Tagged: email marketing software

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.

Best Email Marketing For Beginners | E-mail Marketing 2020 0

The Best Email Marketing For Beginners : List building is the process of building a mailing list and this is something that any business or marketer should be adept in. So exactly is a mailing list? That would be a collection of e-mails that you will acquire through a website and/or through other means and which you can then use in order to promote and sell products.

The great thing about these lists is that they consist of people who have willingly given you their e-mail addresses and thus given you permission to contact you. They will have visited your website or blog, so you know they’re interested in your niche or whatever it is you are trying to sell. What’s more, the fact that you can message them at will means that you will be able to develop a relationship with them, building trust and interest to the point where they are feverish to buy.

It’s for these reasons that list building is widely considered to be one of the most effective tools available to businesses as well as internet marketers.

Any marketing ‘guru’ will recommend this as one of the most important methods available and potentially it is the best and easiest route to making big money online.

The only problem is that building a massive e-mail list isn’t necessarily as easy as you might hope it would be. That’s where this book comes in to help you build a massive and relevant list quickly. In just 30 days, you’ll have a list that’s 1,000 strong and EVERYONE on that list will be a potential buyer who will be interested in everything you have to say and everything you have to sell.

1,000 broken down is just 34 subscribers a day. Achievable? You bet! In just a year, you could very well have a list of 12,000 subscribers.

So congratulations, in buying this book you have taken the first bold step towards dominating e-mail marketing. Are you ready to take the next?

The Benefits of List Building

So what is list building all about? Why is it so powerful and such an important tool for marketers?

It comes down to a few factors. Most importantly, list building gives you the means to contact a huge roster of relevant potential leads and customers. This is what will then give you the means to start e-mail marketing – which is actually a huge asset on your journey to getting profits and sales. E-mail marketing is one of the most profitable types of marketing available and one of the most popular. Just take a look at the statistics:

E-mail marketing has a ‘return on investment’ of 4,300%

91% of web users check their e-mail AT LEAST once a day


When surveyed, companies rate e-mail marketing as being more profitable than: PPC advertising, content marketing, affiliate marketing, display advertising, mobile ads, social media marketing or direct marketing!

66% of US consumers above the age of 15 say they have made purchases as the direct result of an e-mail campaign


1/3rd of consumers say they open e-mails based on the heading alone!

Perhaps the most outstanding of these figures is that amazing ROI (return on investment). How can e-mail marketing possibly net you 4,300% returns? Of course the answer all comes down to the incredible low entry price. Building a list costs you very little as you will see – but because you’re communicating personally with an audience that wants to hear from you, the conversion rate is very high.

Email Marketing For Beginners

There are other ways you can perform e-mail marketing of course, with the most popular being the use of ‘solo ads’ – adverts that you send to existing lists. Otherwise you can simply gather e-mails from various sources and create a list that way that you can contact ‘cold’.

In every case though, using proper list building techniques is by far the preferable scenario. Why? Because it means that the readers will have actually given you their e-mail addresses. This creates a subtle but VERY powerful psychological shift. Instead of being annoyed to hear from you, they will be expecting to hear from you.

When they see your name in their inbox it will spark recognition and they may even then be excited to see what you have to say. What’s more, they will have read your website or they will have seen you on social media – already you will have then demonstrated yourself to be a good authority on your subject and you’ll already have demonstrated value to that audience.

What’s more, because you’re not contacting your audience through another platform such as Facebook, you completely control the relationship and

there is no way that changes from above can cause you to lose your contacts.

Once you’ve done this and you have built a large list of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say, the next step is to then monetize your mailing list and to get your readers to become customers. You don’t do this right away though – this isn’t a simple matter of sending a message out and begging everyone to buy your product. Instead, you need to think carefully about how best to approach your list, how to establish a relationship and a rapport with them and how to get them to look forward to your messages and to trust what you have to say.

This is the other BIG advantage of building a mailing list – it allows you to reach your audience right in their inbox at any time of day with a personalized message. This personal touch then has potentially a much greater chance of getting them to where you want them to be psychologically.

The absolute masters of email marketing will use a sequence of e-mails that gradually builds anticipation for their product, that develops and establishes trust and that then eventually hits home with a highly converting sales letter. This is the kind of mastery you’ll have learned by the end of this Article!

So now you know what you have to do. The next question is
 how do you go about doing it?

In the title of this ebook we set out a very clear objective: to gain a 1,000- strong mailing list within 30 days. This objective is for everyone. You don’t need to already have a website with tons of regular visitors (in which case it will be easy for you), you don’t need to have another mailing list already and you won’t need to have any powerful contacts in the digital marketing industry (though of course all these things help!).

This strategy will work for anyone and you should find that a mailing list of 1,000 is completely ample when it comes to making conversions. With 1,000 subscribers you should expect to be able to get conversions of at least 0.5-1%. Realistically that means 50-100 buyers – which if you have a

$30 digital product will net you $3,000 a pop. That’s not bad going and it’s certainly not a bad wage for one month of work!

0.5-1% conversions is a realistic and modest target. What’s more, 1,000 subscribers is something you can very likely gun for successfully as we’ll see. But it doesn’t stop there: once you have that first 1,000 you’ll find you start to get exponential gains. The more subscribers you build, the more you will continue to build as you gather momentum, get the hang of it and leverage your existing contacts.

If you got 1,000 subscribers every month for the next year, then you would have 12,000 by the end of it – which is a pretty hefty list. More likely though, you’ll find that your rewards double each month. Month one you’ll get 1,000, month two will be 2,000 and so on. If you followed that pattern, then by the end of the year you would have
 well
 a lot.

To gain 1,000 subscribers in 30 days, you would need about 33 (point three recurring) new subscribers every day. Let’s call it 34. That might sound like a lot but this isn’t really the way you should be thinking about it.

Best Email Marketing

What you’ll find is that you’re much more likely to get 200 in one day and 500 in another. You might have a couple of days where you get none. We’ll be using different strategies throughout the month and you’ll find it’s almost impossible to predict which ones will be the big winners for you.

So that’s the plan and the aim. 1,000 subscribers. 30 days. Before you read on, I want you to completely commit to this objective. At times it will be tough and there will of course be work involved – but once you get the hang of it and once the subscribers start coming in it will be more than worth it. A huge mailing list can actually set you up for life and you can end up as one of those ‘super affiliates’ living on the beach and using your private jet to visit Mum. And it all starts here.

So make that pledge, then read on!

The first step towards your huge list is going to be signing up to a few essential services and getting a few tools. You can’t build and manage a list all on your lonesome, so read on and we’ll look at some of the things you’ll need to get this ball rolling. Consider this a little bit like the ingredients for the recipe we’re about to make.

Autoresponder

The first and most important thing you will need to build and manage your mailing list is an autoresponder. An autoresponder is basically a tool that lets you send e-mails out to large groups of people, that stores your addresses and that lets you easily manage them. Autoresponders also allow you to easily build your own opt-in forms which are the little forms you’ll place on your site for people to join up.

These are necessary for a few different reasons. For starters, a professional looking opt-in form will make your mailing list seem more professional. This in turn will mean that people are more likely to be interested in signing up and it will mean that they’ll expect higher quality. Make the form yourself and you risk making it look a little like an amateurish job – so use a professional tool instead.

Moreover though, it’s simply impossible to manage a huge mailing list without one of these tools. When you run a mailing list, you need to protect yourself against spam, you need to make sure that people confirm their interest in signing up and you need to give people the opportunity to unsubscribe. You’ll also probably want to send out a welcome message to all your new members.

With an autoresponder all this is made much easier. Autoresponders will handle all these different jobs automatically, meaning that you don’t have to manually add and remove people from your list or manually welcome new members. If you were to at some point have a mailing list of hundreds of thousands of members you’d end up spending all day adding and removing people from your list – and that’s why you need an autoresponder to do it for you.

Best Email Marketing