Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills |  |
- Why Again Should I Keep An Email List?
- Pt 3 – Raising Money For My New Company – How it ended up
- Adjusting Your Content Strategy to Suit Multiple Digital Devices
| Why Again Should I Keep An Email List? Posted: 08 Jul 2014 06:30 AM PDT
I’m sure that you’ve heard the phrase, “The money is in the list.” Do you have a list? If not, you might think that it’s not worth the trouble or that it probably won’t work for your business. If you have a list and it’s just not providing the return you expected, it might be the right time for you to eliminate the clutter and consider what it’s all about in the first place. The fact that you’re reading an online marketing blog is evidence enough that you’re in a business where you could leverage this medium. If you embrace it, more than 90% of businesses online will benefit enough from an email list to make it worthwhile. Often, the contribution is significant and can be a game-changer. I consulted with a colleague a short time ago that sells vacation packages online. I introduced him to the concept of email marketing and a sales funnel in this way. This is an actual excerpt from the discussion: Here’s the theory – my own adaptation to your market. Let’s assume there are six levels of engagement that your customers usually experience BEFORE they book a trip with you. The phases of planning a vacation: - Speculation You have people coming to your site every day that are in each stage of contemplating, to planning, to buying a vacation. Besides the tire kickers, visitors are looking for something specifically relevant to the stage they are in today. Today, a visitor’s need may simply be a need for information. They might hit your site(s) once and never come back. It could be either because they didn’t remember your site’s name, they didn’t bookmark the page, or even because the subway was pulling up to their stop and they close the browser window. More than half of these people are really passive, and won’t interact with the site other than reading the pages and then leave. Many of them aren’t planning to take a trip for another three months to a year so the urgency to “get anything done” doesn’t really exist to them yet. The type of strategy that we will discuss will capture a decent number of those passive visitors that may never come back otherwise, and eventually turn an astonishing percentage of them into customers—many of them life-long customers. The more often you have interaction with people, the more likely that they will trust and eventually buy from you when the time comes. Interaction stacks up over time, and progressively increases the likelihood that the sale eventually happens. Your ad clicks, affiliate clicks and all the rest of your traffic in the end, is reduced to a small conversion percentage (buyers of vacations). Usually the absurd vast majority visit your site and leave. Knowing your daily interaction rate is important. This is how many phone calls, emails and web form fill-outs you get daily as a percentage of overall visitors. For most sites this is between 2% and 6%. Sometimes it’s a lot lower. Of the remaining 94-98% that don’t call, email or fill out a contact form, you can easily capture an email address! A typical email capture rate can be between 3% and 10% of your site visitors every day. Begin with a lead-generating offer to them: This is usually a free offer designed to get the attention of everyone on your site—something to read later and benefit from. To accept the free offer, they enter their name and email address. You have two HUGE advantages in doing this. 1) I looked at over a dozen vacation websites and almost nobody is doing this. 2) Your form would only include two simple fields to fill out. Every other vacation site has a minimum of six fields and as many as sixteen. The more fields you force the “Speculation and Investigation” stage people to fill out, the FAR more likely they are to ditch the form. Many don’t even have a date in mind yet! Your lead generator can be anything creative and professional looking. You should come up with 4-5 possible things to offer (and each gets tested). Examples might be: Vacation Planning Guide, Secrets to Planning a Productive and Stress-free Visit to XYZ, Planning Strategies to See Everything You Want to See and Do, etc. You can combine some of your best stuff that you’ve already written or published (even video) to build a great guide that REALLY helps people on its own. By doing this, you’re helping them and building a relationship at the same time. Upon acceptance of your lead generator, you pass your subscribers through a sequence of informative emails that tells about you, the different locations, tricks to booking that save money, etc. In every other email you provide a hook at the bottom that says: “If you liked this advice, we can offer more advice and give you a 'hands-on' consultation for planning your vacation. Click here to request an appointment with one of our Experts.” This takes them to a page where they simply enter a phone number and a time/date range that works for them. You’ll consistently bring anywhere from 5-20% of your list BACK to your website with each email—visitors that, before, had a very slim chance of ever coming back. After the first two weeks or so, your email opens and clicks will begin to fall off. If you map out the message sequence carefully you will have mentioned various venues like Florida, California, Gulf Coast, Cruises and other items of interest. You’ll separate (and this can be automated…in fact the whole thing is) people into various interest categories. Someone for instance, that opened and/or clicked an element in a message pertaining to cruises after having ignored the previous three emails about other topics is definitely more interested in cruises than anything else. You break that individual out into a new message sequence that sends them 2 to 3 emails over about two weeks just about cruises. ALWAYS share insight that provides an advantage or “insider” information that they won’t find anywhere else. Each of these emails are short, and provide the “If you liked this advice…” byline at the bottom. When someone buys from you, they are removed from the existing list and added to a retention list. The retention list sends an update once a month or so, and gets heavier at the 10 and a half to 11-month mark – At the time of year they planned their previous vacation. If they haven't purchased from you at the 4 or 5-week mark, you can assume that you have exhausted most of your options for gaining their purchase, and you move them automatically to the retention list. All the while, you’ll be earning their trust and you’ll be the only one pitching them. If you give them great information you WILL be the first site they return to when they get back to contemplating a vacation again. Does this sound like a lot of work? It may be, but it is worth it. And the yielding results make the time and effort seem like a piece of cake. What's more is that someone can do it for you! PAR Program (People, Acquisition, Retention) is a professional Internet marketing team that specifically specializes in this list building and email targeting sequencing. PAR works with your company to bring in customers, keep your customers coming back and make you money. Get a free PAR Program demo here. Keep in mind that every click and every lead generated using this method is catering to people that are statistically unlikely to have bought from you otherwise. This method does not harm your existing traffic and lead-production methods and does not offend anyone. The best lead generator for a previous client is a lightbox that you might deem intrusive and a huge turnoff (You can see the example used by a client here. Wait because there’s a 5-second delay before it appears). We have not observed a reduction in visitor “time on site” or “pages per visitor” when we use this compared to when we don’t. You’re capturing people at all stages of investigating and planning their vacation, catering to their specific interest and maintaining a “stickiness” to your brand and your service that nobody else is taking the time to do. There are a dozen methods to track how effective the list produces for you. The data can be analyzed in so many ways to learn more about your target audience and who is more likely to buy from you. If you use the PAR Program, you’ll have access to an incredible level of subscriber data that makes it easy to identify groups of buyers inside of your list. Justification for the cost of setting up should be (if I were contemplating this for my website) based on number of visitors per month to your site. It would be reasonable to expect at least 3% of them will join your list. So, at 15,000 visitors per month, you should pick up 450 subscribers minimum. If you convert even 1% of them per month for an average $2,000 vacation and your business makes 10%, then that’s $900 per month in new business revenue. In month two, you’ll have 900 subscribers. In month three, you'll have 1,350 total, and so on. If you get 1% in the first month to buy, the list may decline and only get .25% the second month and .10% the third month. So you would have $900 (first month subscribers), $225 (second month subscribers) and $90 (third month subscribers) for a total of $1,215 a month ongoing because there are new people entering the system every day. These are really conservative numbers by the way. We operate lists that pull 8% of all visitors 7 days a week and convert 4% of them into clients. Do the same math with the 15,000 monthly visitors and you’ll have $9,600 in sales from first-month subscribers alone per month. There’s no way to tell until you try it. With a good list, you’ll also send a percentage of subscribers back to your site every day. Encourage them to “Like” you on Facebook and share your posts, etc.. Followers on Facebook will begin seeing you more often and build “frequency” with the customer. They will also see your brand new material as you publish it. When you build a list that converts well, you can afford to advertise your lead generator on a PPC or CPM basis to bring people directly into your list. Alternatively, you may just keep up the advertising that you’re already doing that brings people into your site. Either way you’ll see a higher ROI (return on investment) from advertised traffic because you have a second and a third and a fourth chance to convert some of them instead of just once. That’s the theory and method of lists. It largely operates as another arm of your business and a new revenue stream that does not affect your existing numbers. In fact, you can also subscribe (with their permission) people that call and fill out a form that don’t buy from you, and add previous customers so you can catch them later. The long-term benefits of using a list is that you’ll often have people coming back that visited your site months and even a year ago to buy from you. This, all because you took the time to do what everyone else isn’t doing. You’ll earn that frequency and trust in a more personal way than advertising alone can ever accomplish. If you like what you read and want more information, click here. I am David Haas and I am a PAR Program Authorized Sales Representative & Independent Internet Marketing Consultant. You can reach me at www.48clicks.com or Dave@48clicks.com. Looking for an SEO service that won’t get you banned?       |
| Pt 3 – Raising Money For My New Company – How it ended up Posted: 08 Jul 2014 05:00 AM PDT
This is Part 3 in my adventure in raising money for my new company – The PAR Program. If you missed the other parts you can see Part 1 (preparation) here and Part 2 (pitching) here. The great (but not the interesting part of the story) is I raised almost $600,000.00. I will refer to it as 600k just rounding up in this as reference to make the numbers easier. Now where and how I raised the money IS the big surprise. In pitching to VC’s / Angels – the question I always got was, “You have money why do you need investment”. I had a good canned response to that, but it wasn’t well received. The real reason I was trying to raise money to bring more to the table than money. Money wasn’t the issue to make this company work… it was the connections and experience that came with it. Unfortunately that didn’t turn out well for me. I have no doubt this company will be the biggest startup success story ever to come out of Nebraska… and I wanted to take a local Nebraska VC/Angel company a long for that ride. I thought my past companies sold and successes mixed with the fact I have never lost money in 13 years should have been a no brainer. I was really out of my league and comfort zone pitching and to be bluntly honest just very ignorant on how the process works. I cover that much more in detail in my post about that journey. I have been told that reads like sour grapes… well it should. I was deeply disappointed and frustrated with not being able to raise money locally. Even though I have a lot of connections at major firms in Silicon Valley, I had no interest or time to to do so. You know how they say its always darkest before the dawn? Well, for one thats is BS because its darkest at midnight but there definitely was a very empty, dark, feeling. For a brief time I felt something I had never felt before. A bit of hopelessness. Even though we are doing great financially the company was not growing at near the pace I wanted it to and I was very worried without the right people in place that would allow me to do what I am good at (marketing/bizdev/development strategy) the growth was not going to be acceptable. Mix that in with the huge overhead, payroll, trying to manage people (which I have come to learn I am the worst at), and the rest of the stuff… well it felt for the first time in a decade I was actually “working” again and looking forward to 5pm everyday. And then the dawn came: Back before I initially started pitching for money we applied for the company to get accredited in the Nebraska Angel Tax Credit program. This program, if approved for your startup, allows investors to get a 40% refundable tax credit on the investment they make. To put it into perspective if you invested $500,000.00 in my company by the end of 2014 and met the criteria you would get a $200,000.00 refund from the state of Nebraska when you filed your taxes next spring. Being its a refundable tax credit, its not a credit to future taxes, its an actual lump sum check. AND of course you still have the full investment. You just only have 60% of your investment at risk. Pretty badass right? Just after my last pitch, and coming to the realization funding from a VC/Angel firm wasn’t going to happen, we received notification that the PAR Program was approved for this. Total game changer as far as raising money… As you can imagine, after word got out, all of a sudden everyone wants in. Why not? Where you going to get a 40% return on your money in a couple months and still have the full equity? Of course, the first thing that hit me was if I was qualified to do this myself. After my lawyer, accountant, and the head of the state tax credit program went through all of our records for the new company, they concluded, that I did indeed qualify to invest in my own company and get the 40% return. On May 25th I made the investment. A week later I got a certificate to file with my state taxes next year for a refund of 230 some thousand dollars. I still have reservations about posting this publicly. Lets put our cards on the table. I am the guy that has publicly, hell PROUDLY, disclosed that I attribute a lot of my success due to the fact I am not afraid to take angles and push the limits morally, ethically, and sometimes legally. I don’t want this to come off like I am gaming the system. Its far from that. This is dealing with the IRS… its a lot different than coming up with interesting ways to get affiliate commissions for ringtones, acai berries, dating leads, or various other things I have done in the past. Everything was done 100% correct with lots of meetings between accountants, lawyers, and representatives from the state. I racked up well over 20k in fees just making sure all was done right. There is a lot of oversight and many hoops to jump through otherwise the state can come back and collect that refund. I don’t want this to come off like its a “loophole” or the “rich get richer” program. In fact, among many other things, I can’t/won’t take a salary, distribution or any sort of income from this company for a very long time. It could be years. I do have income from the blog and other entities, products, consulting whatever so its not like my kids won’t eat =P. Immediately that capital has been put to work. Not only bringing on staff with the agency side of the PAR Program, but hired 2 more developers, and a few other people to build out the self service platform that will be launching early fall if not sooner. In total I have hired 4 people, 3 of which were unemployed, so far. And we are looking for more people. I started creating jobs in Nebraska and will create many more in the coming months. That is what this program is all about. I also have found 3 high level seasoned people to come on board as our CEO, CIO, and marketing ninja, with very proven track records. Since coming on board in those roles they have fairly seamlessly integrated in managing my existing staff and development team which in turn has allowed me to do what I love and am the best at. Its been a while since I have been this happy. With this capital I was able to bring them in and they are better and have more experience than anyone that could have come with VC money. Mix that with the fact they have already built a couple multi million dollar SAAS platforms in our industry… its all coming together. I will announce who they are when we launch… You might recognize their names but for sure know the company they previously founded. The Nebraska Angel Tax Credit program was created primarily for job growth by giving investors an incentive to invest in something they might be on the fence about or otherwise wouldn’t by mitigating their financial risk. I knew what I had to do, but without getting this or other investment money, I am not sure it would have happen. Well it would have happen but it would not have had the growth rate that I find acceptable. It is an amazing program and the people that run it are amazing to deal with. If you have a new startup in Nebraska or looking to invest in one, I can’t recommend enough that you look into it. If I haven’t drilled it home enough I just want to again emphasize that I have to keep the investment in the company for 3 years and with a LOT of hoops and oversight going forward. The 600k was money I had to liquidate from other investments and the capital is already going to work pretty hardcore. Also incase you missed it - We are holding a contest right now to help name the new self service side of the company. If we go with your suggestion I will not only pay you $1,000 cash but you will also get a shirt that says “I named X”. There is also a place where you can enter to be a beta tester which is a big opportunity not only with all the benefits but also you will help play a big role in ironing out any bugs and helping us with new features or suggestions. Go here if you haven’t to sign up for the contest or the beta program. Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?     |
| Adjusting Your Content Strategy to Suit Multiple Digital Devices Posted: 07 Jul 2014 10:51 PM PDT Making adjustments to your web content strategy to suit multiple digital devices is no longer just a good idea – it's become a necessity. With smartphones users tipped to total 1.75 billion in 2014 and tablets also rapidly increasing in profusion – the number of Android enabled devices alone is expected to surpass one billion this year – ensuring that your web content is compatible with multiple devices has no longer become a case of solely gaining a competitive edge over other businesses in your sector, but has become a requisite if your business is to reach out to as many people as it can. Your content strategy can't, however, come at the expense of good website design – the importance of good website design is far too important to overlook – though it's a mistake that some have been guilty of in a mad rush to make their content suitable – or as is often the case the same – across multiple devices.  Image credit: schoschie, license Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) Therefore, your content strategy needs to be different for different devices, i.e. a strategy for your website and another for smartphones and tablets. Screen size matters – Making adjustments to allow for multi-screen usage In addition to making adjustments to allow for differences between your website to be viewed on a desktop PC or notebook and smartphones and tablets, you also need to make further adjustments to take into account further variations in screen size – a 10" iPad is a different kettle of fish altogether from a 4" smartphone. Here are a few important factors to consider with regard to screen size:
These are factors that you'll need to gain an understanding of and although conducting research into consumer behaviour isn't always easy, it's a reason in itself to get involved in analytics so that you can make informed decisions about how to engage visitors to your website and mobile site. Working with images – The need for scalability A lot has justifiably been made of the need for 'breathing space' for written content, i.e. white space, though it's also important to bear in mind that images also need to be taken into account and that they need to be scalable so as to fit both the text size and the viewport. There are a few tools that can be used to assist you with this – or the web designer you're working with if you're not as tech savvy as you'd like to be – such as Focal Point, which crops responsive images so the image's main focal point isn't lost when viewed on smartphones and small tablets. In addition to scalable images, you also need to take into account the practice of 'minification', which aims to improve loading times by removing unnecessary characters from image source codes. Google is here to help – Accessing Google's wealth of knowledge Google's report, 'Any Place, Any Time, Any Device – Building Websites for the Multi-screen Consumer', is an excellent place to start your research into how to create an effective content strategy for multiple devices. Of the issues the report can help you make sense of, included are:
Work with the right people – It's what you know AND who you work with Unless you're a cutting-edge web designer with an in-depth knowledge of digital marketing you'll need to work with the right people – an award winning digital marketing agency and website designers of a similarly high calibre – if your content strategy is to bear fruit across multiple devices. Working with experts to create a content strategy that succeeds across multiple devices doesn't mean you're taking a backseat approach, but rather that you're putting yourself in the best possible position for your efforts to come to fruition and bear the fruit that you want to see. Looking for an SEO service that won’t get you banned?     |
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