Friday, 29 July 2016

Customer Data: The Solution to Lead Generation

More leads, please.

In most companies, it’s an ongoing process to generate interested buyers to your product and services.

We want qualified leads that move effortlessly throughout the sales cycle.

But the problem lies in our preparation. Some of us just don’t have enough information about our prospects.

The CSO Insight study reported that “42 percent of sales reps feel that they don’t have the right information before making a call.”

Use accurate customer data to prepare your team. Knowing key insights can make or break the deal.

Power up your data profile. Leverage it to produce more qualified leads.

Gathering Reliable Data

Based on a Ascend2 study, “35 percent of those surveyed said the biggest barrier to lead generation success is the lack of quality data.” Your data should tell a vivid story of your customer.

To gather reliable data, track anonymous users who visit your website. Watch leads interact with your content via session replays.

Ask for feedback from current customers. Monitor the trends of loyal consumers.

B2B marketers must also “embrace more third party and real-time data sets to really understand buyer’s across the entire customer journey.” For example, that may include using social logins to access a prospect’s profile information.

Data is widely available. Your team must decide which acquisition channels work for your company.

What’s the best way to collect email addresses? Or how can you quickly accumulate customer preferences?

customer-demographics-chart

“Understanding who your customers are and, in turn, what they like, will undoubtedly enable you to increase conversions and sales. Make it easy for your customers to share their data with you, and use that data to keep them engaged with your business,” says Josh George, a senior applications engineer at Lyons Consulting Group.

Know who you’re serving. Collect valid data for better results.

Enhancing Buyer Personas

Get inside your prospects’ minds. Map out your ideal customer to understand their reasons for buying.

But, what’s the point?

Buyer personas are roadmaps to navigating through your prospects’ interests, dislikes, and habits. If you’re aware of their behaviors, your team can create targeted solutions.

“By developing research-based buyer personas, you can create effective, highly targeted marketing campaigns. Each piece of communication ties back to your buyer personas so that every message addresses relevant pain points and positions your software as a viable solution,” states Brie Rangel, Account Strategist at IMPACT.

Knowing the basic demographics of your buyer is a given. Your team’s goal is to dive deeper. Learn your customers’ goals, challenges, and personal story.

Below is an example of a buyer persona for a specific startup founder. The story section offers a complete picture of the prospect, everything from the stage of his product to what he does for fun.

buyer-persona-startup-founder

The role of customer data is to provide accurate information for your buyer personas. You don’t want to waste time selling enterprise-level B2B SaaS software to a B2C startup.

Moreover, inaccurate buyer preferences and habits will leave both the prospect and sales rep frustrated. So, double-check your personas.
Because in the end, your mission is to match your product with a qualified lead. That’s how you bring in sales.

“Use personas to spend more time with qualified leads, because they’re the ones who are most likely to turn into those long-term customers you’re looking for,” says Nicole Dieker, freelance writer and copywriter.

Enhance your buyer personas. Use data to add a face to the customer.

Segmenting Your Audience

After learning your customers distinct behaviors, it’s time to serve those individual needs.
It makes no sense to group everyone together.

If Sally specifically likes apples, why send her emails about oranges and grapefruits? Instead, educate her about the difference between gala apples and pink lady apples.

That’s a mental hurdle for most SaaS teams. We assume if our customers like X; they will definitely love Y. It isn’t always that simple.

Segmentation comes in many shapes and sizes. From geographical to behavioral differences, your customers vary. And it’s up to your team discover how to connect with them.

market-segmentation-approaches

You might consider a city in a particular state or the buyer’s readiness to purchase. Work with your team to develop a goal.

Define your reason for segmentation. Experienced marketing and product leader Doug Goldstein offers the following common segmentation objectives:

  • Create segmented ads & marketing communications
  • Develop differentiated customer servicing & retention strategies
  • Target prospects with the greatest profit potential
  • Optimize your sales-channel mix

Segmentation is impossible without customer data. Add insights derived from analytics to guide how you group prospects.

And don’t be afraid to experiment. Testing is how you’ll discover the right messaging for your sales reps. Plus, it can help you market product information on your site.

“When practicing website optimization, leveraging customer segmentation provides a framework for running intentional, well-hypothesized experiments on your website that drive value,” writes Junan Pang, a solutions architect at Optimizely.

Segment your audience to deliver more personalized and timely experiences. With a segmented list, you’ll be able to target the right services to interested buyers.

Building The Relationship

You can collect the data, create the buyer personas, and segment your audience. But all that data can’t substitute customer relationships.

And that’s where most businesses miss their opportunity.

“[C]ompanies often manage relationships haphazardly and unprofitably, committing blunders that undermine their connections with customers,” states Jill Avery, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

Customer data is intended to facilitate the relationship between the sales rep and the buyer. However, research shows that companies without sophisticated data management tools “derive erroneous results that annoy customers, resulting in a 25 percent reduction in potential revenue gains.”

bad-impressions

Don’t attempt to foster a customer relationship with poor-quality data. If you do, prospects will seek out your competitors.

TechTarget executive editor Lauren Horwitz and SearchCRM site editor Tim Ehrens agree:

“Customer data management often falls to the bottom of the priority list. Organizations get bogged down with more pressing issues, such as cutting costs or keeping daily operations running. But relying on poor-quality customer data almost always frustrates customers — and many of them take their business elsewhere.”

Relationships are built on human-to-human contact. That means being genuinely interested in your buyer’s concerns.

How can you make their lives better? Where can you offer convenience?

And sometimes your product won’t be the solution. Yes, your SaaS service may not be the best option for that particular person.

Sales teams must recognize that it’s okay to remove unqualified prospects from the pipeline. This action should be commended, not frowned upon.

Use customer data as a tool to score leads. Then, gain insight on how to target prospects that matter to your company.

Data shouldn’t supplant the customer relationship. Make the human connection.

Go for the Data

Your team needs qualified leads. Focus on customer data as a solution.

Gather data from reliable sources. Use buyer personas to target your audience. Segment their behavior to create a personalized approach. And focus on building relationships throughout the sales cycle.

Want more leads? Go for the data.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.



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3 Tips to Improve Marketing Accountability

Marketing accountability can be a challenging endeavor – and conquest—for organizations. While it can be incredibly exciting for an organization to make the decision to introduce technology platforms to assist in the improvement of marketing accountability, it’s critical to understand the management and measurement implications that will support success. 

Even when an organization has processes in place to leverage technologies, refinement and optimization strategies must continually evolve in tandem with marketing goals. 

Whether you’re a marketing leader or a boots-on-the-ground pro managing marketing technology daily, here are some key considerations to enhance your marketing accountability:

1. Position your marketing for programmatic success. To employ a necessary cliché, it has to be said that programmatic marketing and advertising is the wave of the future. According to eMarketer, programmatic digital display ad spending is projected to reach $26.78 billion by 2017. That’s up from only $10.32 billion in 2014. This means that marketing professionals and hiring managers should consider programmatic knowledge a core skillset. That requires an organizational commitment to the development of programmatic thought leadership and marketing application.  

You don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to monetize core inventory. The entire programmatic category is seeing increased spending across the board due to its predictive yield and ROI for marketers and publishers alike, not to mention easy insertion processes and lower barriers to entry for most advertisers. 

2. Develop data “Dos” and “Don’ts” that support meaningful marketing. You need to encourage your customers and the modern marketing community to “Think beyond the transaction.” In other words, consider the treasure trove of data available to you that can be leveraged to create rich, meaningful buyer profiles that help you better target, as well as understand the attributes of your ideal customer. Invest your time and team resources into a strategic blueprint of data “Dos” and “Don’t’s” relevant to your business goals, and consider the benefits of implementing a data management platform (DMP) to support your strategic goals.

Organizations previously focused on their known marketing channels—for example email data stored in a familiar place: CRM systems. But now the focus has shifted to anonymous channels. Offline and online data—or known and unknown—is important. 

Presenting valuable and compelling offers hinges on the ability to develop creative and content that aligns with audience browsing habits and patterns. All of this insight needs to be matched with channel insight to ensure relevance and maximize the interaction, and the DMP helps marketers achieve that. 

3. Test your tech stack accordingly. To ensure that you’re maximizing your budgets and resources from an investment perspective, consider which tools will help you achieve your goals and position your measurement strategy for success, as well as the technologies that will support your existing technology infrastructure. The DMP can collect rich behavior data and attributes such as website actions, product engagements, or demographic information. From there, it can pass that data into a cross-channel marketing solution to build a more comprehensive, actionable customer profile to inform that holy-grail customer experience previously discussed.

Ready to seize the opportunity to reinvent your marketing function as a core part of your company’s revenue engine? For more insights on how to maximize your data and accountability strategies, Download The Guide to Advertising Accountability.



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What to Look for in a Professional Content Writer

how to identify a professional writer

Every business needs content. Not the bland, me-too nonsense that frequently clutters up our inboxes and feeds, but genuinely useful, interesting content.

Content that helps a business stand out amid the clutter and noise. Content that moves prospects closer to a sale. Content that can become a powerful differentiator for your company.

And businesses often have a tough time finding the writers who know how to create that type of content over time.

One of the reasons I think organizations struggle is that they don’t always know what qualities will make for a genuinely productive, profitable hire. And as you might guess, I have a few strong opinions about that.

So, here’s what I think you should look for when you need to hire a content professional to create the marketing that will move your business forward.

A professional content writer has a strong, confident writing voice

A strong, confident writing voice is essential.

Strategy, marketing, and persuasion techniques can be taught (that’s what we’re here for). Voice, on the other hand, develops over time and needs to come from within a creative, intelligent, sensitive human being.

While a solid writing voice can be developed over time (here’s how), your writer won’t ever get there without a lot of passion and commitment. Talent doesn’t hurt, either.

Look for a writer whose work is interesting, funny, smart, perceptive, and convincing. Look for someone whose writing you just like to read.

Some have it and some don’t. Insist on hiring the one who does.

A professional content writer has a solid grasp of spelling, grammar, and usage

Unless you have the bandwidth to add a content editor to your team, your writer needs to have a solid grasp of usage, spelling, and all those mundane issues that can make us look silly when we get them wrong.

Your writing candidates should get their feathers ruffled when someone uses it’s for its. Every writer occasionally makes a typo — but for a professional, that should be rare.

A professional content writer finds the intriguing angle

Well-crafted content is important — but if it’s not wrapped up in a fascinating package, it probably won’t get read or shared.

Strong content writers are capable and creative. They think about your topic in interesting ways. (Mainly because professional writers think about their topics all the time. Occupational hazard. Probably why we’re such odd birds.)

A pro knows how to deliver the usefulness that audiences need, but also wraps it up in unusual hooks and angles that will capture attention and engage curiosity.

A professional content writer understands the elements of content that sells

There are plenty of writers out there who can write a pleasing sentence or paragraph.

But a content professional also understands how content can move prospects smoothly down the path from stranger to interested prospect to delighted customer.

She understands headlines and why content gets shared. She knows what type of content works well in blog posts and what’s better saved for a landing page or an email message.

A professional content writer lives and breathes strategy. Which brings me to my next point …

A professional content writer can articulate why she’s using a particular content strategy

If you have a writer working for you, that person should be able to tell you precisely why she’s taken a particular angle with a blog post, video script, or white paper.

She can explain how your content program ties into your search strategy and why she’s using the number 8.4 in the headline, rather than rounding it up to 9.

Give her a chance and she’ll talk your ear off about the structure of bullet point fascinations, benefits over features, and the call to action.

The people who revel in this stuff are the ones who create compelling marketing content that builds your business. Whether or not you find it exciting, your writer needs to.

She needs to be able to tell you why, so your entire organization moves in the same direction.

(And on your part, you need to take the time to listen to those explanations. Don’t hire a pro and then second-guess every move she makes. If you want great content, you need to give your writer the space to craft that greatness.)

A professional content writer has a commitment to quality and ongoing education

If content is important to your business, you need a professional, not an interested amateur.

And one of the hallmarks of the professional is commitment. Commitment to getting better over time, to staying on top of developments in the field, to a lifetime of learning.

Raw talent to write is important, and an understanding of strategy is important. But you also want to find someone who takes the profession seriously — as a profession — and continues to sharpen and refine his skills.

From search algorithms to social platforms to what types of headlines are performing well these days — professional writers need to stay plugged in to what’s changing in our profession.

A serious content professional also takes the initiative to become an authority in the topics he writes about. He interviews experts (some of whom might be within your company), performs independent research, pores over industry journals, and talks with customers.

You can find that level of dedication in a freelancer who specializes in your industry, or you can build a long-term relationship with a strong content generalist who takes the time to develop that depth of knowledge about your individual company.

What you don’t want is a pennies-a-word person from one of the cheap freelance sites. They simply can’t make the commitment to learning your topic the way a true pro can.

Where do you find these content professionals?

I cheated when I wrote this post — because I went to the guidelines for our Certified Content Marketer application evaluations.

These are the qualities we look for when we’re assessing the work of writers seeking our Certification — and these are the qualities you’ll find in the writers who earn that badge.

We have a whole page dedicated to them — some serving specific niches like real estate or healthcare, and others who write across several industries.

A member of the Copyblogger editorial team takes a close look at each applicant’s writing. (I’m on the evaluation team as well.)

We look for the qualities I talked about above: a great writing voice — first and foremost — paired with strategy, professionalism, and straight-up marketing chops.

If you’re looking for a serious content professional, this is where you’ll find her or him. But don’t wait too long.

The perfect writer for your business would love to get started making your content program more successful … don’t let her slip away to some other company.


If you’re a writer who wants to become a Certified Content Marketer, our training program opens to new students next week …

But you can get in early if you add your email address below.

The Certified Content Marketer training program helps writers position themselves and their offerings, so that they can build profitable freelance writing businesses.

Find out when our Certified Content Marketer training program reopens:

Editor’s note: The original version of this post was published on November 12, 2014.

The post What to Look for in a Professional Content Writer appeared first on Copyblogger.



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Email Marketing: The Permission Question and the Deliverability Answer

Permission is something that is discussed every day with our deliverability customers. They are always asking questions around what is and what isn’t acceptable. Senders want to understand who they can email, and how can they grow that list each and every day. The list of places where marketers are asking for permission also seems to grow every day as well.

Let’s review the standards of permission that we believe are necessary to be successful.

We require an explicit opt-in to communicate with customers. This might be an eye-opener for some senders who have relied on implicit opt-in as the permission method of choice. Why the change? This change came from the evolution of ISP’s and how they look at engagement. They have upped the standards to a point where sending to implicit opt-ins at any volume levels will most likely result in the bulking or blocking of those messages. There are also the questions of specific country regulations that are trending on the explicit permission side (some countries have laws that regulate this sort of thing). If you haven’t yet spoken with your legal team, it’s past time to evaluate potential risk by sending to folks who didn’t explicitly opt-in.

What are explicit opt-ins? You give the customer an opportunity to enter an email address specifically to receive email. They are given an opportunity to check a box, tick a bubble, or otherwise move a permission lever in order to receive messaging. This does not include pre-check boxes, which we don’t recommend in any circumstance.

One of the newest permission questions to arrive on the scene concerns apps. We’re all downloading some type of app these days, whether we’re searching for Pokemon, or checking our email. As part of the sign-up process there are multiple methods for collecting email addresses. Some methods don’t require the email or give an unchecked box that the user can choose to fill out. Some just require the email address and sail through the sign-up with no options for marketing materials. We obviously feel strongly that the former method is the way to go. The backlash from people who wanted to play a game, but are now bombarded by marketing messages is not pleasant. We see high spam complaints, and low engagement coming from these recipients. These are both pretty bad news for deliverability.

The apps/permission question is very much like the debate around the abandoned cart email. We don’t believe that someone who visits a site for the first time, and puts something in a shopping cart without finishing the process has “signed-up” for email. It can be a controversial subject, but we know that senders who follow this practice generally see reduced deliverability performance.

What’s the way around these issues? We would recommend the following method if you are required to email people gathered through one of these implicit methods. Send a series of 2-4 permission pass messages. Ask the person if they want to receive email from you. If they don’t respond, respect that permission. You’ll send less email, but the reality is that the messages you do send will probably be seen by your customers.

Don’t trick your customers, or feel like you've gained a customer by slipping that permission choice past them. The harm done by someone who is upset that they are being “spammed” is far greater than the few people that you might convert with liberal permission marketing policies.

Although we have covered the standards of permission necessary to be successful, you will definitely find that the Email Deliverability Modern Marketing Guide will get you on the right track for successful email deliverability. Download it today! 

Email Deliverability Modern Marketing Guide



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2 Experts Share What Running a Membership Site is Really Like (FS173)

On the show today, 2 experts share what it’s really like to run a membership site.

The experts, of course, are Corbett Barr and Chase Reeves (that’s me) 2 of the co-founders of Fizzle’s Business Courses & Community, a membership site that’s been live for almost 4 years at the time of writing.

There’s a lot of conversation in the world of online business about how valuable a recurring revenue model. Dependable recurring income that you can count on sounds very sexy if your business needs to be selling to new customers every single day.

So, is it as good as it sounds? Or, as a smart Fizzler put it in the forums: what don’t I know about running a membership site?

That’s what we lay out for you today on the show, diving in deep to a big list that Corbett prepared. Enjoy!

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Chase: Today on the show, we’re talking about what you need to know about membership site business models. How did I do at that one?

Corbett: Nailed it. You didn’t even look at your notes.

Chase: It’s the pauses. It’s all in the pause.

Corbett: Yeah. Let me try again.

Chase: It’s the pull back that generates the force.

Corbett: Today, we’re going to talk about what you need to know about membership site business models.

Chase: Yes, I like it. It’s a little pedantic. What I need you to be doing is like shuffling papers around your desk like a news anchor. I don’t know. In certain name of a news anchor here who’s just casual and cool. This isn’t just a local …

Corbett: [Inaudible 00:04:05]

Chase: Of course. Who else’s going to be thinking?

Corbett: That guy’s put on some weight since I was a kid.

Chase: I don’t know who is. There are listeners in the Northwest who are just like, “Oh my God.” We are talking about the business models of having a membership site. What are the things you need to know? There’s a lot of info out there where people are going, “I want to start a business or do something where I can …” No, they’re saying like, “Hey, I want to make money without working. How do I do that,” and then they’re finding things like Pat Flynn stuff about niche sites or something like that. They’re finding things about passive income. One of the things that comes up about that is everybody will start talking, “We want to make you product that your selling your thing.” You’re like, “Oh good and that costs $200 and I do launches twice a year and I sell and make some money a couple of times a year.” It doesn’t take very for you to go like, “I wish I didn’t have to do this whole selling all the time thing.”

Corbett: Yeah. Launching all the time.

Chase: “Launching all the time thing and I could just have people paying me every month.”

Corbett: Right. Yeah. I think there’s thing feeling that a subscription based model is some panacea.

Chase: We think it’s going to solve all our problems because think about it. All you see is here is what I want to do. I want to have money come in every single month without me doing a heck of a lot of work. Can I do? I think that’s what most people think of when they of a membership site.

Corbett: Yeah. I think that a lot of people are also just legitimately looking at business models and thinking that not that they don’t want to do work but they look at the subscription based model and they think that there are some advantages to it and there are. You hear a lot about it because there’s this whole world out there that most of us aren’t participating in but it’s called SaaS, Software as a Service. Usually you pay for Software as a Service on a monthly basis. Most of us do this. We pay MailChimp. We pay Wistia and a bunch of others. You hear about that a lot because VCs talk about it and entrepreneurs talk about it because it is a really interesting business model. You find a customer. If you serve them well, then the hope is that they will continue to come back month after month after month and pay you for that product. When it works well, it’s nice because the revenue is very predictable from month to month. You also aren’t having to go out and find new customer all the time because you have a built in customer base.

You do on the other hand have to win your customer over and over again.

Chase: You have to win them over every month.

Corbett: You have to support them. We just happen to get a few really great questions about membership site business models or subscription based trainings.

Chase: This is in our forum of our membership site.

Corbett: Exactly. I think a lot of people come into Fizzle and they’re interested in what we’re doing and so they want to build something similar. They’re curious about it. Let’s start out with the first question from a member named Gregg. Gregg says, “Hey entrepreneurs. I want to create the equivalent of Fizzle within my industry. I know how to sell. I know how to build an audience. I know how to create content. I know how to do community building. Essentially I have all the hard skills required to make it a real thing and hopefully a successful thing. What I don’t have is the experience with this kind of business. I’ve never run or built a membership site or a subscription business. Here’s my question to any of you who do have this experience. What don’t I know? What are the intricacies involved in this business model that I don’t currently understand? What do you wish you knew getting into building a membership? I love to hear your insights.” He just posted this recently and I jumped right on it because obviously we have some insights in here. I think we can share many of those today.

Really the gist is we talked about this on an episode a while back. What don’t I know and that’s really what gets you …

Chase: I love Gregg’s question here starting with what don’t I know. You know what I mean? It’s just a smart question to ask. This is a trick for anyone no matter what business model you want to do, no matter how much you’ve thought about it or planned about it or read about it or studied up on it, right?

Corbett: Yeah.

Chase: You could totally glean some things by talking to people who are doing that or have done it and say what don’t I know. That’s a great question. That’s what we want to do in this episode. What don’t you know about membership site stuff.

Corbett: I thought you were waiting for me to say it.

Chase: I can do that again. What don’t you know about …

Corbett: Membership site business models.

Chase: Bam. Hey, I got a question. If the moon was made of cheese, would you eat it? If your fingers were made of sausages, would you eat them? It’s a simple question. A baby could answer it. We were both drinking last night at our friend’s party and I’m like halfway there in my brain. It’s 4 PM and I still haven’t even woken up. I don’t even know where I am. I got a chantey in my hand. I’m feeling all right.

Corbett: Chase’s unwind time starts at about 4:45. You’re on the downhill slope. If you’re just joining us today, we’re talking about what you don’t know about membership site business models.

Chase: Let’s get back into it.

Corbett: This question from Gregg, he wants to know what don’t I know about membership site business models. He wants to know what are the intricacies involved in this business model that I don’t currently understand and what do you wish you knew going into building a membership site.

Chase: All right. It looks like you’re answering this in the forums. It’s pretty good. Let’s get into it. Let’s just start diving into some stuff. Let’s assume that people who are listening to this read has read an introductory article about what is a membership site or something like that. Let’s get a little bit into the nitty-gritty of what it looks like to actually be doing this. What your life actually looks like.

Corbett: What maybe surprised us in this regard.

Chase: What has surprised you?

Corbett: The point that I made in the forums to Gregg … I just realized I spelled his name wrong. I spelled it with 1 G instead of 2.

Chase: I’m going to go in there and edit that for you.

Corbett: This is so embarrassing. We really were surprised at the amount of ongoing work that it takes to build a membership site. We started Fizzle as a team of 3 and we’ve hovered between 3 and 5 people on the team since inception. Even with that small team, we’ve still found it to be a bit of a struggle to keep up with all of the different ongoing work that needs to happen. For us specifically, our membership site offers training which means our members are expecting us to create new training modules for them, new courses. They’re expecting us to coach them in some way, to answer their questions. Our time ends up being divided between a bunch of different things every week. To figure this out, I just looked at my to do list over the past couple of weeks and realized here are the different things that we do. Customer support is one thing. Just answering basic questions. A lot of pre sale support as well. People writing in with questions about is this right for me. We also spend a lot of time on content marketing which we’re doing right now on both podcasting and blogging.

We publish every week. We’ve published a podcast every week for the past 3 years. Similarly, we publish a blog post every week. We create courses for members. A course for us a pretty significant undertaking. I remember early on we had a lot of enthusiasm and we also had no customer support, no marketing to worry about and so we were able to crank out a fair number of courses. When you start piling on all the other activities, you end up realizing that you just have a little sliver of your week available for creating the content that your members need. Creating a significant course for us like we just launched the “Start A Blog That Matters” course, the redo of it which is really great.

Chase: Pardon that D.

Corbett: The response to that has been awesome but it took us, I don’t know, like 3 solid months of scripting and writing and filming and editing and all that stuff. That was you and I both working on it pretty hard. We spend time coaching our members. Again, if you’re offering training this sort of thing, it’s like office hours. If you’re on a college course, you expect to be able to talk to your professor once in awhile to clear up some questions. We do that. We answer member questions in our forums. We have a big community there and we like to be active there to make sure that we’re fostering that sense of people are able to get answers there. We maintain and improve our platform. We has this whole software infrastructure, right? There’s the payments processing and the user interface and all that kind of stuff. You can outsource some of that stuff. We decided to custom build it and it costs us some time. Luckily, you are and I able to write the software and work on the user interface for the most part.

Chase: This stuff can be really complicated. There are some software that helps you out quite a bit. Plug-ins for WordPress or things like that. I never looked at one of these like out of the box type of course ware type of deals in some ways but with the membership stuff all built in and all of that. I don’t know how easy it can be out there but I know that no matter how easy it is, you’re still going to feel like your hands are tied in some situations. Things that you want to do you’re still going to need lots of customization if you want to do it a particular way.

Corbett: The customization’s always going to take you time or communicating with the support staff at some other business that you put your platform on. We also spend time working with partners who send members our way. There’s all the regular business stuff no matter what model, the legal, the finance, to hiring, all that stuff. I wanted to stress to Gregg that we do this with a team of 3 to 5 people and we still feel like we don’t have enough hours in the day to get it done. Whenever someone asks us about running this subscription based training platform as a 1 person team, we usually caution them because there’s a lot of work to be done. We see this a lot of times with people who will launch a new blog or a new podcast. If you’re a 1 person team, it’s easy to get caught up just in that piece of content creating let alone to create a new product. On top of creating a product, imagining having to sort that product week after week after week. It can be a challenge.

That’s really the main thing that I think we’ve learned just how much work it is and then the differences between running it as a 1 person team and a 3 to 5 person team.

Chase: You listed off a bunch of bullet points here. These are things that we have to do. Honestly, if we really fail on any one of these, our membership will sense that. The members will feel that. If we slack on customer support, if we’re not there for them when they email, people are going to lose confidence in us. People are not going to trust us quite as much or something like that. You’re going to see that on the back end if we’re slacking on making courses, if they’re not as good or if they’re not as frequent or if they’re not on the topics that I need or something like that. People are going to start to cancel if that cancellation that we’re always fighting against. I think one of the biggest metrics to find in a membership site or membership business is churn, C-H-U-R-N. Churn is how many members are cancelling every month or every week or however you measure it. Because the thing is for us with Fizzle for example, Fizzle’s only about $1 a day, $35 a month.

Really, really affordable compared to other products that are similar in some ways but also right along lines of things like Lynda.com or I don’t know what other … Like Treehouse training things where you’re like, “I’m learning a professional skill that’s going to earn me revenue.”

Corbett: I’m paying monthly.

Chase: I’m paying monthly. We also have a yearly membership where you get a handful of months for free. All that instead of paying $2,000 for one 6 month or 3 month course that you take with somebody.

Corbett: Ninety-seven dollars or whatever it is.

Chase: Exactly. The idea is this is an affordable thing that anybody can basically get into if they’re serious about starting a business. It’s literally the most affordable thing for professional training, actual support, group coaching, these things that you get every single week. Even though it’s all affordable, we still have to provide all of that value to every single member so they feel like it’s worth it. That’s the wait that comes with a job like this. I always envy my friends who just have a course for sale or multiple courses for sale or things like that where it’s just, “Now, I’m just blogging on this. I’m making this podcast. I’m doing this thing. I’m becoming a personality doing the thing. I’ve got a couple of courses to sell and people are just buying those and they’re going through it in their own ways.”

Corbett: This is the thing, the grass is greener on both sides. Whenever I sit down with an entrepreneur who has courses like that, somebody who’s established some big names out there, often they’re jealous about our business model. Here you are saying the reverse is true. The reality of having to earn your customers every month is really what directs the work that you’re going to do. That can be good and bad. For us, I think on balance we actually like that part of it because it really puts our head where it needs to be on making a great product.

Chase: For us, why does this work? Okay. Break this apart. Why did this work for Fizzle? For 1 major reason, Corbett had a started a blog called “Think Traffic” and had a really big following there. Large site. Huge email list of people going like, “I trust this guy. Send me everything that you write.” When we launched Fizzle, we launched it into that, a large group of people of which a small percentage were willing to pay for a greater access to you, Corbett, and to professional training in the form of courses as well as community. You’re not doing this alone. There’s other people who are enthusiastic bloggers and podcasters in the entrepreneurs of all shapes.

Corbett: Right there along with you.

Chase: Depending on who you talk to in Fizzle, some people will say, “The community is blowing my mind. It’s the only thing I ever really use in Fizzle and it’s super helpful.” Others will say, “I don’t really spend any time in the forums but the courses have absolutely changed how I look at business.” Some people will say like, “Yeah. It’s pretty good. I just like it. I like it that I can go in and I can end up searching in the forums before I go searching online to find an answer. Chances are there’s going to be an intelligent answer there.”

Corbett: Right.

Chase: They just keep it around as like, “It’s nice to have when I need it.” There’s all these different people within Fizzle because I think we have a wide net that we cast saying, “Anybody who wants to do a small business basically.” Specifically as well business on the internet or using the internet at least as one of your main things there which is really wide. If you had a membership site just for designers who design email newsletters, that could be very small but very profitable as well in some ways or in that … I don’t know how much they’d be willing to pay for this stuff. The idea of being if you are a really focused and niche, Fizzle was just for bloggers and the whole thing was just a blogging membership site. It’d be more targeted. In some ways you wouldn’t have as much cross-pollination would you?

Corbett: Here’s the thing, you’ve started talking metrics, churn. Another one is average revenue per user or per member. What you can do is you figure out the average price that somebody pays you per month and the average amount of time that a member sticks around. You multiply the 2 of those and you get your average customer lifetime value. You can argue that with Fizzle let’s say for example, that people stick around for 6 months on average. You could multiply 6 times 35 and figure out that our lifetime value is $100 something, $200, something like that. You could argue that well, we could just sell a $200 product instead of selling this ongoing membership.

Chase: Two hundred and ten dollars and then on average have make money per purchase.

Corbett: Exactly. What you were just …

Chase: We’re talking today about what you need to know about membership site business models, right? We talked about a handful of bullet points of just all these tasked that we have to do that you might not know you got to do. We’ve got into the reality of you got to earn your customers every single month. I was talking a little bit about the difference between if you focus broadly versus narrowly in your topic or just whatever. There’s a lot of different ways you can shape your membership site.

Corbett: The next place I wanted to go with that was this idea that in order to make a membership site work well, you have to have something that … A problem that you’re trying to solve that is an ongoing, long-term pursuit, need. For example, you talked about designers who are setting up email templates. It could be the case that they have a short-term need. Really they need to learn some things and it only takes a month to do so.

Chase: Why have a membership site?

Corbett: They’re not going to stick around.

Chase: Actually I’d really be curious about … Okay. “Start A Blog That Matters,” this course that we just renovated, we just completed updated, you launched that originally several years ago as a standalone course with some support along the side, right?

Corbett: A little bit. It was $97. Customers were able to leave comments on lessons but we didn’t have ongoing coaching or anything.

Chase: Okay. Got it. What I’m curious is in a few paragraphs, how would you describe the difference between selling that? Because it sounds like that’s what you’re getting at, the difference between … They’re telling that 1 time thing and doing the ongoing, now the membership thing that we do.

Corbett: Right.

Chase: Right? If you had to describe the difference, what made you … First of all, describe the difference as you see it, just what it feels like to be the entrepreneur each of these and then what made you choose and decide to go the membership route?

Corbett: A couple of things. One, with “Start A Blog That Matters” being a $97 course, we had wild swings in revenue from month to month. Sometimes you’d partner with somebody and you’d make a ton of money and the next month, it would just go down to a baseline of whatever your content marketing efforts were bringing in. It would fluctuate quite a bit. That’s always hard to build a business around. The other thing is we had built other courses. We aren’t just talking about “Start A Blog That Matters” in isolation, we had built other courses and so from a customer standpoint, it became a little bit confusing as to which one should I take first and why doesn’t what I contribute in the comments to this course apply to the other course and so on. Customer support was different for each of them and it just became a little bit messy. We wanted to bring that all under one roof. Now, running Fizzle, obviously the revenue is very stable as I mentioned before which is really nice.

It also allows us to do sometimes smaller, little chunks of courses that wouldn’t be a good standalone and that we would never invest enough time to do in standalone but nevertheless they’re really important to people even though they’re short and sweet. Again, there’s pros and cons.

Chase: When you’re talking about that just to give the listener a little bit of, I don’t know, something to chew on about that. For instance, we have this course “Start A Blog That Matters.” We have this course “Growing Your Email List To 10,000 and Beyond.” We have this course “Essentials of Web Design for Business Builders” for non-designing business builders, just what you need to know about design. All these are very standaloney courses. Anybody could jump in. We can sell them individually for any number of prices. We have another that’s like “Business Archetypes and Minimum Viable Income” which is a small piece but a really important piece of every entrepreneur’s journey. Nobody would buy that individually but if we place that into the roadmap at the right place, we can get you thinking about questions you didn’t know you should be thinking about. In a very effective way, making simple decisions and informed decisions up front so that when it’s time for you to make your first product, you’ve already answered a lot of these questions.

Those questions that you answered awhile ago, they informed your business decisions that you made since then so that your product is way more likely to succeed in your audience the way you’ve been building it.

Corbett: Right.

Chase: Right? Little things like that that we’re able to do because we have this roadmap. Hopefully with people who are members and are digging it, it’s an indeterminable amount of time with them. We can say, “Listen. Building a business doesn’t take a month. It doesn’t take 3 months. It takes 5 years.” If you’re around and you get answers to your questions promptly and they’re solid over the first year, 2, 3 years of that, basically you’re going to do your business in much less than 5 years. You’re going to make a lot more progress faster. You’ll be earning money faster which means you’re paying for Fizzle but eventually that becomes a sound investment when it starts paying off.

Corbett: Yeah. There’s no question that the value is incredible inside of Fizzle …

Chase: I think that’s a big thing that maybe we … You’ve got to create that value. That’s a part of this needing to convince your customers every single month.

Corbett: Absolutely. Back to the pricing question and the customer lifetime value, again, you could argue that it’s the same … You could either sell a one off product for the customer lifetime value that earned from the membership site or you could run it as a membership site. The 2 are roughly equivalent but the difference is that a customer gets to decide how much value they’re getting from the product and then they based on that. It’s almost as if you’re offering products at a bunch of different price points because on one hand, somebody can jump in Fizzle. Try it for free. In fact, if you’re a podcast listener, you can try it for free for 5 weeks by going to Fizzle.co/try5.

Chase: Which is a long time. You could go take all of “Start A Blog That Matters” which is a very priced … Could be a very pricey course if we sold it individually.

Corbett: On one hand, you have customers who paid nothing and then maybe they decide Fizzle isn’t right for them. On the other hand, we have customers who have been with us since the beginner and have probably paid accumulative over $1,000 for Fizzle over the past 3 or 4 years or whatever that adds up to. The customers are paying for the value that they’re receiving hopefully whereas if you just offer “Start A Blog That Matters” at one price point, then everybody’s paying the same no matter how much they’re using it. You’re game becomes just trying to get people pass the refund period whatever that might be. That’s what a lot of these high priced products do. If you’re paying $2,000 for a course, there’s probably some crafty little catch in there about the refund period being X days or 2 months or whatever and you don’t get all the stuff that you want until after that. Maybe there’s something that you have to do in order to qualify for the refund which we didn’t want to hassle with.

Now, if you’re thinking about starting a membership site and you’re looking at the business model and you’re thinking, “Man, this just looks too good to be true. I get a customer. They pay me every month. I don’t have to look for new customers. This is great.” A lot of that comes from what we see in the software world. I have to tell people that the software world is radically different. The metrics in the software world are radically different from what you are going to see by offering training as a …

Chase: This is what we come up with all the time, right? We’re talking about the grass is greener. Something that Corbett and I have talked about a lot is how green the grass looks on a SaaS business where you are MailChimp or Squarespace or some little thing that does some little tool that people are willing to pay $5 a month for even. Something very small potentially.

Corbett: Here are the dynamics that are different in that world. When a customer signs up for an ongoing software product and it becomes integral to the operation of their business like if you’re hosting your website on software of you’re using them as a mail provider or whatever, it becomes very difficult for you to switch providers over time. You’re likely to stick around much, much longer than you would with training. Because with training, I have to do something in order to receive the value. It’s work for me. Whereas with software, ideally I sign up. I pay every month and then the value happens to me. It’s given to me in exchange for dollars. It’s very easy with a software product to just let it continue to run and we pay Wistia $300 a month or something to host our videos. We do that every month gladly because they’re all up there and it provides valuable service.

Whereas with training, the moment your life gets busy or you change your mind and this thing isn’t as important to you anymore, learning how to play tennis or whatever it is that you’re paying for, then that’s one of the easiest things for you to cut. The churn rate that you were talking about before in SaaS, the really good SaaS, they end up being in the low single digits, 2%, 3%, something like that which just means that a customer sticks around for multiple years as opposed to with training, a customer sticks around for several months. The other thing about that is that in software, oftentimes the more value that a customer is getting from the software, the more they pay. Because on MailChimp, we now have X tens of thousands of subscribers, we’re paying a lot more than we did a long time ago and we’re happy to pay that because we’re getting more use out of it. With training, it doesn’t necessarily work that way. You look at Lynda.com or Treehouse or Us, it’s a flat flee no matter how many courses you’re talking. Those dynamics are a lot different.

I think that should temper people’s expectations when they’re thinking about the subscription model being this like unicorns and rainbows scenario.

Chase: Absolutely. Far up to know, it’s just been like this general sense of like, “All right. I want to do a membership.” If you want to do a membership site, there’s more work than you think there is. Some of those categories of work are customer support, marketing. We do content marketing and blogging and podcasting. I think a lot of the membership sites that people are probably thinking about are education based, you know what I mean, because for those who can’t do teach. That’s why we’re here.

Corbett: There are also all of the product subscriptions like getting the T of the month or the Trunk Club stuff.

Chase: I find less and less getting interested in doing that because it’s so much hard goods inventory costs, you know what I mean, shipping and inventory and all that other stuff whereas teaching and training, being like, “For $20 a month, if you’re trying to be a marathoner, we have a marathon membership squad or whatever. It’s $20 a month and we do coaching every week. There’s a library of coaching calls based on … Answers to questions and things like that.” That could potentially be really valuable. What’s great about that idea is if it’s $5 a month, how many people have subscriptions that you paid for that you don’t really use that much. There like $5 to $7 to $15 a month that are under that radar. Pricing your thing is tough. That’s what’s interesting. That’s what’s so hard about pricing of membership sites is you’re putting your stick in the mud in a pretty strong way when you’re like, “This thing’s going to be $10 a month,” because it’s hard a year from then to up the prices in some way. It can be. We’ve done this a few times.

We’ve changed prices a little bit over time. Everybody who signed up early got the cheapest version. We just grandfathered them and they’ll be paying that the rest of their life but that took some custom code and some optimization figuring out how to do that. It’s not impossible to change the price of things. If you start out by going it’s $5 a month and then we’re just doing coaching. I’m recording each of the calls. I’m paying someone to take those calls and cut those videos up by question and then add them back into the Q and A section so it’s like everything has its title like, “What kind of shoes should I wear? What kind of this should I get? How long should I practicing or training before I start my first marathon?” All those questions are broken down and now there’s 150 questions in there. You could find anything you’re looking for. Five dollars a month, right? That’s not a problem.

You could probably do that but if you wanted to make it more serious later on and go like, “Now, it’s going to be $50 a month for serious people because I’m done just doing it for people who want to just occasionally who up.” Then it might be hard to change into that thing. You might have to do something completely separate. Actually I’ve never really thought about this idea of doing a small … We always talk about minimum viable products. There are small, tiny bite size little ways that you can test the product idea. That’s really hard with a membership site because in some ways you’re going like, “The purchase is not just this month. It’s every month to come. It’s your promise to me that you’re going to have this available for me at $5.” Thinking on ways how you could do a small version of the membership site and just be really valuable for the first year even though you’re not making much money and then you can raise the price over time when you figure out the technology and the tools that you need and stuff.

Corbett: Of course. If you’re talking about the difference between $5 and $50 a month, then that means you need 10 times as many customers to earn the same. It really just depends on the reach that you have. Theoretically, selling a $5 product should be much easier than selling a $50 product but is it 10 times easier? Are you going to have a 10 times better conversion rate? Probably not.

Chase: What’s interesting with these membership stuff, I’m looking at the world and just realizing how much … It seems like the original media or the original business model for broadcast of any kind, blogs, podcasts included in this as well as the beginnings of radio, the beginnings of TV. We’ve got a show and it’s sponsored by Clorox Bleach or Parliament Cigarettes. Shows originally were started as like “The Parliament Cigarettes. Howdy Doody Cowboy Hour.” It was brands who paid for all the content being made. Now, the content’s being made and that’s on the creative in a network and the advertisers have to … We’d have to entice those end advisers because we’ve enticed the people in some ways. There’s this model of you’re trying to reach the masses. I looked at Marc Maron. Marc Maron could have charged $5 for his podcast a month from the beginner. He’d have a smaller audience but he’d have a ton more money if it got big. That’s the question.

Corbett: That’s the thing.

Chase: That’s what we don’t know if it would have gotten big. There’s this payoff of like I think it make sense. Find the things that you can do in the world that are real work, that are free or barely monetizable if you can have the membership site. I love the way that we get to blog and podcast at Fizzle and make those things really, really good because we always have a product for sale that we believe in.

Corbett: I think there are benefits to both the free content and the membership or the paid content. Businesses that only do one or especially businesses that put everything a pay wall, they struck really hard. We’ve seen a lot of big names try it over the past several years. People who say, “I have this private newsletter now and it’s $5 a month or private website or whatever.”

Chase: It’s because you’re cutting off your whole ability to grow organically. You do still have a referral like people are going in and joining up on your private newsletter that cost $1 a month or whatever and they might tell their friend, “This is so great. Oh man. You’re not doing this? It’s so great.”

Corbett: It used to work better. I think it was because there wasn’t this proliferation of free content. It’s almost an arm’s race to give away …

Chase: I hate that the only people who are winning are advertisers. Do you what I mean? Marc Maron is winning. He’s making money. He’s doing the thing and he’s very confident for the first time and it seems like forever. It’s really cool to see that, right? Louie CK though is doing something very … How is he growing? He’s selling individual $5 specials or $3 an episode like play that he made, “Horace and Pete.” Weird stuff that he’s trying.

Corbett: He’s growing because he’s on network television.

Chase: He’s growing because he’s Louise CK. He does have a show. He’s on network television and he’s one of the largest celebrities to a certain group of people. We’re talking today about what you need to know about membership sites and these business models of the membership site which why I bring up Louie CK because he’s just a great example of someone who’s not doing the membership site thing at all. [Inaudible 00:38:52]

Corbett: It was great.

Chase: What else do we need to talk about here? There was some questions that were brought up. Before we get into those, I want to make sure that we’re getting to Gregg’s question because I think it was good. We talked about what do you not know right now? You’re hopeful about doing a membership site. What don’t you know? There’s a handful of bullet points that Corbett listed off, customer support, making content which is our version of marketing. It’s basically like if you had to categorize these, it’s making sure your customers are happy, your existing customers are happy and finding new customers. You’re constantly doing both of those.

Corbett: Totally.

Chase: You can break those down into multiple sales inside of there by making sure they’re happy is like I’m answering their questions when they’re asking me questions. I’m making the things that I promise them I would make them. One of the things that you said in your answer to Gregg which I think is really strong is just be careful what you promise that you’re going to make on an ongoing basis.

Corbett: It’s much easier to add things than it is to take away.

Chase: It is. It really is. I know the feeling very well of really wanting to convince people to join. Really wanting to say all sorts of things that you’d love to be able to say.

Corbett: We’ll come to your house.

Chase: You just want to say it all to get them in. Some people are like that. I’m one of them but now, you got to live with … The thing that matters most is that they’re getting in and being impressed. They’re being delighted and they’re trusting you. They’re going like, “Oh yeah. This is at least as good or if not, better than what I expected from the sales pitch.” That’s what I think is really important.

Corbett: Absolutely. An example of that just being cautious about what you commit to. It’s easy to want to offer regular coaching, to create new material on a regular basis, to create material that is multimedia video, audio, written, all that stuff. Just from watching people who run membership sites successfully as 1 person, they really pair that down. They release less on a regular basis. They maybe offer some content that is text only and they don’t worry about video and audio. They don’t do weekly coaching. They do monthly instead. They don’t participate in the forums. That’s for members order thing. Start with a baseline and really just focus on the core value proposition. Why are people here? It’s probably to learn how to do some very specific things. You can do that mostly with course material and then a little bit of Q and A. If you were smart about it, you could just collect questions and then have a FAQ and then people should be asking fewer and fewer questions about each of the courses.

Chase: I like this other question. Membership conversion stinks. How to get things buzzing again a year after launch because I like this idea of you’re a year in … Okay. Right now listener, you’re like, “I want to do a membership site. I want to do a membership site. Okay. Okay. I’m listening to these guys who are telling me there are some things that I didn’t know that I didn’t know but I still know I can do it. I’m confident.” Okay. Now, let’s teleport a year in the future. You’ve launched the thing and it’s up and running. It’s been running for awhile. You’re finding yourself in the situation that Stephanie’s in where she’s like, “How do I get things buzzing again?” It’s died out. Tell me a little about what Stephanie’s situation is.

Corbett: Stephanie’s situation is she has been at this for a year or so and when they first launched, they had a couple of really great enrollment periods where they offered 50 spots at a time and they sold out. They grew to 100 or so members. Twelve months went by. Their email list is growing but they’re not able to convert many people from that email list to join the membership again. There’s a bunch of stuff at play here. Stephanie points out that her membership conversion stinks and that she feels like the conversion stinks because her product isn’t attractive enough. Now, there’s a question here that I had which I didn’t get from Stephanie which is is she able to convert anybody or is she just not able to grow the overall membership? Because what happens at a certain point with a membership site is people are going to be leaving on a regular basis because they get to the … There’s this, we talked about earlier, the average customer lifetime or the average customer lifetime value. They stick around for a certain number of points.

Once you’ve been up and at it for awhile and you have a decent number of members, then a certain percentage of your membership is going to be leaving every month. In order to grow, you need to be adding more people every month than you’re losing. I don’t know if Stephanie is at that situation or if she’s just not able to add any people at all. She said that her conversion rate stinks because her product isn’t attractive enough. She had a couple of good waves. Got people in and now she’s feeling like even though her email list is growing, she’s not adding people. I can imagine a few different reasons for this. The first is, she wanted to know how to get things buzzing again. When you imagine in the beginning when you first create this thing and you open a limited number of spots, there’s a lot of inherent buzz in that thing. It’s new. There are limited options. I want to jump in and see what this is like.

If you want to get things buzzing again, perhaps you should work the magic that you worked before and give people a reason to want to join. Another thing that we found that works really well is releasing new courses and making a big deal about it not just quietly releasing things to your members but making a big hubbub about whatever it is that you put in there that’s new to drive new interests. The question about conversion rates though, I think it’s easy to assume that people aren’t converting because your product isn’t attractive enough but there are other things at play. You mentioned earlier pricing. It could be that your product is attractive but that not at that price. That’s an issue that she should explore. Another one is it could be the wrong audience that you’re attracting. Her email list is growing but she’s not converting those people into buyers of her membership thing. It could be that she’s giving away something, promising something to the email subscribers that isn’t compatible with what she’s selling on the membership site. They could just not be looking for this thing.

They don’t have the problem or the need or the desire she’s trying to fulfill with the site.

Chase: I definitely hear that question when she’s like, “I don’t think that my product is attractive enough. That’s what her hunch is, her hypothesis.” Good job using that word, Stephanie. Great work. We’re trying to teach everybody in Fizzle and outside that your business idea is just a hypothesis and you’re a researcher. You’re not an entrepreneur. You’re not a magician. You’re not a genius or palm reader.

Corbett: You’re a God damned scientist.

Chase: You’re a scientist, running around wondering, could this be the case? Is this going to work? How about this? Because you don’t know. You don’t know what’s inside of other people’s heads even if you know really well what’s inside of yours and you’ve seen it also in your uncle and your aunt before. You’re like your business idea is a hypothesis. This mindset helps you to not just think about this current experiment properly but the next and the next and the next and the next. Whereas if you’re like, “I had a business and it failed, I’m a failure.” That’s what I love her using that word. I love that as a hypothesis. Okay. Question, is this valuable enough? I’m looking at her website which is Foodcoach.me. I’m wondering if it is … Because it is for a very particular group of people.

Corbett: Right. Absolutely. My suggestion in this case and for a lot of these when you have this hypothesis is you have to think a hypothesis is something that has to be tested. You have to ask yourself how am I going to test this? One good way to test this is by talking to customer directly. You have this assumption that people aren’t finding it valuable enough. Why aren’t they finding it valuable enough? Are they just not aware of the value? Is there something else at play? Is it too expensive? Do they not even have this problem to begin with? By having customer conversations, by interviewing customers, I know we’ve talked about this a lot before but it really is a solution to a lot of these problems. Just call up 10 customers or email 30 of them and ask if you can get on the phone with 10 of them. She has a big enough email list that it would be really easy for her to do that especially because she could offer some customized advice or whatever. She might have ideas through those calls for new courses.

Chase: Absolutely. That’s totally what I would do. If the question is membership conversion stink, how do I get things buzzing again a year after launch, I think one really solid answer is talk to your customers. Create an organized strategy for talking to at least 10 to 20 of these customers to hear what they have to say directly. Stephanie and anybody else out there dealing with is, you’ve got to take the “Customer Conversations” course in Fizzle. If you’re not in Fizzle already, go to Fizzle.co/try5. Is that our website?

Corbett: Did it just sound weird? Was it like when you say a word you’re like satchel. Satchel.

Chase: Limit. That’s one of those words man. You go to Fizzle.com/try5. You get 5 weeks for free. That is plenty of time to take the “Customer Conversations” course then don’t quit. You won’t get charged again if you quit but don’t quit because that’s not the end of your journey like knowing how to talk to customers and getting the actual insights that you need directly from their lips. Now, you’ve got to implement that action. That’s for Fizzle in the community is going to come in handy for you I think. I love that question of you can start a membership site going like, “I think is going to work.” A year later, you’re like, “It’s not working.”

Corbett: You’ve stagnant.

Chase: That’s what’s so important about a membership site. Give me a membership idea. I can sell that. I can just fill in the limited spots that we have available upfront. Will it still be selling on its own a year from now is a big question. That’s a really honest question to ask yourself. Almost impossible to answer.

Corbett: I would wondering if she was able to sell out those spots so easily in the beginning, what was she promising then that she’s not promising now? That isn’t being communicate to people now? Either the pitch and the value has changed or the customer has changed.

Chase: This is a great example of this is a solvable problem if the need is great enough. Find a need that’s great enough. That’s the answer to all of these business questions. All of these things are solvable problems if the need is great enough out in the world. Go see if it is. If it’s not, find another one that is. There are out there. There’s lots of those. There’s lots of those. Today, we’ve been talking about what you need to know about …

Corbett: Membership site business models.

Chase: We’re giving you our open the kimono which to me sounds like a little bit of a creeper’s thing to do. You know what I mean? There’s a reason why it’s only dudes in restaurants, in dark restaurants or boardroom meetings, that say that to each other.

Corbett: Open the kimono.

Chase: We’re going to open up the kimono a little bit.

Corbett: You just think about a creepy dude with a trench coat.

Chase: Jesse over there in the corner from marketing is just cringing every time she hears Walter say, “I want to just open up the kimono and lay it all out there.”

Corbett: Which reminds me of a film I saw one time. I don’t remember …

Chase: Did you see it at the cinema?

Corbett: I did. No, I think it was on VHS. This is a long time ago. I don’t remember what movie it was. Maybe a listener can help us out. A person, one of the stars of the movie, was sitting in a car and a flasher comes up in a trench coat. Opens the trench coat and says, “What do you think?” Person says, and I don’t remember if it was man or a woman, I think it was a woman, she said, “Looks like a dick only smaller.”

Chase: We’ve got a lot of questions left to go. I guess one day we’ll tell you more and more about membership site stuff but these are the basics. These are the essentials that we want you to know today about the work that you didn’t know that this is going to take. About what it looks like a year from now when you’re membership site that you took … It was amazing to get up and running, starts fizzling out or plateauing and you’re like, “How do I get it to buzz again?” These are great, great introductory questions to get you thinking smarter and more informed about creating one of these kinds of business models that can be a really effective, really, really straight up terrific way of doing a business. It’s like straight up terrific, dog.

Corbett: Terrific.

Chase: It’s absolutely neat. Super.

Corbett: Just amazing.

Chase: Neat. I like neat and terrific and super so hard.

Corbett: What about swell?

Chase: Swell feels a little affected to me.

Corbett: Okay.

Chase: You know what I mean? It’s like a little …

Corbett: Like geewilickers.

Chase: Geewilickers.

Corbett: It’s like too much of a …

Chase: Give me butter whistles over geewilickers any day. Butter whistles.

Corbett: Leave it to Beaver stuff.

Chase: Oh mom. I wanted the orange stuff.

Corbett: Butter whistles.

Chase: Butter whistles. Darn it. I wanted to come up with a funnier thing than darn it and I just rushed right through it.

Corbett: The state you’re in.

Chase: All right. I got nothing else to add. I’ve been Charles Wardman Reeves.

Corbett: I’ve been Corbett Bar.

Chase: We’ll see you there.

Corbett: Or-

Chase: We’ll see you-

Corbett: -see you on another time.

Chase: -on another time.

Corbett: We didn’t really coordinate on that very well.

We appologize for any innacuracies in this transcript. We are still looking for a transcript vendor that can, let us say capture our unique way of doing things :)


2 experts share what running a membership site is really like!



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Thursday, 28 July 2016

40 Brilliant-but-Easy Ways to Build Your Email List

Email marketing is a high-impact, low-cost way of delivering your marketing message to current customers and prospects — if, that is, you have a great email list. If you don’t, this article is for you. Read on for the most effective and creative ways to build your email list.

If your email list is short, scant on information, full or errors and redundancies, or just not on-track with your targeting, that poor-quality data can be worse than having no data at all! Without a good email list, all your other digital marketing efforts are little more than wheel spinning.

There’s a lot to be said for the human touch, and these ideas rely on good old-fashioned human interaction to help you build your email list.

Build your email list the right way

1. Put out the sign-up sheet

Whether you’re at a trade show, community event or in your own storefront, collecting email addresses in person can be as easy as putting out a signup sheet and encouraging people to write down their details.

2. Leverage business cards

When you meet people face to face for any reason, ask for their business card. Offer yours. Set a glass bowl on the counter in your store or the reception desk in your office, and ask visitors to drop their cards in it. Offer some incentive to do so — a free product or service, gift card, etc. Use your own business cards to further drum up emails; add an offer on the back of your card that encourages people to sign up to receive your emails.

3. Host an event

Stage an event — lunch gathering, topic talk, book club or whatever works to get people in the door. Drop invitations at nearby businesses, post the notice on your front door, and advertise in local media. Ask people to RSVP with their email addresses.

4. Invite people to ‘join the club’

Offer a birthday or anniversary club that allows people to “enroll” by providing their email address and relevant date. Reward them with a special offer for signing up, and follow up with something else special, such as a discount coupon, on their birthday or anniversary date.

5. Organize a giveaway

Using snail mail and/or your existing email list, send people a postcard asking for email information and offer them a reward for providing it.

6. Drum up emails with direct mail

Sometimes you have a physical address but no email address. Send a direct-mail offer they can only get by going to your website and joining your email list.

7. Try some telemarketing

Throughout the day, you and your employees probably interact with many customers and prospects on the phone. Before you hang up, always ask if they would like to join your email list. Give them a brief statement of the benefits of enrolling — for example, exclusive offers and discounts only available to email subscribers.

8. Optimize your website for opt-ins

If a customer or prospect visits your website, they’re already at least somewhat interested. Don’t miss the opportunity to add them to your email list. Include email registration forms on every main page of your site, as well as on the pages for popular products and services.

9. Build with your blog

Your blog provides a great way to build a personal relationship with customers and prospects — and to gather their email addresses. Consistently end blogs with a call to action that encourages readers to sign up for your email messages. Require blog visitors to provide an email list in order to leave comments, and set it up so that they have to actively opt out if they don’t want their email address included on your mailing list.

10. Engage through social media

Social media participation can allow you to reach new audiences and make new connections. Stay abreast of trending topics that are of interest to your customers and prospects. Use social media to encourage people to visit one of the channels where they can sign up for your email list.

11. Don’t give up on bounce backs

Everyone hates to see the dreaded bounce-back alert in their inbox. If you have snail-mail information to match an email address, send a postcard asking the contact to provide you with an updated email address so you can stay in touch. Consider rewarding them with a discount or freebie for taking the time to respond.

12. Piggyback on a colleague’s efforts

Consider sharing email lists with neighboring businesses. Offer them space in your newsletter in exchange for including a link with your opt-in form in their newsletter.

13. Don’t let website visitors get away

If a visitor gets through your entire website without opting in, grab them one last time before they go. Set a lightbox to appear asking for an email address whenever someone is about to navigate away from your website or blog.

14. Create an online community

Platforms like BuddyPress for WordPress make it easy to set up a community and foster interaction between your brand and your customers. Include a sign-up form for your newsletter on every page of the community.

15. Leverage ‘email only’ specials

Reward your loyal email followers with specials that are only available to subscribers. Encourage them to forward the link to your sign-up page to friends and family.

16. Don’t forget your own email

Be sure every email you send has an opt-in form so that anyone who receives one of your emails via forward from someone else, can sign up directly to be on your list.

17. Use Foursquare

Offer a reward for customers who buy something from you and show that they checked in at your business on Foursquare using their mobile device. When they do this, they’re telling everyone in their network that they’ve done business with you. Each month, reward the person who gave you the greatest exposure by offering a discount, and asking for their email address.

18. Be active on blogs and forums

Frequent the blogs and forums your customers do and offer insightful comments. Include a link to your website where visitors will find your opt-in form.

19. Get employees involved

Reward employees for collecting valid, testable email addresses. Remember to have them obtain the person’s consent before giving you the email address for your list.

20. Encourage customers with a daily deal

Daily deal sites can be useful for retail or local service businesses. Offer your discount (daily deal) through the site for a limited time and ask anyone who wants to grab the deal to provide their email address in exchange.

21. Word of mouth still rocks

Ask current and new customers to refer new subscribers to your list. Sweeten the deal by offering them a discount as a reward for valid, confirmed and consent-backed email addresses.

22. Encourage forwarding

When you send an email, include a forward-to-a-friend link in case recipients want to forward your content to someone they think will find it interesting. Make sure the link directs newcomers to a page with your opt-in form.

23. Serve up a sandwich board

Sandwich boards are nothing new, but what about using one in a new way? Place one on the sidewalk in front of your storefront or office to advertise your newsletter and offer a reward to anyone who signs up. Invite customers into the store to enroll, or give them the web address where they’ll find your opt-in form.

24. Use receipts

Customize your credit card receipt with a field/line where customers can jot down their email address while they’re signing. Or, simply ask them to write their address on the back of the receipt. At the end of the day, enter the addresses into your database and send out a welcoming email.

25. Take it to the street fair

Spring, summer, winter, and fall — your community probably has at least one street fair or similar event throughout the year. Participate in the event and collect email addresses right at the fair. Sweeten the deal by offering new subscribers a discount on their first (or next) purchase in exchange for sharing the email with you.

26. Encourage competition

Sponsor a video contest in which customers create a one-minute video about why they like your business, products or services. Ask them to send the videos to you and post them to your Facebook page. Invite visitors to vote on which video should win a cash or merchandise prize. Include an email opt-in on your Facebook page. Be sure to follow Facebook’s rules regarding contests.

27. Go mobile

When you’re out in the world at a tradeshow, business meeting or other public forum, use your smartphone to collect email addresses. And be sure to include an email opt-in with your business’ mobile app. If you offer the app for free download through your website, “charge” users the “price” of their email address in order to download the app.

28. Inside-the-box ideas

If you ship products, it’s a perfect opportunity to expand your email list at no cost! Include an inbox request on a card inside every package you ship. Be sure to tout your “email only” offers and direct recipients to your website’s opt-in form. After they join, redirect them to a page where they’ll receive their first promotional offer.

29. Make it more than just a bill

When you send out an invoice, include an option to sign up for email communications with you. Again, sweeten the deal by offering an incentive such as a discount or free shipping on the next order as a reward for providing email addresses.

30. Signs of the times

Include a link to your opt-in page in the signature of all your emails, personal and professional.

31. Network for emails

Join your local Chamber of Commerce or another business networking group. Email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services and include a link to sign up for your emails and newsletter.

32. Download freebies

That e-book or buying guide you created to establish thought leadership in your industry can also help build your email list. When visitors to your website request a free download, ask them to complete your opt-in form in order to download.

33. Speak up for yourself

Speaking engagements are a great way to establish your company as active in the community, but you can also weave into your talk the idea that more information can be found on your website. Offer free consultations in exchange for signing up for your newsletter and emails.

34. Giving it all away

Every month, offer a giveaway of a valuable or fun item to anyone who signs up for your email list.

35. Subscriber-only access

Everyone likes the feeling of being in on something exclusive. Offer your email subscribers something only they can get. It might be a special discount. It could be access to a video, e-book or another piece of useful content. Promote the availability of this exclusive access in order to encourage more email enrollments.

36. Give them subscription options

People like more choices, so consider creating subscription levels that let people sign up to receive content that’s relevant to them. For example, if you sell widgets and tax advice, provide three options on your opt-in form that allow users to sign up to receive info about widgets, info about tax advice or both. Further customize by allowing them to designate how frequently they’d like to hear from you — weekly, monthly or only when something really special is going on. People may be more likely to sign up for your email list if they have some control over the content they’ll receive.

37. Don’t forget the power of print

Add a QR code (a bar code that people can scan with a smartphone app) to print ads, direct-mail post cards and other printed marketing materials. Use the code to allow people to opt-in to your email list simply by scanning the code.

38. Leverage testimonials

Make your opt-in form extra convincing by including testimonials from current email subscribers touting the quality of your content.

39. Create a teachable moment

Are you an expert in something people want to know about, like weight loss, home improvement, cooking, etc.? Promote an exclusive online email course available only to subscribers.

40. Reel them in with a scroll box

Visitors to your website might overlook the call to sign up that you have at the top of every page, but it’s harder to ignore a lightbox or pop-up. Scroll boxes pop up on visitors’ screens after they’ve scrolled down a certain length of the page. The box encourages them to sign up for your email list. They can be effective for encouraging a user who’s already shown interest in your content (by staying on the page long enough to scroll) to sign up for your email list.

Building an email list takes time and is critical to marketing success in the digital age. What tactics do you use to collect more emails?

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© 2016, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.

The post 40 Brilliant-but-Easy Ways to Build Your Email List appeared first on Vertical Response Blog.



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Hit Gold with Paid Advertising, Understand the Landscape, Solve Problems, and Create Staying Power

It’s already the last Thursday of the month, can you believe it? In the past four weeks we have heard from Katrina Munsell, Group Manager, Content Marketing at Microsoft; Lauren Goldstein, VP of Strategy & Partnerships at Babcock Jenkins; Jesse Noyes, Senior Marketing Leader at Kahuna; and Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group. If you haven’t listened in, you still have a chance to catch up on this month’s Content Pros guests.

Hitting Subscriber Gold with Paid Advertising

Michael Brenner is a strong proponent of using paid advertising to drive your content to broader audiences that may not otherwise go to your site. He is experienced in making a strong case to CMOs that paid is the best use of marketing dollars to elevate your content game.

Using his tips on how to frame the conversation, where to pull money to support the effort, and which platforms to approach first, even the most timid of marketers can change the mind of a stubborn CMO.

On this podcast, Michael shares the following with us:

  • How the rise of ad-blockers leads to reframing the conversation around content
  • Why a campaign mentality means focusing on short-term and hindering your content growth
  • Why measuring the ROI of paid activity means looking more closely at your subscribers
The Staying Power of Email

It’s easy to get caught up in focusing your time on learning the newest trends and apps. However, there is a familiar old friend out there sitting idle that, when harnessed correctly, can convert leads for you at a rate higher than just about any of those other social platforms.

Email, the stalwart of internet communication, is that best friend of content that you didn’t know you had. Katrina Munsell’s approach to crafting the perfect email has led to conversion rates of up to 50% and open metrics that are 11 times over rates from last year.

A few highlights from my conversation with Katrina:

  • Why email can be the best vehicle for your content
  • How focusing on the design of an email leads to better click through rates
  • How multiple clicks can lead higher conversions than single clicks
Content That Solves Problem

There is such a drive to produce content these days that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and focus only on the content at hand with hardly a glance toward what’s next. However, in order to really move a business forward, its content needs to serve a purpose and solve a problem.

With over 15 years of experience, Lauren Goldstein has the skills and knowledge to help B2B marketers recalibrate their content to be more effective and engaging. She has helped businesses change the conversation and define the art of what is possible for their business buyer.

Learn from Lauren about:

  • How visuals lead to fulfilling content
  • Why great content and storytelling means keeping the business outcome front and center in your mind
  • Why bringing content to life means having a diverse set of viewpoints on your team
Understanding the Content Landscape

There is a new wave of multi-talented marketers entering the workplace and their arrival is fundamentally changing how marketing departments work from the bottom to the top. This rippling effect is requiring everybody to rethink their approach to marketing and organizational collaboration.

Jesse Noyes has experienced the evolving CMO first-hand, created departments that draw on the multi-disciplinary strengths of his employees, and mapped the origin of content throughout organizations.

Join Jesse to gain insight on:

  • Why the diversifying abilities of marketing professionals means a shift in the background and focus of CMOs
  • How good organizational structure leads to high velocity content
  • How collaboration between marketing operations, analytics, and sales leads to a decrease in departmental contention


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