting today, doesn’t have a hefty learning curve, and provides quality traffic that can convert: social media.

Keep in mind that certain markets are more inclined to use certain social networks than others, so it’s important to locate your market and be certain you’re focusing most of your time and energy on those locations. While you can still use other social networks, most of your effort should be focused on those sites that have a higher concentration of your target demographic.

We’re going to look at a few of the most popular social networks, and how you can locate your target demographic on each one in order to find out which one(s) you should concentrate on.

Facebook

Locating your target demographic on Facebook is relatively simple. Begin by searching for a topic related to your niche and find pages and groups that fit your niche.

For example, if you are offering a dog walking service, you’d want to search for things like groups for pet owners in your city or state. Find out how many people are in those groups, and how many groups there are. This will give you a rough idea of how many people you can reach on Facebook.

Join these groups and participate in them, making sure you follow their rules. If they don’t allow promotions, you’ll need to contact the group administrators and ask for permission to advertise your service. Otherwise, you should be able to pipe in if people happen to ask about dog walking services.

You can also start your own group, which is your best option. This will give you a source of traffic you can turn into leads anytime.

You should also start a Facebook page for your business, and you can even include a link to your squeeze page on your Facebook page.

Pinterest

Pinterest is like an online corkboard. You can have multiple “boards”, and then pin images with links, sort of like bookmarking a page.

You can find out how popular your niche is on Pinterest by performing a search, and then clicking “Boards” to find out how many people have boards related to your niche AND how many followers those boards have.

You can also search pins for the niche and see how many repins each one has. This will let you know how interested people are.

Pinterest has a huge amount of traffic, and it’s relatively easy to access just by following accounts that have some connection to your niche and pinning content related to your niche and using keywords in your board names and descriptions.

You’ll need to have some interesting content to pin, so it’s a good idea to have a blog or website that you use to post content related to your field. For example, you could have a dog care blog for your dog walking service and post useful information for pet owners.

One important thing to note is that Pinterest is heavily imaged-based, so you’ll need good images to pin that relate to your article.

For example, if you’ve posted an article called “5 Tips for Housebreaking Your Puppy”, you’d want to include a photo of a dog being trained, or something related to housebreaking a puppy, and have the title of your article on the image.

If you take a look at Pinterest, you’ll see that most images are taller than they are wide. That’s because they take up the most screen real estate since images are constrained by width, but have much more space to expand lengthwise. Thus, try to make sure your images follow the same format.

Instagram

Instagram is a great platform for visual content, and you can get a lot of traffic from it, especially if your business is related to fashion, beauty, art, lifestyle, food and cooking, crafts, or other topics that are popular.

You can get a good indication of what’s popular on Instagram by opening the app and clicking the search icon, searching for a term related to your niche, and then clicking “Tags”. This will show you how many posts are currently on the site using that phrase, as well as lots of related phrases.

For example, when I search for “dogs”, I see millions of posts with such hashtags as #dogsofinstagram, #dogs, #dogstagram, and #dogsitting.

You can also click the “People” tab and click some of the top profiles to see how many followers they have. This is another good indicator of interest in your topic.

There are three important steps to getting traffic from Instagram:

1. Fill out your profile and include a link to your website or squeeze page there. Make sure to choose an interesting photo of either yourself or something related to your niche for your profile picture. And include that link because you can’t include links in the descriptions of your individual posts! (Just tell people to check your profile for a link.)

2. Post often. Instagram posts scroll by and are gone quickly if someone is following a lot of profiles, so the best way to get seen is to post as often as possible. Don’t spam! Just a few posts a day is fine, but spread them out every few hours. And don’t forget to add at least 5 relevant hashtags to every post!

3. Follow people who are related to your niche. Many will follow you back, and others will find and follow you from those people’s profiles. It’s a good idea to follow at least 20 new accounts each day, which you can find easily through the search function and referrals from other people. Stick mostly to following accounts related to your niche, because you want qualified leads, not just a high follower count!

Other Social Networks

There are other social networks that can be effective, too, depending on your market. I suggest giving each of these a try to see how they do for your particular market, but you might want to concentrate your efforts on the other sites we’ve talked about earlier in this chapter.

Paid Traffic

getresponse

I don’t recommend using paid ads until you’ve thrown a good amount of free traffic at your squeeze page for a while and tested conversion rates. If you aren’t getting many leads, you may want to make some tweaks to your squeeze page and/or lead magnet to increase those conversions.

Once you’re happy with how your page is converting, you can start sending some paid traffic to it.

Let’s look at some of the most effective paid ad platforms. These are generally the most profitable, but they may not work for all niches equally, so be sure to track your conversions carefully, tweak ads as needed, and kill any ads that aren’t performing.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is generally considered one of the best advertising platforms, because ads are typically affordable and convert well. This is mainly because of how well they are able to target ads to the appropriate parties.

Remember when we talked about how important it is to get qualified leads? Facebook is brilliant for that, because they have incredibly advanced targeting options. You can target people based on age, gender, location, marital status
 just about anything you can think of
 PLUS, you can target by interests, shopping habits, and so much more.

Sticking with our example of using a local dog walking business, you can target people in your city, or surrounding cities, AND who are dog owners. You can seriously get THAT specific!

When you create your ad, pay attention to the type of ad you’re creating. The regular newsfeed and mobile newsfeed formats are considered the most profitable.

Keep in mind that the price you pay for your ads on Facebook is heavily based on your CTR (click-thru rate), so it’s important to design the most effective ad possible. If you notice an ad has a low CTR, pause the ad and make changes. Keep tweaking until you find the right combination to bring in qualified leads at a low cost.

Facebook has a great guide to help you get started:

>> https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide

Bing Ads

Bing’s ad platform isn’t nearly as competitive as many others, because they have much less traffic than Google, Facebook, and some other platforms. However, you can still get a lot of traffic at a very low price, because the lower competition means you can actually get more traffic than you could at the more competitive sites because in many instances you could be the only advertiser in a genre.

Bing is a PPC platform just like Google AdWords, so if you’re already familiar with AdWords, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.