My Complete Email Marketing System
As you will have noticed I have dedicated a number of posts and videos recently to the subject of Email Marketing and Building Your List.
I had someone email me and thank me for the videos but at the same time, question why I had placed so much emphasis on recent posts on increasing opt-ins and building a list and apparently less on the Affiliate marketing side of things.
Well, to be honest, I had not appreciated I was appearing to focus less on the Affiliate side of things and if that is how it appears, then it was not intentional.
You see Affiliate Marketing and List Building go hand in hand and the bigger the list you have the greater the affiliate commissions.
It has been said before and really I don’t need to repeat it – but I will:
The Money Is in the List
Building a decent, solid list is in my opinion the best way to build a reliable long term residual income.
For me, affiliate marketing is not just about linking to products on my website. At most in a well organized Affiliate Marketing strategy that will only represent 50% of your income and the balance should come from promotions you do to your list.
TOOLS YOU’LL NEED
eCover Creator 3D
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Popup Domination
Using this WordPress Plugin I was able to increase my email opt-in rate by up to as much as 304%. It basically allows you to put a lightbox up on your blog posts promoting your mailing list. Now I can earn more money from my email promotions, oh and by the way, I created this plugin, so you know it’s amazing!
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And again, as I have said before, the best way to get subscribers to your list is to:
Deliver valuable content that adds value to the life or business of your visitor
Frankly if you are not delivering value — especially in today’s competitive world you may as well give up. Today’s website visitor is more sophisticated than ever, more reluctant than ever to give up their email address and demanding more value than ever.
No use being a ‘copycat’ (not even a copycat of me) – and rehashing something someone else is putting out there. You have to have your own unique angle / approach and above all giving your website visitor a reason to follow you and opt-in to your list.
In today’s video I actually disclose the Email Marketing System I will be employing on my new website for the first time.
A term often used these days is that something or another is a ‘game changer’. My personal view is that the game is changing all the time – sometimes a little bit – sometimes a lot and if we don’t change with it, then we get left behind.
My new website will hopefully be a Game Changer – but I always recognize the need to evolve and improve on every element of business all the time. I came across this quote by William Knudsen this week which very accurately sums up my views on the matter:
In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running; if you stand still, they will swallow you
Please don’t get swallowed in business.
Enjoy the video – again I have included an enhanced transcription with many additional resources. (Thank you for the great feedback on the Enhanced Transcription – especially from those of you to for who English is not your first language) This transcription includes more than ever explanations and links not included in the video – so really it is a Must Read.
Your comments and feedback is as always very welcome
To Our Success
Michael
PS: Check out the IncomeDiary.com YouTube Channel for all my latest videos – in advance of them being published on this blog. You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.
Video Transcription – Enhanced
Today I’m going to talk to you about my complete email marketing system that I put together in the last couple weeks for my new site. There is a much more to this than most people realize.
To start with your visitors have to find your opt-in (or have their attention drawn to it by your OFFER)
Today I want to highlight 4 different strategies and some issues related to Opt-ins.
I am experimenting with some new approaches on IncomeDiary now I have redesigned the site. Note the word’ experimenting‘ — in business and marketing you need to always be striving to beat ‘control’ (i.e. beat your current best strategy) and it is not only just about number of Opt-in’s it is also about number of un-subscribes, number of people who don’t confirm and actual conversion on any offers you promote to your list. After all a list of 1000 people that converts at 10% is exactly the same in monetary terms as a list of 10000 that converts at just 1%. (I will talk about some of my own stats a little later on)
No1: strategy is driving people to the “Michael Dunlop” Squeeze Page. I do that in a number of ways – for example I will include a link to this page in my email signature, or if I give an interview I will include this link and explain the benefits of my 7 Day eCourse. However for this example I am just going to highlight how I promote the Blogging eCourse on my website.
See image below:
Getting The Attention Of Your Visitors With Good Graphics
I sort of wish I could say it didn’t matter — but really I have found, the better the graphics, the better the conversion.
No 2: Strategy for me is an offer (Opt-in Opportunity) placed in the side bar of the blog. Again a STRONG OFFER is essential. See Example Below:
Sidebar Opt-in Offer
Special Note: The “I take your privacy seriously’ notice is essential. An opt-in without it in my experience converts much lower.
No 3: A light-box Subscribe / Opt-in Form. This is a BOX that appears (hovers) over your content.
AWeber have produced an excellent LightBox Video that explains how to install a Lightbox Opt-in using the AWeber system. Highly recommended and you will see just how easy it is to do.
It is the much maligned pop-up by another name I suppose. I am in two minds about the Lightbox – it will I’m sure convert very well but I’d be reluctant to ‘hit’ a visitor with it the second they land on my web-page. However if it appeared after they had read a number of articles or just on some specific pages I think the quality of conversion would be better.
I mean, there is no point in ‘forcing’ people to opt-in if they then unsubscribe after a few days – or worse still you lose the goodwill of your visitor. So I am going to start of tentatively with it and indeed many of you will not even see it to start with. As I said earlier there is little point in growing your list if the quality of the list reduces significantly and their responsiveness to offers (conversions) is very low. I know not all marketers would agree with me on this and there is a tendency to just throw as much as you against the wall and see what sticks – but that is not my style.
I would welcome the views of my visitors on this topic so if you have anything to say on it please comment below or feel free to Contact Me
Offers?
Having decent graphics as I mentioned above helps a lot – but more importantly in my opinion is the right OFFER. No longer is it good enough to just say something like signup for my free newsletter. It needs to be more substantial like my Blogging eCourse or another cool giveaway – for example some free audios or videos or an ‘underground report’ about your niche.
No4: Test and Then Test Again
After all of the above you should test and find out what works for your site and what doesn’t. You could do loads of different things, like different colors, different text, different offers. For example, I test different offers, such as my videos, my e?course and eBook, reports, you name it. This is sometimes referred to as A/B testing or bucket testing. As I mentioned above — all the time, you are trying to beat ‘control, beat your previous best.
More on A/B testing can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing
Something New On This Site
Something I have discovered, especially with my eCourse is that people don’t always act on each day immediately and then end up for example loosing day 5 and 6 emails for example. When this happens they “Opt-in’ again. The AWeber system will point this out to the visitor but I am working on a new system which points this out to the subscriber and actually gives them a PDF download of the eCourse – see screenshot below.
Message For Already Subscribed Visitor
Other Offers
It is not something I do much with myself – but something a number of my friends do is on the Subscription Thank You page include a special offer for one of their products. For example a $1 Trial on their membership website or indeed any sort of sales offer.
As I said, not something I am doing myself, but something that might work for some of my readers. I personally have found it better to Emphasis just how important it is that they CONFIRM their email address in order to receive my offer / free gift. I also give them an ‘unadvertised bonus’ such a Free subscription to my weekly blogging updates – always building the value so to speak.
Talking of confirming email addresses – ask any marketer and you will find this is one of their biggest issues with building a list. Getting people to opt-in is only half the story – to complete it you must encourage them to CONFIRM email address. I have recently created a new Thank You Page which will hopefully encourage more people to complete the Email Confirmation. Check out the new Thank You Page here
I have quite a number of email lists now – across a number of sites. Last year my target had been to get an average of 50 new subscriptions per day across my websites – which may not seem a lot but that is 350 a week or 18200 in a year. I have been beating that now for a while and my new target is 100 new opt-ins per day but as you will see in the screenshot from one of my lists on AWeber below getting people to CONFIRM their email makes a big difference to how fast you grow that list. As can see in this example if I wanted 50 confirmed opt-ins per day on this list alone I need a lot more than 50 new opt-ins to reach that target.
Confirmed Opt-ins is what counts in List Building
In the above example you will see that 12th May I got 41 new opt-ins but with Unverified (did not confirm email address) and 5 unsubscribes I actually netted just 22 new subscribers on this list. Compare that with the 19th May when it ‘only’ took 28 Opt-ins to leave me with a net number of 21 new subscribers. This is why I focus on the SUBSCRIBED (confirmed) number daily rather than the number of opt-ins that day. It is also why I am putting even more effort into encouraging people to CONFIRM email address. (And also why I am being selective about Lightbox Opt-ins – and anything that ‘forces’ visitors to subscribe — because as you can see it is all a waste if they don’t confirm.
Just in case you are wondering why I used the word “LEADS” in this post title it is because in my opinion an OPT-IN is not a LEAD or a SUBSCRIBER until they confirm their email. So you could say:
More Opt-ins = More Subscribers (Leads) = More Sales = More Income
When Might You Have a Single Opt-in?
As you will have noted, I primarily go for that double opt-in and get people to always confirm their email address. But there may be the odd occasion when you only wish to use a single opt-in.
One time you might wish to use a single opt-in is for say a webinar or tele-seminar (a one time event). You can send the subscriber details of the event (call in numbers etc) along with reminders of when the event is just about to start. (e.g. Webinar Starts in 1 Hour)
Auto-responders Make Your Life Easy
If you have not already done so please check out my Making Money with Email Marketing and an Autoresponder Series post.
I use an Autoresponder to deliver my 7 Day eCourse but in between I will email important updates (Helpful blog posts etc) plus I also will do promotions such as $1 Trials and Product Launches by other people in my niche that I respect / endorse. I really don’t over-do these promotions – sometimes there is one every week or so then other times a month or more will pass. Basically I don’t promote unless I think what is on offer is something I would be happy to buy myself.
In Conclusion
As you can tell I am a huge fan of List Building. It is also very important to not spam or email anyone who really doesn’t want to hear from you. (Always include an un-subscribe link)
AWeber offer what to me is an amazing service. Indeed I have to say there are lots of AWeber features that I have not even applied yet.
One however that I plan to do soon is to send email ONLY to people that had not OPENED a previous email I sent. Open rates are rarely better than 50% and 10% – 20% is considered good, so as you can see there are a lot of people (busy people) who never see that well crafted email you sent out. But what if you could email the ‘un-opens’ only again with out offending those who had already opened their email?
Well that is now a feature that is available through AWeber and by all accounts it is very powerful.
I have heard of this strategy doubling the overall open rate – especially if you change a few words in the subject line but resend the same email.
Not only that, but it allows us to learn more about our list and their emotional hot buttons and what they respond to – which ultimately makes us all better business people.
But that is another subject and a big one at that which I will leave for another day. For now I hope you have enjoyed today’s video installment and this transcription, I hope it helps.
Let me have your comments below and as always you are very welcome to email me your suggestions and questions you would like to see answered in future posts by contacting me here
Note:
Check out the IncomeDiary.com YouTube Channel for all my latest videos – in advance of them being published on this blog. You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.
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