5 Tips for Testing Your Email Marketing Messages to obtain better results in Q4:
The real win in the face of digital marketing is measurement. Instant results based on your last email marketing message can be a valuable learning tool if approached with thought. There is no better time than early in the fourth quarter to practice testing.
Form sub-groups out of your groups
This is the first and most important step in testing and applies to the other four tips. You may be grouping your list into distinct groups based on customer profile and are sending them messages that pertain only to them. This is terrific! Now split each group into two or three sub-groups and send the same message with slight tweaks to measure what works and what doesn’t.
Subject Lines
Send email campaigns with very different subject lines, but with the same content in the email body to each sub-group. This will help you learn what drives higher open rates.
Imagery
Have you every thought about what effect it might have on an action decision if you included a picture of a dog or a picture of a tree in your email template? Keeping all else the same, send one graphical design to one sub-group and entirely different design to another.
Link Positioning
Positioning both in regards to physical positioning within the email and whether to include banner links or text links. Its worth experimenting. After all, don’t most of your links lead to an action decision?
Timing
Are your customer’s weekend warriors and would rather plow through email on Saturday and Sunday? Or are most of them in a different time zone? It’s worth testing different days and different times of day for send activity. Maybe you’ll find out that the normal Tuesday mid-morning send isn’t right for your contacts.
Tips to Grow Your Email List
Building a strong, permission-based email list is one of the best marketing assets you have. You don't want to miss any opportunity to communicate with your customers and clients, networking contacts, and other prospects. Make sure you give everyone you come in contact with in your business ample opportunity to join your list.
Ready Campaigns offers a number of special features you can easily implement to help grow your email list automatically! Some of the tools we offer to help you build and manage your list are:
Newsletter Subscribe or Mailing List Signup forms on your website. We give you the code to copy and paste directly into your website. Your visitors can fill out a simple form with basic information such as name, email address and phone number, and this data gets automatically ported directly into your Ready Campaigns account in a separate contact list!
Send to A Friend. Every email you send automatically includes a Send to a Friend link, that allows your email recipients to easily forward a message on and add a personal note to their friends and family.
Custom List Development Services. Need help growing a specific list of customers? Ready Campaigns’ Marketing Specialists will work with you to help you build or grow any targeted email list. We will also ‘clean’ the lists and send them through our system to ensure opt-in and CAN-SPAM compliance. Contact Us for more information.
Make a habit in your organization to collecting emails at every opportunity and point of contact. Just remember that you are building a permission-based list, which means a person must give their permission before being added. Here are some tips for growing your list.
Always have a sign-up sheet available at your place of business
Train employees to collect addresses and permission at every single point of contact
Collect addresses at tradeshows and events
Network, network, network! Join your local Chamber of Commerce or other professional networking group, and collect business cards at every opportunity.
The 4 “U’s” of Effective Email Copywriting
When prospects get your email marketing message, they make a quick decision, usually in a couple of seconds, to open or delete it based largely on the subject line. But given the glut of promotional email today, how can you convince a busy prospect – in just a few words – that your message is worthy of attention?
The “4 U’s” copywriting formula – which stands for urgent, unique, ultra-specific, and useful – can help.
According to this formula, strong subject lines are:
Urgent. Urgency gives the reader a reason to act now instead of later. You can create a sense of urgency in your subject line by incorporating a time element. For instance, “Make $100,000 working from home this year” has a greater sense of urgency than “Make $100,000 working from home.” A sense of urgency can also be created with a time-limited specific offer, such as a discount or premium if you order by a certain date. Unique. The powerful subject line either says something new, or if it says something the reader has heard before, says it in a new and fresh way. For example, “Why Japanese women have beautiful skin” was the subject line in an email promoting a Japanese bath kit. This is different than the typical “Save 10% on Japanese Bath Kits.” Ultra-specific. The direct mail company Boardroom is the absolute master of ultra-specific bullets known as “fascinations” that tease the reader into reading further and ordering the product. Examples: “What never to eat on an airplane,” “Bills it’s okay to pay late,” and “Best time to file for a tax refund.” They use such fascinations in direct mail as envelope teasers and in email as subject lines. Useful. The strong subject line appeals to the reader’s self-interest by offering a benefit. In the subject line “An Invitation to Ski & Save,” the benefit is saving money.
Ask yourself how strong your subject line is in each of these 4 U’s. Use a scale of 1 to 4 (1=weak, 4=strong) to rank it in each category.
Rarely will a subject line rate a 3 or 4 on all four U’s. But if your subject line doesn’t rate a 3 or 4 on at least three of the U’s, it’s probably not as strong as it could be — and can benefit from some rewriting. Originally printed in (and adapted from) “World’s Best-Kept Copywriting Secrets” by Robert W. Bly
Building An Effective Email List
Got a pocket full of business cards from that last networking event? Don't forget to ask permission before adding those names to your email marketing list. People put up with unwanted catalogs, credit-card offers, charitable appeals and other "junk mail" that clutters their mailboxes at home. We sigh about dead trees and toss it all away. Our email inboxes, however, are a different story.
Consumers take a very proprietary view of their email inboxes. Direct mail doesn't elicit the same "How dare they?!" reaction as unwanted email. People feel strongly that they have a right to decide what email they receive and what they don't. That's why your email marketing communications must be welcomed and wanted. This also applies to new business contacts you meet at networking events. You may add them to your email list, but only if you gain their permission first.
How Do You Ask for Permission?
Before we get to networking, let's review some list-building basics for permission-based email. Both your website and your physical store should make it easy for people to "opt in."
Your website should have a prominent link or button for visitors to sign up for your newsletter and promotions. The right technology can facilitate signups. If you're embarking on your first email marketing campaign, it's okay to send it to your pre-existing customers. Good marketing practice is to put a "permission reminder" at the top of your first email communication: "You received this email because you're a customer of Business XYZ. Click here to unsubscribe."
There are other great ways to obtain permission and email addresses. You may have a guestbook or a fishbowl for business cards on your counter with a "Join My Email List" sign. You should encourage your staff to verbally ask customers to sign up. The more explicit your request for email subscribers, the better. But that's not always natural or convenient, especially when you're out networking and prospecting for leads.
Business Card Bingo: Ask Now, Sell Later
Before- and after-hours events sponsored by Chambers of Commerce, BNI, trade associations and other professional networks are a good way to meet potential partners and customers. Networking is a lot of handshakes, elevator speeches and exchanges of business cards. It would be great to add all those people to your email marketing list. But you can't just carry around a fishbowl labeled "Join My Email List."
So how do you turn that stack of business cards into subscribers? First, separate them into two piles. The first pile are people who asked for more information about your business. Asking for more information is very close to asking to be on your list. They're expecting you to follow up. Go ahead and email them your Welcome Letter and attach a copy of your last newsletter or campaign. Show recipients what they'll receive in future mailings and give them an easy way to subscribe or unsubscribe if they prefer not to be on your list.
The second pile are people with whom you had social contact but didn't fully engage. They didn't ask for, nor do they expect, any follow-up. Those are the ones you need to ask permission to send them your email newsletter or promotions. You can send those people a personal email asking for their explicit permission to be added to your mailing list. Remind them about the event where you met, asking if they would like to subscribe to your emailing list. Tell them how subscribing will benefit them. If they sign up, great! If they don't, cross them off your list and cut your losses there.
Don't Let Those Leads Grow Cold!
A networking event isn't over when you grab your coat off the rack and head out to your car. You need to close the permission loop as soon as possible. If you found the networking event valuable and you met some great contacts, then don't let that go to waste. Follow up with new contacts as soon as you get back to the office. You can wait a few days or a week, tops, but if those business cards sit on your desk for months before you reach out, it's likely no one will remember you and they won't sign up.
Cold Marketing in a Warm Environment – or is that Warm Marketing in a Cold Environment?
by Nicole Fronczak, President Ready Campaigns.com
As a marketing consultant in this industry, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to work with some of the nation’s top financial advisors, agents and recruiting organizations throughout my career. And during this time, I have observed there is a universal truth that rings true whether you are at the top of your game opening your fourth regional office, a leading MGA with tens of thousands of contracted agents, or just getting started as a junior planner:
We as an industry rely strongly upon what I call ‘cold’ prospecting and marketing efforts -- and expect them to achieve warm and fuzzy results. We send thousands of seminar invitations and postcards to a purchased list; we buy Internet leads for insurance quotes. We hire appointment setters and telemarketers to call on people we don’t know and who don’t know us. We put up websites hoping to attract traffic, and maybe even do some marketing in our local communities, such as yellow pages ads, billboards or radio spots. We spend increasingly larger amounts of money to achieve smaller and less predictable results.
The problem isn’t so much that we are doing all this; after all, this is a sales profession, and any good salesman will tell you it’s all a game of numbers, with the key to this little game being to gain exposure and get in front of as many people as possible.
Rather, the problem lies in our expectations of what this type of prospecting effort will achieve (or perhaps for some of you more seasoned advisors, fond remembrance of marketing times now long past). And expectations directly translate into our attitudes and actions in terms of what we do and how we handle this exposure once we’ve spent all the time, money and effort to achieve it.
If you are like most advisors today, the buck (both literally and figuratively) tends to stop here. Let’s look at a typical example. Joe Smith is a successful financial advisor in Middletown America. For the past seven years, he has held two dinner seminars a month to attract new prospects. He sends out eight thousand invitations each month to a purchased list and has hired a telemarketing firm to accept incoming reservations. Although his results in terms of numbers of qualified prospects attending each event has declined over time, he knows that if he can get 20 people in the room, two to four of them will eventually become clients, and he’ll make money.
Still, Joe isn’t happy with the decline he has seen in his results over the years. Last year he hired an appointment setter to call on the seminar attendees post-event to schedule appointments, but that has seen inconsistent results and 50-60% of them are no-shows. He had his assistant call on his existing clients, asking them to invite friends and family to his next seminar, again with mixed results. Joe went to his broker/dealer and FMO for help, and they suggested he host more seminars outside of his home town to increase his results. He now holds four seminars a month, and spends roughly $20,000 in ‘cold’ marketing efforts to do it, with no better results.
Does this scenario sound familiar? It certainly has to many of the planners I come across and work with. What is interesting is how few are able to determine why all their strong efforts are no longer working – or at least, no longer working in the way it once did.
It’s a little like trying to see the forest through the trees. It’s easy for us, in our busy lives and schedules, to get comfortable with and rely upon a model – even a declining one -- for running our business. We get so busy focusing on the deals at hand, before we know it the next ‘cold’ prospects are in line and we are doing it all over again. Again, it comes back to expectations. This industry has taught us to expect that an individual or couple responding to a cold marketing effort will, after a chicken dinner and an hour or so of time with you, sign over a significant portion of their life savings to your care. That may have been true in the past, but in today’s world, trust isn’t as easily forged as it once was.
Now, I’m not picking on the seminar model or any other so-called ‘cold’ marketing efforts for that matter. I think these efforts are and will remain an essential backbone in our business for making new contacts and sales. However, it is only a part of a comprehensive marketing plan in today’s industry, a good first step. It’s what comes after that, those efforts that focus on relationship building, drip marketing, and personal, ongoing contact with your clients – and all those chicken dinner eaters through the years – that are so crucial to real differentiation and success today.
There are any number of ways in which to implement such relationship-building or ‘warm’ marketing efforts into your practice, and most of them are surprisingly inexpensive and do not require a full staff or a PhD to implement. Ironically, with a little planning, you can implement highly individualized, one-on-one marketing on a regular basis with your clients and prospects using highly automated processes that take very little of your time. Such efforts do, however, take a little bit of pre-planning and often a bit of a shift in how you perceive long-established practices in your business.
As 2006 comes to an end, I challenge you to take a closer look at your practice and current marketing and prospecting efforts. Ask yourself some probing questions: What happened to all the contacts and leads I’ve purchased or been exposed to over the years? Are they being touched on a regular basis, and how? Are they categorized and tracked? Do I spend enough time building strong relationships with my existing clients? Do they make regular introductions for me? Do I interact with other professionals in my community that could help me grow my business? How personal or ‘cold’ are each of the marketing efforts in my practice?
In the months to come, we will discuss specific ways in which you can break the ‘cold marketing’ cycle in your practice and strategically build relationships with each and every person you come in contact with. We’ll also talk about new ways to conduct seminar marketing and other forms of prospecting that is highly personal and avoids the traditional, expensive direct mail methods that is currently flooding the marketplace.
Here’s wishing you a warm and fuzzy holiday season.
Getting the Best Value From Purchased Leads
by Nicole Fronczak, President Ready Campaigns
Here are a few tips for getting the best value from Internet or other purchased leads:
1. Try buying leads only from sites that allow you to preview the leads before you purchase them. Buying leads sight unseen is like playing blackjack blindfolded. While many Internet lead providers offer filters, but these are often misleading.
2. ALWAYS get an email address for the prospect. Send an introductory email immediately letting the client know two very important things - that you will call them within 24 hours as they requested AND you will do business by email if they feel more comfortable. The second point in particular has been successful for many brokers we work with. It allows the client to conduct business on their time. They can rest assured that they will not receive phone calls in the middle of Desperate Housewives and take up their free time. By using email, you get to maximize YOUR time, also. Email allows the client to feel more secure in that they do not have to deal with another commissioned salesman in the flesh.
3. If you have been unable to reach a lead after a week or so of calling and at least 2 emails, send a polite letter apologizing for YOUR inability to reach them. Ask them for an opportunity to "answer their questions" not necessarily sell them a loan. While this goes against the old "ask for the sale" advice, it eases the client into knowing that you will not pressure them into making a decision immediately. Ask for the sale once you have had a chance to build trust and can show them the savings they are missing. Try including a couple of free information guides on credit scores and mortgage refinancing myths so that they get something of value for nothing if we part ways.
4. Even if you don’t hear from them after these efforts, add them to your “drip” database. Send them your monthly e-newsletter through Ready Campaigns or another service. The key is to continue making contact in a personalized, yet informative and unobtrusive way. They will do business with you when they are ready to, if you maintain top-of-mind awareness, the key in this industry.
Remember, you paid good money for these leads, and the prospect did reach out with a need. Be patient and build the relationship, and over time, you will see a higher return on investment.
