November 5, 2015 by EziSell

Three Emotional Triggers to Drive Sales with Words

The reasons we buy things vary greatly from person to person. For one, the need to fix a leaky roof might be the most immediate need in their life. To another, a new flat screen TV may seem like a necessary update to keep up with all that the entertainment world has to offer. While the motivations behind specific purchases do seem vastly different, many of the most important buying motivators can be boiled down to a few needs and emotions. Today, we’re going to take a look three different universal purchase motivation factors that you can use to enhance any part of your sales funnel. Traditionally, these triggers have resided solidly in the copywriting world, but keeping them in mind when creating all kinds of marketing materials, when designing your sales funnel, and more can be a great way to implement these triggers above and beyond the standard sales letter.

The Need for Shelter & Comfort: There are few things that motivate people more than an uncomfortable or uncertain living situation. A great example of this is the seemingly miracle stories of internet marketers who may have been homeless or couchsurfing when they started out, doing whatever they could on their local library’s internet to make ends meet.

If your product solves a problem within this niche, you’ve already got some of your work done for you, because you’ve essentially got automatic demand. That said, if you can work into your copy and funnel that your product can improve living conditions or comfort, you can tap into this trigger as well from other markets.

The Need For Love and Companionship: Let’s be honest, no one is surprised by this one! With the amount of ‘get your ex back!’ and ‘seduction’ products out there, it’s pretty clear that romantic prowess and success are important to most people. This issue has only been exacerbated by modern dating apps and sites (Tinder, etc.) which focus almost exclusively on looks and nothing else. Many people feel slighted, and like they won’t be able to perform well on these platforms, making this trigger even more potent than ever.

Think about how you can suggest that your product, training, course, etc., whatever it is, can help people to increase their romantic value. Many products that don’t even directly sell dating advice can still have strong tie-ins. For example, products on public speaking can be marketed as products that help boost confidence in most any social situations, not just speeches, which can translate into a more confident dater.

Financial Success: People love to make money. Money makes the world go ’round. Whatever other cliches you want to drop here. Whether they admit it or not, most people have a large monetary motivation, and helping someone get ahead in this way is a major conversionary selling point. Again, this motivator is not only tied to products geared toward ‘making money’, but it can also be used with educational products that increase earning potential, lifestyle products that increased perceived wealth, and more.

The bottom line: Any time you’re creating communications, you should be putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and hitting them where it, um, ‘motivates’ most.

If you can work these emotional triggers into your product’s hook then you’re in good shape!

October 25, 2015 by EziSell

5 Tips for Emails that Get Opened and Convert

Email marketing is a bit of an odd duck: As other marketing channels have seen a distinct rise and fall in the face of social media and new communications technologies, email marketing still remains effective. In fact, despite all of our new ways to communicate, people still retain the use of their email for daily use. Receiving invoices, communicating with customers, etc.; sure, other platforms have sprung up for these communications, but none are as ubiquitous as email. That said, email marketing has aged, and therefore it has changed. Getting your emails opened, then read, then obeyed, is no easy task. It was hard in the beginning, and it’s super hard now that everyone and their mother is used to receiving promotional emails. Let’s take a look at how your emails can be the exception to the rule in a “no open” world.

Give before you take: Many marketers have gotten a lot smarter about this now, but it wasn’t always the case, and there are still many who fall flat on their face when balancing their value. Think about the reasons you follow the accounts you do on twitter. Think about which emails you open when they slide into your inbox. They’re the ones that are important to you, not the ones that sell and annoy you the most. Your customers are just like you, so make sure you’re building trust and value through emails that really offer something, before you every ask for any action(s) in return.

Avoid subject line cliches: This is the most controversial piece of advice here. Most people these days are used to the types of subject line formulas that have traditionally performed well, and haven’t realized that their effectiveness is dying down. Consider simply summarizing your subject lines in a way that makes them sound like they’re from a genuine person. Companies now more than ever perform better when viewed as individuals or collectives of individuals rather than businesses.

Keep it short: How many of you have received emails from some marketer whose email list you opted which are pages long? How many of you read them to the end? How many of you send these types of emails yourself? If you want an email to be a sales letter, keep it short, visual, and enticing, then use a CTA to get people to click out of an email and onto one of your pages where you have more control. People are turned off when they expect a helpful message and are greeted with a 9 paragraph sales letter in email form.

Get feedback: One really can’t stress enough how valuable it is to hear back from your customers directly about how you’re doing and how they interact with your brand or your product. The assumptions you make may not be helping you at all, so it’s important that you reach out and invite feedback; you may just find that a slight tweak to your sales funnel could address something that is currently a huge conversion killer for your customers. This could take the form of either a personal email message or a survey.

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October 20, 2015 by EziSell

Top 5 Reasons to use Pinterest for Your Business

Pinterest only started in 2010, yet millions of users flock to the site daily. What sets Pinterest apart is that there has never been anything quite like it before. Imagine being able to pin just about anything you want on a virtual corkboard and you’ll get the essential idea of Pinterest. In addition, you’ll be able to organize these boards into topic-specific scrapbooks.
For businesses, Pinterest provides a way to pin a variety of company information, products, and services onto organized online boards. If you’re wondering if Pinterest is right for your own business, here are 5 benefits to consider:

* Pinterest will help drive more traffic back to your company website. Each time you pin something to a board, you can link what you pinned directly back to your site or blog by using the provided description area below the pin. Each pin comes with its own description box which allows you describe the product in 500 characters or less.

* Most Pinterest users are shoppers. In fact, Pinterest users typically buy more products and services than any of the other top social media sites. According to Nielson, many consumers purchase products and services after seeing them on Pinterest. Furthermore, numerous users visit Pinterest with the intention of purchasing. Although this doesn’t mean that every user will purchase a product, the chances of consumer purchases on Pinterest are favorable when compared to popular social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

* Pinterest offers business accounts. With a business account, you’ll be able to verify your company’s official website, which promotes trust and credibility to consumers. In addition, Pinterest offers a plethora of educational materials and tutorials to help businesses effectively market their services. For instance, some of the tutorials show businesses how to effectively create a company story, how to increase product exposure, how to build a Pinterest community, and practice tips to help your customer base grow.

* You can run contests on Pinterest. Creating a contest is an excellent way to drive in new customers by offering an incentive to those that help spread the word. Pinterest business users can create colorful product and service photos, pin them to a contest board, then offer a prize to the winner who re-pins or gets the most shares from one of your contest pictures. This will not only help your followers get more exposure, but it will allow your pins to be seen by their followers as well.

* You can have as many boards as you need. For example, you can use one specific board to organize conference notes and charts, another board for product photos, and yet another board for service descriptions. Pinterest also offers a simple way to organize the information on each board with a few simple clicks. Keep in mind that although Pinterest is an effective tool to get exposure for your products and services, you can also use boards for company conferences, training materials, and networking.

October 12, 2015 by EziSell

How to Target Early Adopters with Your Next Big Idea

Not to sound bigoted, but let’s just face the facts: some customers are more valuable than others. There! I said it! More specifically, customers who can be classified as “early adopters,” especially in the realm of digital technology, are major players in the success or failure of a 21st century business and/or product. Early adopters are so important because they’re often also your influences; they run blogs, Youtube channels, and everything they say has triple or quadruple-digit retweets on twitter. Get on the good side of an early adopter, and they can bring with them hundreds or thousands of average users. In some writings on the adoption curve and life cycle of new products in our day and age, early adopters are touted as those who can guide a new business across the “chasm.” The chasm is the period of uncertainty where it is uncertain whether a product will make the jump from something a few people try out to a technology that is adopted and integrated by the majority.

Today, we’re going to talk about how you can help your products and businesses be as attractive to early adopters as possible, and how you can best leverage that attention.

1) Find a genuine need. Depending on where you’re at, this might be advice coming too late, but the first step to getting your product into the hands of eager early adopters is to make sure you’re filling a genuine need. People have “cool” ideas all the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re ideas that will come to be known as “needed.” Sometimes, however, your big idea can simply be an improvement of another system (think: Facebook usurping Myspace), however the barrier to entry with these ideas is higher because your product has to be so good it entices people to drop something they’ve grown accustom to.

2) Have a proper incentive system. Don’t just offer to give people free products, give something above and beyond that. For example, you might take a note from the gaming industry: Often times, these companies will offer their early adopters exclusive titles for their profiles or unique character looks called “skins” that won’t be available ever again after the initial testing or adopting period. Think about what rewards could be relevant to your audience in the same way. Maybe you’re launching a mobile ecommerce platform and you offer “veteran seller” badges or other marks of credibility to those who sign up and start using your site within the first 3 months, etc.

3) Communication will make or break you. The world we market in today is one of two-way communication. Social media. You know, that kind of thing. You should be regularly reaching out to and interacting with your potential early adopter audiences through the channels that they use most. Beyond recruitment, this also expands to post-adoption feedback and support. Early adopters will likely be using these channels to either get in touch with you directly or to broadcast their opinions about your product or service. Either way, you should be monitoring social and traditional channels all the time to respond in a timely, appropriate way.

September 10, 2015 by EziSell

Twitter Advertising Seeks to Evolve with New “ads editor” Tool

Advertising on social media has been a dominant force for several years now. In fact, search advertising has even taken a hit in recent years due to the amount of time people spend browsing social networking sites. It’s not like Google’s trembling in their Adwords boots right now, but it’s probably been on their radar.

That said, social advertising has had the disadvantage of being relatively uncertain for a time, due to the platforms and tools that facilitate it not having as much time to evolve like the ones that support more traditional online advertising. Twitter, long the number two social media network in the English-speaking world, is looking to rectify this by rolling out a feature they call “ads editor” – yes, all lower case – which allows advertisers to bulk edit the parameters and copy of their twitter ads using excel spreadsheet uploads. The use of such techniques is far from new, but it could certainly be a blessing for those who manage hundreds or thousands of different twitter advertisements for their clients’ campaigns (or their own, for that matter).

Things like end dates, budgets, and targeting criteria can be changed en masse by simply downloading a spreadsheet of your campaign, making the appropriate edits, and re-uploading it, explains twitter’s project manager Deepak Rao. Once uploaded, a single click will apply the changes you’ve specified to all affected campaigns; it’s that easy.

The tool will be especially useful to large-volume advertisers, who have the budget to bankroll massive trial and error campaigns based around hashtags and keywords much in the same way Adwords giants work: They begin with ads based around thousand of keywords, sometimes with multiple variants of copy each, and slowly trim the fat, taking away those that perform poorly and focusing instead on split-testing frontrunners. In theory, twitter’s new ads editor will allow advertisers to conduct these types of changes with relative ease compared to the manual editing required before.

Of course, your own intuitive (or learned) marketing savvy will be your best tool here, but no one ever complained about a little time-saving help from technology, right? The tool itself is not available to the public yet, but twitter plans to begin rolling it out to select advertising partners over the next few days. These individuals and firms will get the first chance to test the new product, before twitter expects to have the platform fully rolled out for everyone within two to three weeks. If you’re keep to see if you’re one of the chosen few for this tiered testing, keep your eyes peeled for a notification from ads.twitter.com

Of course, early skeptics of the tool have already emerged, arguing that the use of such a primitive tool as Excel might mean limiting the capabilities of users on ads editor. For example, finding a simple way to factor potential reach and suggested bid into spreadsheets will be difficult, as a spreadsheet will exist as a static, offline document once you edit it on your computer. If the tool worked in a browser-based office variant, however, it might be able to make suggestions in real time in accordance with your edits.

Of course, only time will tell how well the tool actually catches on, but here’s to hoping for the best.

September 6, 2015 by EziSell

Trimming the Fat – Copy Tips for Saying More With Less

Copywriting doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. From the billions of dollars in sales each day that hinge on a well-formatted sales letter, to a polished TV commercial script, to the catchy jingle or slogan you just can’t get out of your head, effective professional, persuasive writing, “copywriting,” does a lot for us as marketers.

It’s unfortunate then that copy is often neglected as a luxury expense or an unnecessary cog in many marketers’ or business owners’ sales funnels. The reason, inevitably, is cost. Good copywriters know that their words will have a direct effect on your conversion rates, and thus the money you make, and leverage that knowledge for a nice payday. It then goes to follow that many marketers begin crafting their own copy. To be honest, even if you don’t have the polish and practice of a professional, someone who is a good writer in general can learn to produce decent copy to keep them growing and selling until they can afford a dedicated copywriter. The key word there, however, is “learn.”

Amateur copy is almost always identifiable by a lack of brevity; people often write too much and get too wordy, losing their vital, important, life-changing points amongst superfluous, unnecessary adjectives and ineffective anecdotes. See what I did there? That sentence could have been a lot shorter! Today, we’ll take a look at how you can catch yourself and self-edit copy to stay effective and to the point.

1) Cut out very. The concept of “cutting out very” is probably referenced in proper copywriting books somewhere, but here’s my take on it. The tendency in sales writing is to be, well, selly. The way to do this however is with proper punctuation and, more importantly, by getting inside your audience’s head and telling them what they want to hear. Unfortunately, amateur writers usually use “filler” words. The word ‘very’ is one prominent example, because it is a false enhancer that is rarely needed. Don’t say “It’s very good,” say “it’s the best.” Another example is the use of very before the word ‘unique’, which is redundant. Something is either unique or it isn’t, it’s not “very unique.”

2) Boil it down to exactly what someone needs to know. One of the biggest things you can do to make your copywriting effective is to put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re writing to. This gets you out of salesman mode and helps you think about what someone with the problem you’re offering a solution for actually wants to hear. Sometimes, doing this can help us see that what we’re put down is over the top, too selly or spammy, or even just flat out unhelpful!

3) Proofread 80 times. And I’m not just talking about any usual proofread. Sure, you’re going to be checking your spelling and grammar and making sure everything lines up, but a copywriting proofread should see you putting on another hat as well, the “could this possibly sound any better?!” hat. Read each sentence and look for words that could be dropped, phrases that could be made more appropriate for your customers, etc.

Of course, just like every facet of IM, there’s always more to learn on the copywriting front, but this should get you headed in the right direction until you can hire a personal Don Draper of your own.

September 3, 2015 by EziSell

Social Media Marketing Tips That Works

Marketing your business through social media is quickly becoming a necessity rather than an option. If you’d like to see how this can positively affect your business, keep reading for great ideas on how you can utilize these online platforms to market and advertise your company, product or business.

If you are going to create a social media profile, you must be willing to continuously update it. Your customers may expect regular updates. If you don’t provide these, you may find yourself losing customers. Aim for publishing updates more than a couple times a week.

Always answer to the messages and comments you receive on social networks. Be sure to check for comments and questions at least once a day. They’re easy to miss, so you have to be vigilant.

If you are considering social media marketing, the first thing you should do is sign up with as many social media websites as possible with your preferred account names. These account names should include your business names. This is particularly important for websites like Twitter where your account name is your displayed name. As time goes on, it will become more and more difficult for you to get the account name that you want. Reserve those names now.

Employing social media marketing strategies can be a great way to keep in contact with your customer base, and develop relationships. Customers that friend you on Facebook, or follow you on Twitter do so willingly. They want to hear from you. You can therefore notify them of new upcoming products, sales and discounts, or even just information concerning your business and industry without the fear of being too intrusive.

Monitor the work of your competition. Find them on social networks and pay attention to their methods. You could either try using a similar method or think of something they have not yet started.

When you are introducing a new product or looking for feedback, use social media websites for market research. People love to give feedback about products and are eager to chime in. Their feedback will let you look at your business from the outside through their eyes, seeing the things they want and the things they have yet to find. On top of all this, this feedback is of no cost to your business.

To make the most of social media marketing, respond to questions and comments in a very timely manner. You do not want to sit at your desk refreshing your inbox 24/7, but you do want to check in multiple times per day if possible. Anyone asking questions is either a loyal customer you want to retain and get more business from, or an interested prospect who might open their wallet if you give them some personal attention.

Branding is so important within social media. You need to always incorporate your logo into your social media profile. Use the same color palette on every one of your social media accounts. Your followers will associate these colors with your brands and trust you because you are consistent. Consistency means advantageous branding in identifying yourself and letting you stand out from your competition.

Establish your business’s presences by name, on both Twitter and Facebook. Staking a claim to your business’s name on these sites will prevent someone else from posting content that is meaningless or even damaging to you. Even if you are far from actively employing the account, you’ll have staked your claim to your name.

Taking your business to the next level requires a new wave of marketing efforts that you have not previously tried. Social media marketing could very easily be this new wave that you are searching for. If you use the tips and suggestions here, you can find success in your new marketing efforts.

August 29, 2015 by EziSell

How to Improve Churn Rate – Part 2

Welcome to part two of this series on reducing churn rate. Let’s jump right into a few methods for keeping customer retention high and making sure no one is jumping ship!

Shamelessly One-Up

Savvy businessmen and women know that keeping an eye on the competition is key, and nowhere is this more important than in customer acquisition and churn rate assessments. Take time out of every day, week, or month – depending on the cycle time and speed of your market – to research what your competitors have been up to. Are they doing something that you aren’t? If so, is it something that you, as a customer, would want and benefit from? Be honest here. If the answer is “yes,” think about how you could not only implement something similar, but how you could improve on it.

This is simply part of the process of continuously adding value to a business, and keeping an eye on competition helps you to gauge the rate at which you should be doing so. Rather than trying to slowly dole out new goodies to your customers, challenge yourself to give away new value as it comes about in real time. This also means that you won’t be able to rest on your laurels, and will have to constantly innovate in order to have bigger and better offers for your customers. Seem like tough work? It is – and it’s also how industry leaders get to the top.

Get Personal, Don’t Automate

Automation is one of the trickiest things to master when your business begins to grow. You want to be able to manage everything at once, but losing the personal touch you may have begun with can be detrimental to your relationship with leads and customers.

As a rule of thumb, it’s ok to automate, but don’t fake it. This means that things like post-purchase emails, etc. can be automated, and are expected to be. By the same token, don’t fake communications so that they are automated but are actually canned, pre-written, and going out to 5,000 people.

For example, let’s say you write an email for your list to announce a new offer. Don’t use silly name tagging to fake personalization. People see straight through that, and it is (rightfully) perceived as phony. People understand that they are part of a mailing list, so don’t try to convince them otherwise.

If they write to you, however, respond personally. If that becomes logistically impossible, then make it clear that a support team is the one helping to field questions and concerns. Also, keep in mind that “impossible” should mean something different to you as an entrepreneur. You should be a time management ninja, and also realize that your work day might be 10 12, or 16 hours, not eight.

Ride the Wave, Don’t Chase It

Even more important than watching the competition is to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry and the context within which it exists. Recently, Facebook noticed (and has helped champion) the bringing of rudimentary mobile internet to new countries that have never had such services. The company launched a stripped-down, Facebook Lite app to better accommodate these low-bandwidth markets. As soon as new mobile plans hit these countries, Facebook will be one of the first apps available.

Be the Facebook of your industry. Sound like big shoes to fill? They are! But the point is that you should be looking to ride along with new trends as they crest, and leave everyone else to chase after you. That is, of course, the mark of an industry leader after all, isn’t it?

August 28, 2015 by EziSell

How to Improve Churn Rate – Part 1

Heard of churn rate? If not, well, yikes! Churn rate, in a nutshell, is the rate at which your big business water bottle is leaking out customers – to put it visually. Businesses with high churn rates are at risk of spinning their wheels or even losing money. For example, a business with a churn rate that is equal to its rate of growth will not only have no net growth, but could also be losing money if it’s paying into an advertising and marketing budget to acquire that customers that help its numbers stay “even.”

Further complicating the situation is the fact that churn rate can actually be measured in a number of different ways. It can be

– The percentage of customers lost over a certain time

– The number of customers lost over a certain time

– The dollar value of recurring business lost

and more.

The bottom, line, however, is that a high churn rate is universally an indicator of the need for some patchwork in your business. This two part series is going to explore several ways in which you can actively combat your churn rate. More specifically, we’ll explore strategies for preempting churn – it is almost universally easier to retain customers than to reacquire them after they are already lost (intuitively, this makes sense).

Step Onto the Scene with a Bang!

One of the first steps to churn rate is to nail the first impression. When someone signs up for your mailing list or subscribes to your services, you want them to be excited about being part of your ‘family’. What you don’t want is for them to just barely be pushed over the decision threshold, ready to back out at the first sign of doubt.

For most online marketers, this means having professional, slick interface, website, and user experience design from the beginning. Just as a job interview is your first chance to make an impression on a potential employer, your website is a first point of contact for impressing new leads. It also means putting forth a killer offer from the beginning that jumps out as a must-have. By extension, this means getting your targeting perfect from the beginning. Landing pages need to be optimized for the search terms and/or channels people use to reach them. Split test the heck out of your pages, and put in the work to make different landing spots for different pathways of entry.

Follow-up On Promises!

Admittedly, anyone can make a good initial impression by writing up a great offer, but your immediate turn rate will largely be determined by how well leads feel their expectations are being delivered on. If you promise a solution, don’t fall into the trap that so many internet marketers fall victim to by only giving away half solutions.

Let’s say you run a product on how to lose weight. Your mailing list opt-in form promises a guide on how to lose your first 10 pounds. Some marketers would send a guide out with the first two steps of a four step method to dropping weight. But not you! No! You’re going to give a complete method that will really start to change scale readouts. Your email series is actually going to be useful (what a concept!).

You’ll be building trust, and, though it’s counterintuitive, customers will be more likely to make a purchase of a weight loss system from you after you’ve already given them something that produces results. What you’re selling can help them build on the progress they’ve already seen. Obviously, this can apply to any niche!

Alright, that’s it for the time being – see you all in part two.