Happy new year! I hope your holidays were good and that you’ve managed to re-find some semblance of your routine. (Or maybe even some cool new routines.) On Tuesday this week, Stefanie Flaxman gave us seven ideas for how to thrill your boss, editor, or clients with your writing professionalism. And on Wednesday, Brian Clark
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The post Jump into a Creative and Productive New Year appeared first on Copyblogger.
Every marketing playbook begins with “know your target market.”
It’s preached day in and day out by the top marketing pros. Every well-paid exec learns this on their first day on the job.
And for good reason. Knowing your target market is critical to generating traffic or converting sales.
But what does it really mean?
Most playbooks will tell you to fill out the classic buyer persona or demographic template.
What does that tell you, though? Honestly.
BMW sells convertibles to old, white, bald, suburban dudes who make a comfortable six-figures a year.
Ok. Now what?
That doesn’t tell you why they buy. That doesn’t tell you how to reach them, where they hang out, who influences them, or how to upsell them at the right time.
To make matters worse, most companies sell to multiple customer personas. And each one buys for vastly different reasons.
So shoe-horning them into a single box of…
Age
Gender
Location
… isn’t going to bring in paying customers.
Many marketers want to jump the gun. They go straight into A/B testing multiple audiences, for example.
You need 1,000 conversions monthly, minimum, to get results with statistical significance. And if you’re testing variables against a single persona, that means you need multiples of 1,000 conversions for each one. Which is one of the many reasons why A/B tests often fall flat.
Sales reps, on the other hand, know your target market inside and out. Even the lowest SDR on the totem pole has your target market down cold.
They deal with annoying sales objections all day long. They know what makes your target customer tick. They know what pushes them off the fence and what turns them into paying customers.
How? Because they’re in the trenches talking, learning, experimenting, and failing on a daily basis.
Sales reps spend 41% of their time selling. Dealing with real customers in your target market. Finding out if they’re qualified to buy, or if they aren’t.
Meaning they know major things that marketers struggle with:
Who’s gonna buy from you
Why they’re gonna buy from you
Why they’re picking you instead of competitor A who charges less
Who ain’t gonna buy from you
Why they ain’t
That’s more powerful than any buyer persona template you can come up with. And according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report, leads sourced by the sales department are among the highest quality (outside of unicorn-esque personal referrals).
And they also produce the most leads and sales for a given business.
Sales reps understand customer motivations and preferences deeper than marketers do. Because without speaking one-on-one or meeting face to face, you can’t learn everything you need to learn about them.
You’ve just walked into a car dealership to scout new vehicles. It’s time for an upgrade.
You walk in the door and instantly realize you’ve made a big mistake.
It’s all downhill from here.
Time for a cup of terrible black coffee from the helpful car salesperson grinning from ear to ear. “Another deer in headlights,” they think. Practically licking their lips.
You know exactly what’s coming. But you still can’t avoid it.
You want the damn car. You’re practically foaming at the mouth.
You told yourself to be strong. To fight back. To flee from temptation.
But that smooth-talkin’ sales rep just roped you in.
They sold to you without selling.
90% of the sale happened before you ever stepped on that filthy lot. They built a brand image around the product. They didn’t even tell you to buy the car. They didn’t talk about its features or its wonderful quality.
They didn’t ask you to sign anything, read anything, or even what package you wanted. They simply got you to take a test drive.
See, we buy based on emotions. Ones that never show up on the Customer Persona deck circulating your department’s Slack channel.
They made you feel like a star when you got behind the wheel. That’s selling without selling. And sales reps are king at it.
It’s simply another form of branding that’s unmatched by most online attempts. And branding drives sales:
Sales reps don’t know how to leverage branding or deliver an amazing customer experience because they read about it on GrowthHackers.com.
They know because they know. Because if they didn’t know, they wouldn’t eat.
Landed a few new clients from that latest marketing campaign?
“Run another one and double the acquisition! We just need X more traffic to land Y in new leads.”
Except, of course, those are just leads. Not sales.
And most new sales are completely unprofitable at the beginning.
So that’s not where the money’s at. Savvy (and wealthy) salespeople focus instead on where marketers don’t: existing customers.
You know, the customers who already use your product or service. Who already pay you cold hard cash. The ones that cost 5x less to sell to.
But marketers aren’t really at fault for this. Our system/current mantra is that marketers exist to drive traffic. New inbound leads.
Content is king, right?
Their sole goal at most companies is to bring in more visitors. Meaning they often get caught up in customer acquisition and acquiring as many new visits as possible.
That leaves almost no room for focusing on marketing messages to existing customers.
Even worse, the deck is stacked against marketers. The mass majority of channels used by marketing departments are better for acquisition than retention:
State of Inbound found that marketers’ top priorities consisted of entirely acquisition-focused tactics, too:
On top of that, only 42% of companies can measure customer lifetime value with any accuracy. And if we know anything about real data, that data is probably wrong.
If you can’t measure lifetime value, you can’t know the potential of your existing customers.
That leaves you with one option:
To keep turning the wheels to avoid customer churn. To go back to those acquisition-based tactics. Bring in new leads with inbound strategies and make sure the CPA is low enough to allow for profits.
But sales reps are different.
They’ve built real, lasting relationships with the sales they’ve closed.
They don’t get paid based on Twitter followers. They get paid based on new real revenue.
And the money is in the list.
No, no the crappy email one full of unqualified subscribers who aren’t ever going to pay you. (Those influencers are wrong.)
The money is in the existing customer list because the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. Increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits by 25% or more.
Selling to existing customers is easier. And more profitable.
But typical marketing gigs don’t allow room for that. Marketers drive the traffic and email signups. Sales maniacally focus on dollars and cents.
I know it sounds crazy. Phone calls? Is this 1973?
But phone calls are extremely important in today’s world.
Here’s why.
According to HubSpot, the most successful channel for sales reps to connect with a prospect is via phone:
That means more deals. And more real, tangible sales are landed on the phone than any other channel.
Sitting on social platforms all day doesn’t drive big-ticket sales.
Sure, it can be great for generating brand awareness, but when push comes to shove, phone calls convert best.
Want to reach C-level executives, VPs, and managers? In other words, decision makers? Phone calls are your best bet.
And marketers almost never call customers. They’re too busy running around, managing new marketing campaigns.
Sales reps, on the other hand, are taking advantage of outdated phone calls for one specific reason: personalization. The Holy Grail of conversions.
According to AdAge, most marketers say that personalization will be the most important marketing tactic in years to come. But 60% of marketers struggle to personalize their content in real time.
Marketers love to talk about personalization. However, they don’t like to do it.
Phone calls are arguably the most personalized form of communication (aside from face-to-face interactions).
You’re talking directly with the prospect, for extended periods of time, developing rapport. You’re finding out what they did on the weekend, what ages their kids are, their tone of voice, their frustrations or excitements.
Try getting that on Instagram.
It’s real communication where the customer has a voice, and the sales rep is there to serve.
In fact, customers actually enjoy being contacted by phone:
56% of surveyed customers prefer to communicate by phone for business purposes, after email and face-to-face.
When it comes to big fish like C-level executives and VPs, phone calls and real interactions rank high as well:
While messaging and social seem fun, it’s not what business communicators or consumers want.
And sales reps are the ones conducting the face-to-face interactions and phone calls, not marketers.
To add to that, the most successful channel for connecting with prospects is via phone:
Want to drive more sales?
You need to reach your prospects. And the best way to do it is through conducting a good old-fashioned phone call.
Marketing and sales are often seen as two different worlds.
One has their heads in the clouds, posting cat gifs on social all day. While the other is a sleazy, money-hungry cesspool. (Marketers words, not mine.)
But that’s not true. The stereotypes simply don’t hold weight anymore.
Marketing and sales departments shouldn’t be seen as competition, but rather, two parts of a well-oiled machine.
When marketing and sales teams are tightly aligned, companies state that their marketing strategy is more effective:
If you’re sales and marketing teams aren’t, you’re likely struggling with marketing.
And the cold hard truth is:
The majority of sales and marketing departments aren’t tightly aligned.
Some are even rarely or completely misaligned. Meaning most strategies and campaigns are going to have major flaws that hinder revenue.
So your first step is to work on the fundamentals by making sure your messaging is aligned across both departments. Whether you’re cold emailing as part of your outbound marketing or blogging as part of your inbound marketing.
Viral coefficients don’t pay the bills. Neither do 301 redirects or Facebook chatbots.
And therein lies the problem.
Good marketing can’t beat real relationships or high-quality customer service.
Sales reps are actually the best marketers in your company. Even if they don’t want to be.
Experience trumps all, and sales reps almost always have the most customer experience in your company. They know your customers’ ins and outs. Their pain points. Their desires, wants and needs.
Aligning marketing and sales has never been more important according to the latest business data.
Want to become a better marketer? Spend more time selling, first.
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.
If you’re in marketing, there are days it feels like the most enviable occupation in the world and on others, the most accursed. This is a logical condition since, historically, marketers have been both praised and vilified (think of the series, Mad Men) for the work they do to manipulate their fellow humans and in trying to steer their buying decisions one way or another. Under the intense glare of fraud and privacy concerns in the Internet age, the applause and the brickbats are equally deserved. The vilification though is funny because while our societies have for the better part of a century complained and fretted about the manipulative nature of advertising and marketing, we’ve also emotionally invested in the stories that were told and the images that played out in front of our eyes. In many cases, we love what we see and we act on it. Does manipulation work, then? Yes, of course but we would prefer to call it something else. It sounds better, and more constructive, to call it influencing. Terry O’Reilly of the CBC has a rich source of material called, Under the Influence, which I highly recommend.
Influencing and influencers
By Influencer Marketing, I am not talking about celebrities selling stuff on social media. For the purpose of this blog, I want to talk instead about the countless technical possibilities that exist to help marketers understand, and influence, their customers’ wants and desires. The marketing automation product landscape seems to be as crowded as the beach on a hot summer day and the focus of much of that community of solutions is to try to influence buyers over social media, email, and websites. For marketers, it’s exciting, confusing, and terrifying all at once. However, is it possible that all of the solutions are missing something? This report by The Journal of Advertising Research purports to prove that the most effective advertising campaigns, in terms of stimulating an emotional connection, are actually a combination, and a coordination, of television and those other vehicles. It seems that the human brain while attracted to, and increasingly addicted to, participation in the online world, still fundamentally responds best to television imaging. Does that information upset any notions of how all old technology must always make way for new? It seems the world is too complicated to draw that conclusion and so too is the human brain. Marketers are going to need even more science to handle complications. And that’s another thing that’s funny. The more scientific we become with our marketing approaches, the more critical it is to understand the emotive power of the human brain.
Artificial intelligence
Digging beneath the surface of any subject can sometimes reveal more than you want to know but it also typically reveals greater understanding. That’s why as we continue to evolve our marketing practices, it’s important to incorporate methods that accelerate our ability to do more but to also do it in a way that gets us closer to truths. Just as we conduct A/B testing to discover the best tactics for attracting buyers, it’s worth the effort to try and go even deeper in trying to understand the buyer’s preferences. Test the channels, test the combination of channels, monitor the buyer’s activities, look for patterns, connect the dots, make decisions based on associations. Ah, forget it. Marketers will not be able to do that at scale. That’s why AI holds such promise. It’s the only way marketers will be able to do their job more effectively. There’s a statistic making the rounds that by 2025 there will be 100 billion connected Internet devices, about 12 devices for every human. Not only will there be a lot of humans, there’ll be a lot of ways for those humans to communicate in some form or another. If you’re a data nerd, it will be more your time than ever before.
Open up and be introspective at the same time
To be successful in the future, marketers are going to have to develop methods for touching buyers and customers in ways that connect with them at an emotional level. It’s the same phenomenon we are witnessing now with a desire for longer-form content. Humans are desiring authenticity and messaging that connects with them at a personal level. That’s the trick and the challenge for marketers and if we are going to be successful in the exploding world of multi-channel messaging on new technologies and on old, we’re going to need to be open minded about how our processes work and how our technologies enable us to be nimble. If we can achieve that, then those will be days we’ll feel we’re in one of the more enviable occupations in the world.
If you would like some practical tips for bringing AI into your marketing, don’t miss:
Adaptive Intelligence: Practical Tips for Bringing AI into Your Marketing
What brought you here today? What are you hoping to learn, be, become, do, or change by reading Copyblogger? We’ll be asking that question a lot in the coming year, but while we wait (feel free to answer in the comments below — we’d love to hear it), allow us to talk about why we
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As your business evolves and changes, your email newsletter should follow suit. The subscribers who are currently signed up for your list may have different needs, values and backgrounds than the people you were writing for when you first launched your newsletter. The template that was once on-trend might now be painfully outdated.
If you want to keep your readers engaged, you have to continually examine the state of your newsletter — evaluating everything from design to open and clickthrough rates. And there’s no better time to do this than the start of the new year.
So how can you keep your newsletter fresh and your engagement results rising? As you begin to prepare your email marketing program for 2018, follow these three tips:
To identify your audience, review the previous year’s newsletter metrics and all of the information that you’ve gathered about your active subscribers (that is, contacts who have been opening and engaging with your messages). Where do they live? How old are they? What is there marital status? Which industries do they work in? The answers to these questions may surprise you. If you don’t already collect this kind of demographic data when people sign up for your list, consider sending out a survey to learn more about your readers.
Once you have a complete picture of who you readers are, you can make educated guesses about what will resonate with them and begin to tailor your content to match their interests or needs. For instance, discovering that the majority of your audience is over 50 years old could influence everything from the language you use to the kinds of tips you offer. The more you target and home in on your audience, the more you’ll understand what they want out of a newsletter.
You should be tracking and reviewing your newsletter’s performance all year long to make sure that you’re meeting your marketing goals. But as you gear up for a new year and start developing your strategy, it’s especially important to take stock of the newsletter’s overall performance, noting any trends, wins or setbacks.
Remember, though, that there’s more to newsletter analytics than the number of opens and clicks you receive. Taking time to dig deeper into your readers’ behavior will open your world to a plethora of knowledge about their reading habits and desires. The knowledge you obtain should be used to shape and optimize your newsletter. So what should you pay attention to, specifically, in your newsletter?
http://ift.tt/1g5CWqs?Link_Type=Headline
Once you get a feel for your readers’ behaviors and trends, use this to your advantage and refresh your newsletter design. Is your logo at the top large and pushing valuable content down? Make it smaller. Do your customers click on text links? Include clickable headlines, make them big(ger) or more prominent. Are your article sections lengthy? Make them smaller and use a template with no more than two columns per design to improve mobile viewing. Are text links not getting much love? Try including call to action buttons to each section instead, or in addition.
You should also keep your eye on what other companies are doing. Look in your own inbox and take note of what design elements work and are the most appealing to you. Design best practices are changing all of the time, and a template that you chose five years ago is likely to seem outdated to your current subscribers.
Here’s an example of how we updated our newsletter, VR Buzz, from 2014 to 2017. We divided the layout into easy-to-read content blocks, added more color to make each block of text and our CTAs stand out, and removed a table of contents that might distract from our CTAs.
2014 VR Buzz:
2017 VR Buzz:
BONUS! Segment your lists: Segment your newsletter lists and watch your most engaged readers’ content consumption closely. Create an “Engaged” list of people who regularly open and click your newsletters. When you segment your list this way, you’ll be able to customize content and continue to create newsletters that resonate with this audience.
The start of a new year is the perfect time to take a close look at your newsletter and its performance and determine how you can better serve your audience. So begin your refresh now, and ensure readers are receiving the best newsletter out there.
Join 140,000 small business ownersGet expert tips and email inspiration biweekly. Subscribe today and download our FREE Guide to Email List Management eBook.
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© 2018, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.
The post How to keep email newsletter clicks and readers on the rise appeared first on Vertical Response Blog.
It’s common for non-writers to have trouble understanding how writing for a living actually works. They imagine bespectacled introverts pounding away at their keyboards, detached from social settings and business transactions. How is a reclusive life compatible with a sustainable job? Writing is solitary work, but professional writers know publishing is a collaborative process. And
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The post 7 Ways for Thoughtful Writers to Wow Their Editors, Clients, and Bosses appeared first on Copyblogger.
Are you feeling down about the low numbers on your email list? Have you ever wondered how you could really accelerate its growth?
Perhaps all it takes is a mindset shift.
That’s what we did recently on a separate website we run and it had HUGE results.
First of all, you already know how important your email list is to your business, right? If you don’t know about how important email is to modern business, you can check out any of these educational posts.
The gist is this: for many of us successful indie entrepreneurs, our email list is the core of our business because through email we have a powerful form of “digital relationship” with our customers.
So, if you aren’t getting a very good “conversion rate” on your website — from casual visitor to email subscriber — then it can feel kinda terrible.
Like, there’s all these people coming to your website, but so few of them are taking you up on your offer.
For many of us the is a PRIME LOCATION for investing some time to improve things.
There’s a lot of places in your business you could waste time making updates — like revamping your logo, for example. You could spend hours and hours on that but your changes will almost certainly make zero impact.
Spending time on your email conversion on your website, however, is something that can make a HUGE difference. It has for us.
Because in today I want to show you an audio training where we discuss how Steph Crowder — Director of Member Success here at Fizzle — was able to DOUBLE her email list in just one week.
If you are starting your email list from scratch, or just looking for some tips, tricks and strategies on how to grow your list — and in turn your business — you will really take something away from this episode.
We also talk about the two free guides Steph created to accelerate her list and how listening, empathizing and responding to your listener community is the best thing you can do to grow your business.
There’s some notes below, but the meat of this training is really in the conversation. Enjoy!
“Lo and behold, I put that thing out there and my list doubled in a week.”
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