Email Marketing

Apr 05 2021

Marketing Funnels: Get More From Your Website Traffic

Marketing funnels are a solution to get the most from the volume of traffic that lands on your website. Search engine optimization drives traffic that attracts visitors at various stages in the buyer cycle. Many visitors may not be ready to purchase immediately and therefore require more information and nurturing to convert them into clients. Marketing funnels provide a system for moving your website visitors closer to purchase with your company.

Create content to address The Buyer’s Journey

Generally, the buyer’s journey is divided into three main categories; Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

the buyer journey and the content to include when incorporating SEO with web design

The awareness stage

At the awareness stage, visitors are just learning about the problems they have and what the potential solutions are for solving those problems. This is where they first may encounter your company through a blog post that is aimed at explaining the basics of your niche.

An example of a blog post at the awareness stage of a person searching for SEO would be How do I make my website number one on Google?

The answer to this question is search engine optimization but as far as the user goes, they may not realize what this is until they read the article. Articles such as this would be aimed at expanding the audience in which your content targets.

The content that you publish at this level in your marketing funnels are considered TOFU content (Top Of The Funnel content). Due to the broad nature of the topics, the audience is the largest at this stage of the buyer journey and therefore will also have the greatest drop-off in interest (hence, the funnel concept).

Getting people to your site is only one aspect of your growth efforts. When you’ve effectively captured the interest of a new website visitor, the next step is to move them to the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.

The consideration stage

When a potential client is in the consideration stage, they already aware of their problem and require more information to guide them to a purchase decision.

For example, if you’re searching for an SEO company, you may want to know about the benefits of SEO to consider whether it’s a good fit for your business. Reading about what SEO can do for your company would certainly give you more incentive to move forward with your decision.

Content that provides incentives, facts, and social proof can be considered MOFU content (Middle Of The Funnel Content). Essentially this is content that moves a potential buyer to the decision-making stage.

The decision stage

The last segment of the buyer journey is called the decision stage. It’s where the buyer is past the research stage and is ready to purchase. At this point in marketing funnels, the content that is needed is called BOFU content (Bottom Of The Funnel content).

Examples of content that convinces a buyer to purchase from your company can be landing pages, case studies, service pages, product pages, and squeeze pages. Essentially, any page that is geared towards convincing the visitor to make a purchase is bottom-of-the-funnel content.

The ultimate goal for your website is to generate revenue. An effective marketing funnel means all content on your site should in some way be leading your website visitors to a specific action that moves them closer to purchasing. That means moving visitors to content further down the funnel through a specific call to action (read more, download, opt-in, or purchase).

Customize your sales funnels

While the buyer journey is a good concept as a basic model, you can optimize your marketing funnel to be more effective by adding detail to each stage. The level of detail is based on the type of clients you deal with regularly.

In many industries, the process for going from learning about a product (or brand), comparing options, and purchasing a product may be completed in one session. This means that you can create content that addresses each of these stages all on one page. Many landing pages for retail products are published to do exactly that.

In this example, LinkedIn is offering a free credit for advertising as well as a strategy guide in exchange for an email address. This is an excellent example of how to get prospects to move from consideration to decision with an incentive as well as free trial to see how effective the product is firsthand.

In other industries, the lead-time for selling B2B services or big-ticket items is often much longer and requires more nurturing during the research stage. For these types of clients, your marketing funnel would need to be more detailed and include more micro-stages to move them along.

5 reasons to consider email marketing within your sales funnel

As mentioned earlier, SEO brings many different types of visitors to your door. No matter what stage they are at in the buyer journey, it’s important to identify what your potential clients need to give them enough confidence to making an informed decision. Email marketing is an effective solution for layering content in your marketing funnels and getting the most out of your website traffic for the following reasons:

Build relationships

When you capture an email address from an interested website visitor, it provides you with a way to maintain contact and to continue to move that visitor further within your marketing funnel. Email marketing allows you to learn more about your audience and respond with more content that they’re interested in learning about.

Personalization is high on the list for many companies now and what better way to build a relationship than with content that is specifically tailored to your audience? List segmentation, surveys and questionnaires can help you optimize your campaign and get insights into your audience.

Build confidence in your brand

An email marketing system provides your company with a way to continue to help your potential buyer find more what they’re looking for as well as present the reasons why your company is the best option for what they need.

If your product or service requires a longer lead-time before closing a sale because there’s more research involved before making a decision, your sales funnel would include sending informational emails before trying to close a prospect. Structure your campaign to teach your prospect more about the inner workings of your niche to build confidence in your brand.

Increase conversions

The ultimate goal of digital marketing is to generate more revenue. When you consistently remind prospects about your company and the products you offer, you increase the likelihood of acquiring them as customers.

An email campaign can increase conversions by getting your product in front of more interested website visitors (subscribers) more times as opposed to losing them forever when they leave your website.

Increase repeat sales revenue

Once you sell to a client, it doesn’t mean the end of your relationship. Happy clients will often become repeat customers. Use your email list to notify new and existing clients of promotions and sales. An email list can increase the number of sales you make for seasonal specials as well as the regular flow of prospects that go through your marketing funnel.

Promote brand advocacy

There’s no better form of marketing than word-of-mouth marketing. When you have happy customers, they will recommend your services and products and are 75% more likely to become advocates. It’s as simple as that. Brand advocacy adds another form of advertising that is achieved by incorporating content creation for existing clients.

Examples of content that is geared towards brand advocacy can be follow-up emails about the service they received, surveys, giveaways, and contests. Maximize the lifetime value of a client by learning more about their preferences and making changes to accommodate them as best you can.

Optimize your conversions with an effective marketing funnel

The traffic your website generates will always consist of visitors at different stages in the buyer journey. Identify what content they’re looking for and what they need to move forward in the buyer cycle to facilitate more conversions.

Develop effective marketing funnels on your website to create the perfect tool for lead generation. Your website should be your number one salesperson and contribute to your revenue, leads and new clients daily.

Need help getting more visitors to your website? Contact us today for a discovery meeting and learn about the best available options to grow your business to the next level. For a free website analysis fill out the form below.

Christian Carere

Christian Carere is the owner and founder of Digital Ducats Inc. in Toronto and heads the SEO team at Austin Bryant Consulting in Plano, TX. Christian has been published on publications such as Search Engine Watch, Venngage, Small Biz Daily, Grasshopper, Data Box, Socialnomics, and Mention.

old.digitalducats.com/

Jan 11 2021

Email Marketing Strategies To Increase Engagement

You may be wondering why email marketing has made it this far in the digital marketing spectrum. This strategy is undoubtedly one of the oldest online marketing tactics and you would think eventually, people get tired of it and it would just not work as well. Wrong! Email marketing is just the opposite. With an average of 3800% ROI and one of the best conversion rates in the business, email marketing strategies have evolved to make it more effective than ever.

It’s never too late to start building your email list. Dozens of platforms are fairly inexpensive (free versions as well) to get you started. If you’re planning on scaling up, make sure you’re aware of the options and features that you’ll need as your list gets bigger and demands more management. Automation will be your best friend so plan ahead and in the meantime, here are some tips that will get you that extra-large audience.

Confirmed opt-in
Choose the right frequency
Choose the right time
Make your email accessible
Pay attention to deliverability
Split test your subject lines
Follow your subject line up with a headline
Use images and video whenever possible
Include a CTA
Include a welcome email
Publish pages to create a marketing funnel

Use a confirmed opt-in

A confirmed opt-in box requires your subscribers to confirm their email address when signing up for your list. The reaffirms the interest in receiving emails from your business.

Some may think this is a double-edged sword. If you double confirm your subscribers, won’t you wind up with a smaller email list? Absolutely. You wind up with a smaller list of a more engaged and more responsive audience.

A confirmed opt-in keeps your list clean. Rather than have a lot of “undeliverable” emails from the user typing in the wrong address, you have a list of confirmed subscribers. This saves you the trouble of pruning and weeding out bad email addresses and keeps your engagement reports more accurate.

Go for quality rather than quantity. Use the double opt-in for less headache and a more responsive audience.

Choose the right email frequency

Are you wondering how many times a week you should be sending your list an email? The industry averages indicate that once a week is the best frequency for optimal results.

A chart showing the relationship between email frequency (an email marketing strategy) and open rates

There are benefits to emailing your list more than once a week but they also come with a trade-off. The more you email your list, the lower your open rate becomes. There’s a drop off in engagement as people start ignoring your email after a certain point.

Start with sending an email a week and test whether your audience responds positively when you add one more per week. If you’re getting more traffic and conversions, there’s a positive correlation with the additional email.

If there’s a steep drop off in engagement and your list starts unsubscribing, you know you’ve reached your limit and need to back off with the additional emails.

Choose the right time

Did you know that there’s a perfect time to send an email to each of your list members? Unfortunately, it’s different across the board for people but there are options using software that can help you send email to each of your list members based on historical open rates.

If your provider doesn’t offer this option, stick with the general bell curve for the most success in getting your email to the top of the inbox. If your email is the first one that a subscriber sees, it will have the best chance of being opened.

Make your email accessible

Thankfully, we live in a time of equality and are always looking to make things easier for our prospective customers. Approximately one-fifth of the world population has some sort of visual impairment so you mustn’t exclude this group from your audience.

Make your content accessible by including descriptive alt tags in your images. The alt tags will at least describe to your reader what the image is about.

Example of alt text being used to describe and image in an email to make it accessible for the visually impaired

Many people use software to have their email read to them so make sure you use the punctuation marks within your alt tags. The reader will pause at the appropriate times and make your content more enjoyable for your audience.

Pay attention to deliverability

It’s important to keep track of the email that ends up undelivered. It may not be the provider or a misspelled email address that is causing your email to fall short of its destination. There are multiple reasons why an email is undeliverable.

Check your email spam score to make sure you’re triggering the spam filter. If your email is ending up in the junk folder then it’s time to reassess the content you’re sending and how you’re sending it.

Monitor the open rate, churn rate, bounce rate and complaints. Identifying the underlying reasons for these metrics will improve the quality of your campaigns.

Split test your subject lines

An email list is an excellent place to test the effectiveness of your content. Use split tests to see what subject lines generate the biggest open rates. Identifying what gets the best response from your list will indicate what type of content to continue sending to your list.

Example of implementing an email marketing strategy called split testing the headline

Personalization is a major theme in creating successful campaigns. The more you see what triggers responses from your audience, the more you can effectively engage them in your offering.

Follow your subject line with a preheader

The headline that you start your email with should complement your subject line. It’s a way to follow up with the initial message you’re sending to your readers. Emails with preheaders get an average open rate of 29%.

Remember that the content above the fold is the most important part of your email. It’s what will essentially hold the attention of the reader and entice them to read further and scroll to the bottom.

If the subject line was enough to get them to open the email then your headline will help maintain that initial interest.

Use images and video whenever possible

If an image is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? It’s not always possible to send a video with every email but the use of visual content is vital to getting the most out of your email marketing campaigns.

Videos are the most preferred form of content so it remains your first choice above all. Videos increase engagement, conversions and reportedly generate a 13% open rate.

Strategize your email marketing with a video in your email (as this image is of a funny faced dude in a video)

Images are the next best thing to make your email more appealing. People retain 10% of the information from text-only but retain 60% of the content they read when there are images to explain the talking points.

Use both images and video whenever possible to enrich your content and make your message much more memorable. The result is more click-throughs and higher conversions.

Include a CTA

People need to be told what to do. Never assume that they will know exactly what you want them to do so include a call to action to increase the desired action you want your audience to take.

Be specific with your CTA and provide marked links, buttons or forms to get your audience to take action.

Include a welcome email

Always have a welcome email sent to your list when they first subscribe. Welcome emails get the highest open rates providing a big opportunity to communicate with your list.

Welcome emails can give your audience a breakdown of what to expect and provide options on what they can do and what you’re offering. You can introduce your new subscriber to new content and get more out of your list by making sure they receive a welcome email.

Publish pages to create a marketing funnel

Make sure you have pages that will ultimately lead your subscribers to purchase or completing an action. There are emails you can automate to make sure your audience is being guided in the right direction. Here is a list of the forms that will make a difference in converting your visitors to clients.

example of the pages in a sales funnel (one of the email marketing strategies to implement)

Use email marketing strategies that make a difference

There’s no excuse for not starting an email list. You have a variety of options when it comes to providers and there are plenty of free services to get you started.

When you want to take your conversions to the next level implement these email marketing tactics and strategies to get a boost in the traffic and revenue your website generates.