This week is for our professional writers — whether you’re a freelancer or you work for a bigger organization. We’re tired of you missing out on the great gigs and the plum jobs, while you watch people zoom past you who can hardly type The Cat on the Mat. Poverty is overrated. Let’s get you
Read More...
The post Writers: It’s Time to Get Paid What You’re Worth appeared first on Copyblogger.
It’s the grand old way of getting your website noticed online, but despite its long-in-the-tooth reputation, the effectiveness of email outreach is showing no signs of slowing down – despite what some experts might have us believe.
An old-fashioned email campaign can seem like the loneliest method of promotion available in the 21st Century. It’s not unusual to write thousands of outreach emails knowing full well that well over half of your messages will never even be read.
Neil Patel believes that a reasonable expectation from an outreach campaign is to get around five links for every 100 emails sent, amounting to a success rate of 5%. Meaning that 95% of the time you spend composing messages and hitting that ‘send’ button will be a fruitless endeavor.
So why do we bother? In a world where cold emailing is heavily frowned upon, and a third of all emails are opened based solely on whether the recipient likes the subject line or not, you could be forgiven for thinking that it might all be just a waste of time and resources.
However, this isn’t the case. Email outreach is an extremely powerful tool when correctly utilized, but effective email etiquette is a minefield – and many people struggle to run engaging campaigns.
So it’s for this reason that I’ve decided to offer a list of the seven biggest trials and tribulations that face email marketers today.
It’s the first and perhaps the biggest point to make. Absolutely nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a cold email. They’re annoying, irritating, frustrating and every other synonym of awful. Think about cold calls – where you pick up the phone and listen to somebody with no idea of whom you are speaking from a script with the intent of getting you to give their business money. It’s soulless and often insulting. The cold email is just that in written form.
Like with many websites that aim to expand their network, we try to avoid the risks that come with cold emailing by adding a personal touch to our campaigns. It’s a tricky business because personalization takes time, but if you treat your target audience with respect, it can pay dividends.
In a bid to reach out to people personally, while keeping our quantity of outreach emails high, we’ve constructed a template to customize based on the individual we’re contacting. This enables us to utilize a personal touch that impersonal general marketing emails are devoid of. Here is the one we’re using:
Hey NAME,
Hope you’re doing well!
My name is Dmytro Spilka, and I’m a Head Wizard at Solvid, an Inbound Marketing Blog based in London, UK.
I recently stumbled upon your post on POST TITLE (LINK TO THE POST), and found it incredibly useful. In the post (point #7 to be precise), you mentioned a POST THEY’VE MENTIONED by NAME OF THE PERSON THEY’VE MENTIONED. Although it’s a great resource, it feels slightly outdated and incomplete to some extent.
Anyway, the reason I’m contacting is that I’ve recently put together YOUR POST TITLE (YOUR POST LINK). SOMETHING UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR POST. Basically, did everything to create the ultimate go-to resource.
In fact, our post has been recommended by Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz), Brian Dean of Backlinko and Smart Blogger (BE HONEST HERE).
I would really appreciate if you could please take a second to scan our post and see whether it could be of any help to you and your audience as an additional resource.
Apologies for eating up your time!
Best Wishes,
Dmytro
Web: https://solvid.co.uk
Email: hello@solvid.co.uk
As you can see above, we’re using a few personal touches.
The importance of the subject line can’t be emphasized enough. This is your big hook to get the recipients to read on – and there are plenty of theories behind the recipe for an irresistible heading.
Convince and Convert state that 69% of recipients report emails as spam based solely on the subject line, while 35% open emails because of the allure of the heading. These are substantial figures that underline the importance of the few words that pop up first in your recipients’ inboxes – so nailing your subject line is imperative.
So what’s the secret formula behind the perfect email subject? Throwing their two cents into the ring is Adestra, which believes that the use of words like ‘Alert’, ‘Daily’ and ‘Free Delivery’ bring marketers the best responses.
However, our outreach campaigns try to show honesty without the use of superfluous superlatives – our subject line is simple:
‘Typical outreach email’ shows that we have no interest in click-baiting our intended audience. It also indicates that we have enough faith in our service that we don’t need to rely on tricks of the trade to lure prospective customers in. That being said, email subjects will vary on a case-by-case basis. Hence, we’d suggest to A/B test different subject lines to see which one performs better. In our tests, ‘Typical outreach email’ performed much better, improving an open rate by roughly 20-30%.
You could be marketing the best product or service on the web, but if your open rate is lacking then it means that your recipients aren’t interested enough to even look beyond the subject line of your emails.
According to research conducted by MailChimp, the average open rate varies between 20 – 25% – depending on the industry you’re in. This is unsurprising and disappointing in equal measure, but it’s also a great benchmark to incorporate a bit of trial and error into your campaign.
All sorts of factors can influence your open rate, from the aforementioned subject line, to the relevance of your target audience, to the time of day that you send your emails out (no, really – RingLead have compiled stats that suggest the sweet spot for posting outreach mail is between 2 pm and 5 pm on a Tuesday afternoon).
Premium services like reply.io, buzzstream and outreach.io not only offer the opportunity to personalize automatic outreach emails, but also provide very useful stats on open rates and click-through rates, allowing you to monitor what aspects of your campaign is working better than others and giving you the chance to fine-tune your messages.
For instance, here are some open rate stats for our latest outreach campaign:
In all honestly, 71% open rate is pretty decent (even our regular email subscribers aren’t that active).
Figuring out whom to target is risky business – if you pick the wrong recipients, then you’re in danger of wasting valuable time.
There are many great services that can scout out relevant email addresses to aid your campaign, and hunter.io is a good example that offers a free email search engine (albeit with limited usage for non-premium members).
A good alternative to hunter.io is Voila Norbert.
To find an email address, simply enter the name of the person and a domain name of the company they work at.
Although the information isn’t 100% accurate all the time, this way of finding the right email address can save a lot of time, especially if that particular domain has hundreds of registered emails.
It pays to be attentive in finding which website staff to email – if you believe your blog has a resource that you feel should be added to a website’s list, you could contact the author of an existing article in which you believe your site would make a good reference point. However, a generic ask for a link would not bring the numbers, as it’s likely to be regarded as spam. Answer the following questions before asking for an inclusion of your link:
If only 2-3 of these questions fall under the category of ‘No’ or ‘Negative’ then it’s not worth the effort outreaching – simply because your email will appear spammy.
You need to be observant – if you’re targeting an author of an article that you feel your work would benefit as a reference, be sure to check whether the author is a guest poster or a member of staff for the business. If it’s the former, you’d be better off contacting the editor – though getting in touch with the original content producer may lead to your work being linked in future publications.
Many websites now shy away from publishing emails of editors and content producers in favor of using website contact forms, but if you’re looking to get your posts or resources noticed, the best way of having your message read by those who matter is to find the details of the content producers themselves.
It can be easy to neglect a follow up to your outreach email. If the recipient didn’t want to reply the first time, why would they bother a second time? While chasing a less responsive target may seem counter-intuitive, it works as a great simple call to action and indicates to them that you’re serious about showing off your work.
Our follow up template is a simplified reminder of our original email – our intention is to drop a subtle reminder that we have a great product that would benefit the user and their readership:
Hey NAME,
Just a quick follow-up on a message I sent earlier (attached below) about our awesome POST TITLE (LINK TO THE POST): I would really appreciate to hear back from you.
Best Wishes,
Dmytro
Web: https://solvid.co.uk
Email: hello@solvid.co.uk
We use the reply function on our initial email for ease of reference for the recipient, while including a transparent subject line informing our target that we’re simply following up to an original email.
It’s important to refrain from trigger-happy follow-ups. Becoming a nuisance outreacher risks alienating your audience and even damaging your reputation. Therefore, we wouldn’t suggest going for more than 2 follow-ups after the initial outreach email.
The business of outreach is a long-winded one that carries no guarantee of success. You could invest days of hard work into emailing 1000s of recipients and receive no interest in return.
Luckily you can maximize your chances of success and minimize the time spent chasing poor leads by doing a little bit of market research.
Try to understand who your target would be and whether they would have any affiliates or backlinks that would also benefit from utilizing your work or service.
It’s better to have 100 quality recipients than 1,000 poorly researched ones – this is how we got 20-25% success rate of our latest email outreach campaign.
We like to run tidy outreach campaigns, so take the preemptive measure of identifying leads to investigate to assess whether associated websites would benefit from using our work. If we feel that they would, we add their information to our spreadsheet and invite them to take a look at a relevant piece that would make a good reference point.
So there you have it – with some good prep and honest marketing, the age-old slog of email outreach doesn’t have to be such a pain.
As long as you’re outreaching to a relevant personal with a resource that can potentially bring value to that website’s audience while keeping your emails reasonably personal (without being too creepy), you should see a positive return for the time spent.
Now it’s time to get out there and put your website on the map!
Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.
About the Author: Dmytro is a Head Wizard at Solvid, a creative inbound marketing & software development agency in London, UK. His work has been featured and mentioned in a wide range of publication, including The Next Web, Business2Community, Huff Post, Crazy Egg, Sitepoint, SEMRush, and more.
Maybe you don’t say it out loud. It sounds like bragging, and bragging is obnoxious. But you know you’re good. When you see a sentence that isn’t right, you know what needs to change. You twitch a little when you see a clumsy turn of phase, or a sentence that doesn’t mean what the writer
Read More...
The post Why the Best Writers (Sometimes) Aren’t Paid What They’re Worth appeared first on Copyblogger.
9-to-5 jobs are never truly 9-5.
There’s always something that comes up that needs to get done. ASAP. No questions asked.
Thank your boss for that one. Actually, don’t. That’s probably not a good idea.
But running a business is a whole new level of busy. Being a business owner in today’s world is damn near impossible.
Want to have a normal work-life balance? Good joke.
Need to take a vacation to refresh your brain? Sure. If you’re okay with a business-level apocalypse.
Family asking you to go apple picking this weekend? It ain’t happening.
As a small business owner, you’ve got to run every single department, constantly making sure everything’s running smoothly.
That means creating new content, generating big ideas, speaking with clients, landing sales, checking emails, running marketing reports.
The list goes on.
You simply don’t have enough time in the day to complete all of these tasks.
You can’t scale your business to new heights if you ignore any of them though.
They need to get done. Your business and livelihood literally depend on it.
So what do you do?
You need to automate. Put boring, tedious, time-consuming tasks on autopilot to save yourself hours every week.
Marketing automation isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if you want to scale your business without dying from sleep deprivation.
Here are the reasons why you need marketing automation and three tips for small business owners to automate and scale.
Marketing automation is just what it sounds like: automating marketing-based tasks.
If you’re not too familiar with marketing automation, here’s a simple definition from Google:
The goal is to save you time and increase your ROI.
Automation does this by cutting out time spent on tedious processes. Meaning you’re using less labor. And less labor means less overhead.
But here’s the biggest benefit of all:
Less time spent working means more time looking at pugs.
Yes, it’s a real addiction that affects thousands every year (source: N/A).
The more you can automate, the better.
According to the latest data, the vast majority of marketers using marketing automation strategies are successful in achieving their objectives:
Another study discovered that 50% of marketers using automation tools found either some increases or massive increases in leads:
But effectively gaining leads isn’t all that comes with marketing automation.
It shouldn’t even be the main focus.
Sure, it’s great that marketing automation can increase leads; don’t get me wrong.
That’s amazing.
But the goal here is to reduce time spent working without reducing profit.
If you don’t see a massive spike in leads, but you’re cutting out 10 hours of marketing work each week with automation, you’re effectively increasing profit by reducing labor.
See what I mean?
Even if the process doesn’t generate 10x the amount of leads, you’re spending less on labor.
Less labor = less overhead = more profit.
This is where people tend to go wrong. When you only focus on lead increases, you lose sight of profit and business growth.
There are dozens of ways to achieve profit and growth that don’t include landing more clients.
And according to Aberdeen, companies using marketing automation can reduce their marketing-to-close time by 49%.
That potentially means completing your work in half the time.
If you’re strapped for time and haven’t slept in weeks, it’s time to implement marketing automation.
It will not only cut down on your working hours, but it’ll also reduce your labor costs and help you generate more leads.
Here are three great ways you can automate your growth today.
Content promotion is critical to business growth.
When it comes to driving new organic traffic and leads, nothing competes with top-notch content.
But having good content alone won’t always drive traffic.
So most marketers turn to promotion on social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
All of these platforms are an easy way to generate more leads.
But it takes time. And lot’s of it.
In fact, Statista found that the majority of marketers are spending anywhere from one to 10 hours per week on social media.
By scheduling content and loading it into your Buffer queue, you can quickly waste a few hours every week.
Coming up with tweets and trying to squeeze your content into 140 characters sucks.
Especially when you’re re-sharing that post five different ways.
Content sharing is a necessary process that’s tedious and often time-consuming.
On top of that, it doesn’t always equate to a perfect return on investment.
So it’s sometimes thrown on the backburner.
But that’s not an option in today’s world that’s obsessed with social media.
Thanks to marketing automation, it doesn’t have to be.
You can automatically share content from your blog to social media without lifting a finger.
Here’s how.
Start by creating an account with Zapier.
It’s a popular automation tool that connects thousands of different SaaS tools that you use daily.
Once you make an account, click on the explore tab and head to the “Marketers” section:
Next, you should be able to locate the following “Zap,” or automation process:
This is legitimately a life saver.
If social media is the bane of your existence, you will save hours every week from trying to post and come up with new ideas.
Click “Use This Zap” to start a new automation workflow.
Next, you’ll have to link your public blog RSS feed.
If you’re not sure what that is, you can set up an RSS feed in just a few minutes with this Google tutorial.
After plugging in your feed URL, you can head to the “Action” step, which is where your social post will happen:
All you have to do here is link your account, and you’re good to go.
So next time you publish a blog post on your site, Zapier will trigger this automation process and craft a tweet for you instantly.
You can use this automation technique for all of your social channels. If you don’t want to use an RSS feed, Zapier allows you to connect WordPress too:
Ditch the hours spent crafting tweets and social posts. Automate it instead.
If you’re like me, you spend too much time checking your email.
It’s obviously not because you want to, but simply because your inbox is jammed with emails.
HubSpot’s latest research shows us that marketers spend an average of nearly four hours just sending emails every week.
That doesn’t include checking your email. That’s just typing and sending emails.
Brutal.
Email sucks. It’s boring and often filled with junk.
Yet, your iPhone is blowing up every two minutes from new emails, distracting you from the task at hand and killing your productivity.
So, how do you only get notifications for the important stuff? How do you cut out those nearly 4 hours of sending emails each week?
By automating your email process.
In Zapier, you can set up an automation workflow that allows you to get notified only when specific people email you:
Do you have important clients that email you frequently?
Or even employees that ask time-sensitive questions?
Then you need this. It’s extremely easy to set up, too.
Click “Use This Zap” to get started. Be sure to connect your Gmail account to Zapier and select your work email as the inbox.
Next, you need to type in the search string that will trigger this process.
For example, you can enter a few different search strings:
Try using direct email addresses from clients, employees, or even another boss (like your significant other).
You can also set up simple subject lines like “from:client name.”
Once you save this automation workflow, you’ll get pinged on Slack whenever an important email comes in.
Meaning you can respond instantly and only spend time on the most important emails.
So silence your email notifications, get some work done, and respond to the big-ticket clients.
Stop spending four hours weekly on email with this automation tip.
Collecting leads is awesome.
You just drove some quality traffic to your site and converted a few of them.
Great. Now what?
Do you download the data and upload it into a CRM? Or into your favorite email campaign platform?
Lead flow processes can quickly become tedious and time-consuming.
From downloading, formatting, and uploading lists, you could be spending hours on it weekly.
Plus, if you don’t follow up with a lead fast, you risk losing them.
Automation is critical when it comes to perfecting a lead flow.
From automatically sending nurturing emails to uploading lists without doing the work, you can quickly cut down your hours.
One of my favorite Zapier integrations is adding new sales leads directly to a CRM or email platform without doing the actual work.
You have much more important things to do besides uploading lists and creating new campaigns.
With Zapier, you can actually automatically upload new leads from your site or social media ads directly into a CRM or email campaign.
Zapier is great for this simply because of the integrations they offer.
You can connect it with the top services like MailChimp, HubSpot, and more.
If you use it, they most likely have it.
This is one of my favorite Zaps:
If you don’t use Constant Contact or Gravity Forms, don’t fret.
You can connect nearly anything with Zapier.
This is just an example of two integrations that are amazing.
If you set up this Zap, you are automating the process of lead gen to nurturing without ever having to worry about it.
With your favorite email platform, you can usually turn on settings to send newly-added leads a welcome email, too.
Meaning you are virtually skipping these steps:
Checking your leads, downloading the lead list, formatting it for your platform, uploading it, creating and sending a new campaign.
That’s potentially hours of work every week.
If you’re a lazy business owner like me, you can get tons of value from automating lead flows.
Running a small business is one of the toughest ventures you can embark on. Besides kids.
Don’t get me started.
From sleepless nights (or weeks) to chasing the ever elusive “work-life balance,” you’re always strapped for time. Your plate is constantly full to the point where nothing gets done.
Your workload exceeds human capabilities. And unless you’ve got the hookup on some new age brain transplant technology, you’ve only got one option:
Automation.
If you notice that tasks are piling up and taking up your time, you need to automate.
Do you want your business to have any shot at scaling and achieving new growth? If so, you’ve gotta cut out the junk that, though necessary, doesn’t directly contribute to growth.
But you can’t ignore it full scale. You just need to automate it, filter it out, or delete it entirely.
Freeing up time doesn’t just save you time. It can also help make you a lot more money in the long run.
Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.
About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.
‘Tis the season…for harried shoppers, dubious door-busters and incessant advertising. It’s the holidays! What does a small business have to do to stand out at this time of the year?
Email marketing, for one thing. Here are three tips for making sure your emails shine brightly in readers’ inboxes, and some holiday email inspiration to help shape your own campaigns. For more on seasonal sends that make an impact, download our free Guide to Holiday Email Marketing.
We say this a lot, and with good reason. Since more than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices, everything you send to your readers needs to be easily viewable on a small screen. Fortunately, VerticalResponse makes this a snap — all our email templates are designed to be mobile-responsive.
Everyone is bombarded at the holidays. Work parties, family obligations, travel schedules and ceaseless advertising constantly vie for our attention. Create your campaigns with an eye toward the busy reader. Send announcements about your seasonal specials early, and then send reminders as they approach. Take a look at your past campaigns and see when your readers tend to open your emails most frequently; then time your campaigns to go out during those same days and hours.
Scheduling your email messages is never a chore when you incorporate Email Automation. This way you create your campaigns ahead of time, and then schedule them to go out when you want them to. That frees you up to tend to other holiday-related business matters.
Everyone loves a good deal, and never more so than during the holidays. Make your emails — and your business — irresistible by advertising exclusive discounts or by inserting coupons into your messages. Amplify the savings even more with social media posts. Don’t hesitate to set up Landing Pages that provide more details about the deals or specials, or simply to collect visitors’ contact information.
Subject line: Explore holiday deals before Black Friday
Offering early access to holiday deals, this email from Amazon starts the countdown to Black Friday by offering new limited-time deals every day until the big event. Why wait for Black Friday, Amazon asks its customers, when you can get seasonal specials now? This is a time-honored retail tactic that your small business can easily take advantage of.
Subject line: Spoiler Alert: You’ll save REALLY big on these holiday deals.
Similar to Amazon, Dell offers early holiday deals to its subscribers. Here, bold colors and eye-catching imagery drive home the seasonal feeling while keeping readers scrolling down to see the deals.
Subject line: Two words: Holiday Sale!
This venerable art supply retailer goes with a teaser approach for one of its initial holiday emails. The short and punchy subject line grabs the reader’s attention, and the body of the email is equally to the point. Using very few words and striking graphics, it tells subscribers to stay tuned for more details on the upcoming holiday sale. The sale dates are listed, there’s an invitation to watch the inbox for more, and then a can’t-miss-it store finder and one quick mention of Blick’s long history. Holiday emails don’t get much more straightforward (or easier to replicate with your own business) than this.
Subject line: Up to 40% Off—Get a Head Start on Holiday Baking!
At the other end of the spectrum is Williams Sonoma, the California-based cookware retailer. Unlike Blick’s minimalist approach, Williams Sonoma opts to load up this holiday email with discounts and helpful content. Right off the bat, the subject line promises a sale and a way to get a leg up on the holidays, and immediately the body of the email announces a limited-time discount ending that day.
Scroll a little further, and the retailer offers “Thanksgiving Baking Essentials,” i.e., items that the reader absolutely needs to have to make Thanksgiving a success. Williams Sonoma is generous with its discounts — nearly everything appears to be at a reduced price — and there’s a wealth of photography to make the items pop.
Williams Sonoma isn’t finished just yet. Near the bottom of the email, the reader arrives at the Guide to Pie, which promises to teach everything one needs to know to bake “the perfect pie this holiday season.”
Although many could argue that Williams Sonoma’s email is overly long and overly busy, the retailer was able to squeeze multiple discounts, a sense of urgency and helpful content into one hardworking email. When creating your own holiday campaigns, feel free to try this approach or to separate these types of messages into several shorter emails.
As you can see from these examples, there’s no one right way to make your emails stand out this holiday season. See what works with your readers.
Join 140,000 small business ownersGet expert tips and email inspiration biweekly. Subscribe today and download our FREE Guide to Email List Management eBook.
|
© 2017, John Habib. All rights reserved.
The post Deck their inboxes with effective holiday emails appeared first on Vertical Response Blog.
Cover your ears for a second. My wife can sing. I can’t. There, I admitted it. But, we do have one thing in common — we both think we can. Only one of us is right (ahem). In the world of business, we all put out a tune. A vibe. A voice. Customers flock to
Read More...
The post 7 Ways to Coach Writing Clients on Finding Their Remarkable Voices appeared first on Copyblogger.
