Category Archives: Blog

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Why are People Leaving Websites?

Have you ever wondered what the most popular reasons are that people leave websites? Recently, Kissmetrics put out some very interesting data and numbers that should help every marketer out there understand their viewer behavior just a little bit better.

Poor Navigation and Layout

If your website is poorly designed and difficult to navigate, people will leave it. Quickly. Don’t make this mistake and be sure to use logical and intuitive design when planning your layout. The main navigation links should be across the top or down the left of your screen. All pictures should be clear and related directly to the site, telling a story or providing information. Your text shouldn’t contain confusing links which are vaguely labeled and buried in the main body. Additionally, always add a sitemap.

Overkill Advertising

Have you ever gotten to a site and had pop-up ad after pop-up ad? Or Flash ads or content that fills the entire screen which leaves you searching for dozens of little “X” buttons on the boxes every few seconds? Horrible. This is why people leave sites: too many ads. Never let an ad be the first thing to welcome your visitor to your site. They shouldn’t be obtrusive or cover up a portion of the content as if to say, “You’re only allowed to read that after you pay attention to this ad!” Keep it tasteful, relevant and as always, make sure your ads are much, much smaller than your content, otherwise you look like a spam site.

Horrid Structure of Content

If your site is a jumbled mess of content where nobody can find what they are looking for, watch your bounce rate climb through the roof! There should be a logical flow to your content as it draws visitors deeper into your sales funnel at each step. Keep content that should be together all on one page, not scattered over three or four. Group similar content together to make it easy to navigate deeper into the subject matter. Highlight keywords and don’t forget subheadings in bold.

Automatic Audio and Video

People can find a video on your page if they want to. They don’t need you to auto-play content and possibly blow their eardrums out if they have headphones in, wake up the baby if they forgot to turn the speakers off or slow-down their loading process with ski—pp—ing—spee—ch—pa-tt-er—ns. Give them the option to start the audio or video themselves, or at the very least, start the volume very low and give the user a quick option to exit the audio or video without exiting the website.

Registration Requirements

You’ve been Googling for half an hour, you’re about to lose your mind—finally, you find the product you’re looking for, get on the site and BAM! A registration requirement pops up acting as a physical barrier between you and the pot of gold. You consider signing up but you will not give into this type of bullying! You hop in your car and drive off to the store to buy the product, happy that you defeated the evil internet for at least today. Yeah, don’t be that website. At least offer a little preview or demo first so they can see what you’re offering before you twist their arm.

As you can see, an intelligently designed and well-written and thought-out website can eliminate a lot of high bounce rates that are out there. If your product or service is great, give it a chance to
speak for itself. Don’t lose the war before the battle even begins!

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5 Key Factors That Make Good Webcopy Great

 

The start of the month in internet marketing land should be called copytime. Every website out there is looking for brand new copy, from blogs to social media posts to web copy. Of these three important types of copy, only one is going to represent your website day in and day out. While none should be ignored or written off with any type of nonchalance, I personally believe that webcopy should be the most scrutinized of the three.

After all, many blogs are informal. Social posts aren’t meant to serve as your doctorate. But web copy, this is what the people are looking at when they get to your site. And not only that, it’s what the search engines are looking at when they rank your site. So, it’s easy to see why webcopy should be carefully crafted, but it’s not always so simple to see how it should be crafted.

Five Points to Keep in Mind When Creating Copy for Your Website

Here are five things that you want to keep in mind as you sit down to write your web copy:

1. Capture. The first thing your copy needs to do is capture the attention of your viewers. If you have some bland, boring headline followed by copy that drones on and on, you’re going to bore visitors right off your site (if not to sleep!). Be a little provactive, a little funny, stir it up. The average person browses dozens of websites each and every day, what is going to make them stay on yours?

2. Portray. Your webcopy should be very clear in conveying your value proposition. Visitors need to know exactly what makes you different from your competition. Why should they spend their money with you when there are 50 million other sites selling the exact same product or service? If you can’t answer this, then how can you expect your customers to understand it?

3. Stand Out. People don’t really have time to read everything you write. Even if you’re the most interesting writer in the world, eating a nice juicy steak is more interesting. You aren’t going to compete with reality, so make your content easily accommodating in that you have all key points standing out for quick scanning. Headings and subheadings are a must. Numbered and bullet lists help people get the information they need, do what they have to do and then get on with their life. You aren’t inviting them over for tea, you’re inviting them to learn what you have to offer them and then convincing them to take it and leave.

4. Describe. Description is vital for many products and services, yet so many marketers buy into the “picture is worth a thousand words” ideaology of content creation. Pictures are amazing, yes (videos are even better), but you need the details, features and benefits of your products and services in writing. Why? If nothing else, for the search engines and to rank for keywords, but trust me, there are still people out there enjoy reading everything they can about a product before making a purchase. Remember, an informed consumer buys more.

5. Perfection. Finally, it’s vital that your webcopy be absolutely free and clear of errors. No spelling mistakes, no grammatical errors, no txt spk. You want to convey authority on your site and nothing will lose it faster than mspelling a werd or too or making grammer errors or having poor punctuashun?

Overall, webcopy is to a website what a salesperson is to a brick-and-mortar location. You wouldn’t hire just anybody and send them out there uninformed and unpresentable, don’t do that with your webcopy.

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Are Your Marketing Tools Helping You Reach the Right People?

Marketing is all about reaching the right people at the right time. Unfortunately that can turn into a guessing game if you don’t have the right tools. The marketing tools that we use are essential to our success so if you’ve just been “winging it” or going on intuition, you’re only selling yourself short.

Use Marketing Tools to Reach Your Audience

Here are some of my personal favorite marketing tools that will help you find the right people to get your message, product or service in front of. Of course, you will need to know your target demographic first, but after you do, these tools will help you engage with the right influencers in your industry, the most active fans and most of all, your motivated buyers.

1. Lead Social. While you will have to pay to use this social media tool, it’s one of the best in the game for anyone marketing on Facebook. What it does is it measures your Return on Investment (ROI). Your Facebook ROI is crucial for your budget so if you aren’t reaching the right people, then you’re just throwing money out the window. Lead Social works by assigning a monetary value to each of your Facebook ads and regular posts. In addition, Lead Social highlights users that are engaging with your content the most, giving you an opportunity to reach out to them, follow up with them, thank them, whatever. What you get is real time statistics on how much value you are getting out of each of your posts and ads. Then, just replicate your most valuable posts and ads (and boost them) so you reach people in the places it does the most good.

2. Tactics Cloud. This is one of my favorite Twitter tools of all time because it lets you target any person you want on Twitter. Find relevant users and follow them for follow backs. You can search for groups of users by location, keywords, who they’re following, who is following them, etc. Essentially, this is the ultimate search tool for Twitter marketers, giving you a direct route to the people you need to reach.

3. Little Bird. If you are trying to build relationships with influencers in your industry, Little Bird is the tool you need to find them. This shows you who you should be following as well as people that should be following you. Basically, you can think of this tool as a matchmaker, all you have to do is reach out and build the relationship.

4. GroupHigh. My final tool for reaching the right audience that I keep in my belt is GroupHigh. While this is another paid tool, it’s a valuable one. This gives you an enormous database of bloggers from which to search and the ultimate search tool to do it with. You can find the bloggers that you need to get in contact with, get their contact info and keep up with all of their latest posts. GroupHigh also lets you track your outreach efforts and relationship building.

All in all, I highly recommend all of these tools if you’re really trying to reach the right people in your industry and your target demographic. Of course, if you’re not on Twitter, it doesn’t make sense to get a Twitter tool and the same goes for Facebook tools with Facebook. But it serves your best interest to check out the tools that are out there for each social media platform you are on and beyond.

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Express Links vs Implied Links 101

It’s been recently discovered that Google has submitted a patent that should change the way linkbuilding is done in a drastic manner. We’ve all been aware of the linkbuilding penalties that Google has been handing out for the abuse and misuse of links, so it’s no surprise to see them taking action. In fact, this has been coming for a while, it’s just unclear how many people truly expected this kind of superb fix: implied links.

Under our current understanding of linkbuilding, ‘express links’ are the only types of links that are beneficial to a site’s ranking. An express link is your standard link that leads back to the webpage by embedding (or just plain pasting) the URL on a page. For example, http://www.Google.com is an express link. These are the links that are being used in negative SEO and link building schemes, as well as by honest internet marketers like you and me.

Enter the Implied Link

But now, Google is poised to swing the emphasis from express links to what are being called ‘implied links.’ Implied links do not actually have to include the URL to the website, they are simply implied by the mere mention of the website (or brand, product, service, etc.). This means that mentions and citations are going to be the next wave of linkbuilding, mostly because they are much harder to manipulate in order to score higher rankings in the SERPs.

This isn’t to say anything of nofollow links, we expect these to stay pretty heavy in the algorithm, but just to say that implied links are going to weigh a lot more than express links. Granted, this is mostly educated speculation right now, but the patent filed by Google certainly makes it clear that implied links are a real thing and will matter.

Reference Queries and Brand Mentions

But the changes aren’t stopping there. Not only does the Panda patent talk about express and implied links, but authority calculation will now also be affected reference queries. This is essentially a road map that starts with a very specific query that ends up in a very specific location. In other words, if 80% of all queries into “soda pop” end up on Coca Cola’s page and not Pepsi’s, Coca Cola will benefit from the reference query weight of “soda pop.”

This helps ensure that Google is directing searchers to the right pages by sending them to the places that others have found success. This determines popularity of the page by query entry, thus adding to the authority of the site. Basically, this is just another way to improve the visitor experience so keep focusing on making sure you are giving your audience exactly what they want. The better you answer their questions and meet their needs, the better your reference query scores will be.

As for brand mentions, this is just another term for implied links. They are also called mentions and if you want your brand to carry authority, you simply need other sites to talk about your brand and/or website. This is going to change the outlook on blogging since now you don’t really need anyone to place an express link in their blog, only talk about you as an authority or in some similar form.

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Overcoming the Curse of Knowledge with a Simple Survey

As internet marketers, we have many curses thrown upon us each day, but none so heavy as the one most of us don’t even take into consideration, The Curse of Knowledge. The Curse of Knowledge is a simple theory that makes a whole lot of sense when you finally learn about it, but can lead to serious pitfalls if you don’t. Simply put into marketing terms, when you look at the websites and material you create each and every day, you fail to see it with fresh eyes, thereby falling into the Curse of Knowledge.

 

What is the Curse of Knowledge?

Technically speaking, the Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for those with a certain level of knowledge to understand how those with a lesser level of knowledge view the problems and situations being discussed.

For example, if I had studied nanotechnology for decades and was asked to give a speech at a local high school, if I didn’t take the curse of knowledge into account, my speech would likely fly right over their heads. I’d be so excited about what is new in the field that I’d fail to have an introduction to basics and a way to make my concepts and terminology universally understandable.

For marketers, this takes place when the content on our sites speaks to an informed consumer, using terms and concepts that we might understand, but the average consumer doesn’t. This can be detrimental to your conversion rates because if someone doesn’t understand what you’re selling, why in the world would they buy from you?

 

Overcoming the Curse and Boosting Conversion Rates

The key then, is to be able to see your website with fresh eyes, that is, a set of eyes similar to your consumers’ and not a professional in the niche. There are a few ways to go about this, one of which is probably going to net you the best results. Let’s take a look at your options:

1. Have Friends Look at Your Website. If you have friends or family that aren’t involved in your niche or the marketing industry, have them take a look at your site. Ask them to go through the site as if they wanted to make a purchase. You can even tell them the product you want them to find and purchase. Make note of where they get hung up, where they get frustrated or how quickly they find the product and make the purchase. In other words, track their movements for any signs of resistance and then work on eliminating them. Be sure to ask them exactly what they thought of the site afterward and recommend any improvements.

2. Set Up a Survey. Quite possibly the easiest and most effective way to find out where your visitors are having trouble is to set up a survey for those leaving the website. Qualaroo is a simple tool that will allow you to generate a survey and place it on the important pages of your website such as your checkout page. Ask why the visitor decided to leave the page and if they have any suggestions on how to improve the page/visitor experience. While you won’t get an answer every time, the ones you do get will be some of the most valuable (and free) marketing research results you’ve ever gotten.

It’s also important to follow the visitor flow charts on your Analytics and metrics tools. Finding out where customers drop or bounce off the page is important, as is the way in which you fix it.

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Crafting the Perfect ‘How To’ Blog for Your Website

Since Google is cracking down on website scraping (even though Google is the biggest website scraper out there giving viewers condensed content scraped from other sites right in a box at the top of SERPs), the ‘how to’ article has become a bit of a taboo. In reality, unless you have an entire site built around ‘how to’ articles (i.e. eHow, Yahoo Answers and Instructibles, etc.), you are fine to go ahead and continue using this click-heavy format:

– Introduce the problem
– Present the benefits of your solution
– List the steps
– Provide detail
– Wrap it up and call to action

 

The Right Way to Write a How To

In fact, since everyone else is scared to write a ‘how to,’ you’ll be one step ahead of the competition. Just make sure you do it correctly, that is to say, in the following order:

1. Introduce the Problem You are Solving. Obviously, you want your reader to know that they are in the right place to solve their problem and that you are the person that has the solution. Make the reader understand that even if they don’t realize they have this problem, they likely do or will, and thus, need to read the solution.

2. Present the Benefits of Your Solution. Why is your solution better than anyone else’s solution? Why should the reader keep reading? Are you going to solve the problem in the blog or are you going to provide half the steps and then a free eBook download at the end with a comprehensive look at the solution? Are there going to be videos? Is this a multi-part blog? Let them know!

3. Give Them the Steps. Your steps should be laid out in a list, a screenshot, a picture, etc. Just give them them the basics and a brief explanation. If you need to, you can get into more detailed paragraphs or chapters on each step in later blogs or an eBook. But laying out the steps in a numbered or bullet list will allow faster-paced readers to skip to the sections they need. Perhaps they have half of the solution and just need the last few steps. Remember, the easier you make it for every single reader that comes to your site, the better it is for you. Cater to the beginner, but also make it easy for the seasoned pro to glean what they need and get on to the next step. Don’t waste anyone’s time and they won’t waste yours.

4. Detail is Key. The detail to your solution is going to be key here. For instance, if you provide a solution without an example, what’s to say that the writer really has life experience solving this problem? They could just be an affiliate for a product spinning content from their associates. Graphics, step-by-step instructions, easy to follow language, all of this falls under detail.

5. Conclusion. Your conclusion is where you wrap up the ‘how to’ and recap the benefits that your reader now possesses. It’s important to never forget your call to action. If you don’t have one specifically and are just writing an informative or authoritative blog, add your contact information and have the reader sign up or contact you for more details. You can also link to other solutions you’ve provided, or have an opt in or email sign up for a newsletter or eBook.

As you can see, there is absolutely no reason to abandon such a highly effective blog format. Google is really just trying to punish ‘how to’ sites at large, not the average internet marketer.

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Running Out of Things to Blog About? 3 Tips to Get You Back on Track

In this content heavy market, blogs and reviews likely drive a large chunk of traffic to your site and sales from it. Unfortunately, this also means writing (or outsourcing) a steady stream of blogs for your website, which means you are working with limited resources. If you’re paying for your blogs, then unless they are making you more profit than they cost you to outsource, you’ll eventually run out of capital. If you’re writing your blogs, you’ll likely hit some dry spells where you don’t have any more good ideas for blogs (if you haven’t hit some already).

 

Three Techniques You Can Use to Create Fresh Blogs When Yours are Stale

For those that have run out of topics to blog about, take comfort in the fact that this happens to just about every internet marketer that doesn’t have a team of writers tirelessly wracking their brains for killer blog topics. So if you find yourself teetering on the brink of an empty tank, try these three techniques for refilling your think tank:

1. Play I Spy. Unless you are the only person or website in the world in your niche, in which case just say that in blog after blog since there’s no competition, you likely have saturated marketplace to deal with. While that’s difficult for any number of other reasons, for blogging purposes, it could be a goldmine.

Simply go on a little “spying” mission to your competition’s blogs and see what they are blogging about. This could give you inspiration in any number of ways, maybe you see things from a different perspective and find ways to differentiate yourself; maybe you think your competition is completely wrong and you can blog why.

Most importantly, see which topics have gotten the most social shares or comments, those are the topics that your demographic wants to read or talk about, meaning you need to be covering them. The point is, use your competition’s blog to not only stay relevant with everything that is going on in your niche, but also as some motivation to set your site up as more knowledgeable and authoritative than your competition’s. Do this through blogging.

2. Look Inside. After you look around you, you should start to have some inspiration or ideas for blogs. Now, take a look at your own personal journey as an internet marketer. Think about your successes and your failures, these are what interest people.

Without a personal spin or attachment to a blog, it simply reads as some research that some copywriter did and then threw together in a few minutes. You should have some sort of personal story to relay that shows why what you’re saying matters.

People want to learn from other people’s mistakes as well as follow in the footsteps of their success. Outline what went right or wrong for you, how and why it happened, and share what your readers should take away from that. (It helps if what they take away is whatever you’re selling, but not every blog has to be sales-driven.)

3. Use Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo is an amazing search engine that is geared towards filtering through the metrics and results of content marketing. You simply enter a search topic or keyword phrase and then find all of the content that’s been published on that topic or keyword.

You can filter by date, type of content (e.g. articles, interviews, giveaways, videos, infographics, etc.) and then see how many shares each link has gotten across the various social media platforms. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse of the industry as well as come up with fresh blog topics.

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Making it Hard to Say No Gets More Yeses in Marketing

The last thing we want to hear from our leads is one simple word: No. No is the death of a sale, the end of a funnel, the loss of a lead. So while it might seem pretty obvious that you want to give your leads more chances to say yes, some internet marketers don’t follow through with this. For example, think about the classic website that you land on after a Google search. You read through the content and at the bottom, there’s a link that you can click to learn more, or in reality, make a purchase.

But why is the only option to say “yes” all the way at the bottom? What this essentially means is that every other spot on the page is a chance to say “no.” That’s bad marketing. You never want more chances to opt-out than to opt-in. So what’s the solution? Make it harder to say no by giving more chances to say yes!

 

Increased Calls to Action

First up is the obvious: increase the number of CTAs you have on your site and in your copy. Now, this doesn’t mean simply put links at the top, bottom and middle of your content, get creative with it. Opt-ins and other calls to action can be placed all over your site, in the banner, on the side scroll, in a pop-up. The more chances you give your leads to say yes, the more likely it is that they will. If you make them search for a CTA, chances are you’ve already lost the sale by that point.

Remember, the three tenets of every good website are that the viewer should get there and immediately know:

1. Where they are
2. What they can do there
3. Where and why to do it

The third tenet is the one to be concerned with here, if they don’t know where to click or why, your page has failed. Which brings us directly to our next point, the why.

 

Increased Rewards

Back in the simpler days of online marketing, having one reward would be enough. Give me your email and I’ll send you a free eBook. Sign up for this newsletter and you’ll get 15% off your next purchase. But with so many different avenues of traffic, it only makes sense that you should have multiple levels of rewards. Yes, get the free eBook by joining my mailing list but also get 15% off by liking me on Facebook and get a free website health report by entering your website URL here.

The more points of contact you wish to produce and maintain with your leads, the more rewards you should offer to increase the viability of those contacts. Remember, most people are fairly savvy about what happens when they give a like on Facebook or a follow on Twitter, as savvy as they are about the spam that occurs when they give out their email address. Prove to them that there is value attached to each of these channels by giving them actual value for connecting.

 

Make the Choice Clear

One of the most effective CTAs out there right now include a combination of a pop-up, a reward and making it very difficult to say no. You’ve likely already seen it on QuickSprout or WordStream, when you’re surfing the site, a seemingly random pop-up occurs with a question that has a very pointed answer. You then have the option to say yes or no, with no being a fairly ridiculous choice so that you have to mentally admit that’s your intention.

For instance, a website about money investment might have a pop-up that says, “Do You Want to Learn How to Invest Like a Pro?” The two choices would be:

Yes, I want to retire early

OR

No, I’m fine living paycheck to paycheck

Which would you choose?

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Two Blunt Ways to Get More Clicks through Your Headline

Content marketing is bigger than ever so that means tons of articles and blogs are going up and being shared each and every day. With social media being such a large part of the virality equation, we all know the importance of a good headline. But with click-baiting reaching its slow, but inevitable death and so many other articles and blogs out there on similar topics, what’s to set your headline apart from the rest of the pack?

Now, we all know about the fundamentals of good headline writing, catchy, tells the “get,” puts the keywords or phrase in the beginning, makes the viewer want to click and read more, but hasn’t anything changed since we learned these rules? Absolutely.

 

Writing Headlines for a Weary Audience

The main thing that has changed is not the way we create content itself, but rather, the way our audience perceives it. That is to say, they’ve been there, clicked that. Your article likely won’t be ground-breaking (though it might be, in that case, I’d like to read you instead of the other way around!), but that doesn’t mean it can’t sound some horns and trumpets on the way in.

Here are two great methods for bluntly writing headlines that will bypass the red warning lights headlines like these can sometimes give off:

1. Here’s Why You’ll Use This Headline. I like to call this the “here’s why” blunt approach. Here’s why you’re going to buy my product. Here’s why you don’t need your cell phone anymore. Here’s why your dog is killing you. Whatever it is that you have to tell them, boom! It’s right there in their face now and there’s no denying it. What this does is it generates curiosity while literally telling them what they are going to learn if they click on your headline and read your article. It’s pure subtle genius and that’s why you’re going to start using it.

2. The Best Headline Tip Ever: Telling Them What it Is. Okay, so we’ve all fallen victim to writing “the best” headlines, that is to say, headlines with the phrase, “the best” in them. Of course! People Google “The Best so and so” all the time, we want to rank for that. Are you selling the best so and so of all time? Probably not. Do you have the best tip in the world for making money online? If you did, you wouldn’t be sharing it. Look, nobody really expects the best when they click on a headline, but they also know that if a headline is vague like that, chances are it’s just some lazy marketer trying to get some traffic. Not anymore! Behold, The Best Way to Use “The Best” in Your Headlines, Tell Them! Essentially, what you want to do is tell the reader what it is you are calling the best before they click. For example: “The Best Hot Dog Ever, Ball Park Franks.” Or, “The Best Online Marketing System: Bill Gates Finally Weighs In.”

 

Delivering the Goods

After you’ve come up with this killer headline for your content, it’s time to deliver on the promised goods. Don’t disconnect your headline from your content or you will never get another click from that reader again. When a reader clicks on your headline, they have an expectation and you have a duty to deliver on that, if you don’t, you will break their trust and no matter how great your product or service is, you won’t make one sale from that content.

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Make Your List Come to You with Recurring Content Events

If we’ve learned one thing as online marketers it’s that perception is everything. This isn’t a ballpoint pen I’m trying to sell you, it’s the tool that will unlock your earning potential when you sign your name in the right place. That isn’t a towel, it’s the solution for all of life’s little messes. The more we can sway our audience’s perception to come into line with our sales goals, the more successful we will be at marketing.

So, is there a way to use this knowledge to our advantage with email marketing and list building? Absolutely. Email marketing is often thought of as a one-sided facet: you create your newsletter or email responders, send them out and hope for opens and click-thrus. If you get them, great! Wash, rinse, repeat. If not, you adjust your campaign and move forward until you find that optimal email formula for your market and niche.

 

Rethinking the Newsletter with Content Events

Instead, let’s change the perception about a newsletter or email by creating a recurring content event. A content event is a simple thing to pull off, you set a date and time, provide a medium, send out invites, get RSVPs, perform and then offer replays. If you’re thinking this sounds like a scheduled webinar, you’re absolutely right, but that’s because you think like a marketer.

As a recurring content event, you’ll be able to draw in more of your audience and have them captive. Why? Because this event goes in the Google Calendar. You have to RSVP to it. It only happens at a specific time and date and if you attend, you get something out of it, a reward. So what does this mean? Well, it turns the newsletter from a dreaded “something I have to delete again” into an event, a happening.

 

How to Set Up Your Content Events

People will attend your content events simply because they seem more special than a newsletter, that’s the perception. Of course, if you actually do make it more special than a newsletter, you’ll have recurring guests at your content events. To get started:

– Set a date that works for both you and your demographic. If your demographic works days, don’t do it at 2pm on a Wednesday. Create a great name for your event that piques your audience’s curiosity, tell them what you’re going to talk about and why they’ll want to attend.

– Pick your medium. Most content events take place on webinar or tele-class software. There are tons of free options out there for hosting free video seminars or free conference calls. You can even resort to Skype, but that’s as low-tech as you should go.

– Focus on your goal before creating content. What’s your endgame with this content event? Do you want emails? Sales? Build authority? When you know your goals, start creating your presentation including slides, main points, outlines, openings, closing, supporting websites, documents, a call in section, etc.

– Start sending out invites and when you get acceptances, put them in a separate email list so you aren’t sending redundant emails. The people who accept, thank them right off the bat and even send a free gift for signing up. This will prompt them to follow through with the RSVP.

– After you host the content event, you’ll want to send out a follow-up email, so it’s a good idea to have that all ready. Put the replay of the event in another follow-up email and send it to those who didn’t RSVP. You can send the replay to those who attended, but make sure that email is focused on closing rather than information.