3 Email Followup Strategies That Actually Get Responses - Alex Berman

Alex Berman from InspireBeats talks about how to do effective email follow-up.  This is more on an individual and personal level though, so not for cold leads.

1: The Personal Connection follow-up:  Find a personal connection with each lead, perhaps from one of their profiles, or if they've already told you something about themselves.  This is the most effective strategy of the 3

2: The Excited follow-up: let them know how excited you are to start working with them.

3: The News Item follow-up: use a piece of news that relates to them, to, well, relate to them :)

Effective Email Follow Up Sample

Freddy Rodriguez talks us through how to build a relationship with your email list.  This video is a few years old now, but the information still seems to be totally relevant!

In general people need to be exposed to a product or idea at least 6 times before they will buy.  This extends to individuals, so marketers, as well.  I've heard recent stats say people buy, generally, between the 7th and 13th contact... Either way, in your emails you need to consider the following items:

1. Attractive headline:  you don't want your email to look like spam.  People are already looking for a reason to delete your email.

2. Relate to them, then request them to click: build it up so they feel motivated to do so.

3. Follow up with your leads regularly, otherwise they will forget about you. He recommends at least once a day, although I confess I think that would be more likely to make people unsubscribe...

Some other tips I found useful:

- For some reason, if you put the Re: in the title this helps with the open rate.  Usually re. means regarding, but with email it seems to suggest you're replying to them.  This can make people curious to open it...

- Add something personal to the headline.

- Go through emails that you've received yourself, and see which ones you find intriguing to open...  Model your email headlines on this.

It's All In The Follow-Up

It's All In The Follow-Up...

This is something my coaches keep telling me... It's all in the follow-up!

When you start off in digital marketing, you're really focused on getting people on to your list... and it's hard to see much past that. You're thinking of what value you can give to them initially, and how to encourage them to sign up to the value you can give them longer term. The last thing you want to do, is then stop providing that value!

Giving people the opportunity to buy really useful things from you, that you've researched yourself and are confident in recommending - sure, that's valuable! But only if they like you, and trust you - trust that you have actually researched the product, and that you do actually believe it's a product worthy of recommendation.

Until then, you're just a stranger trying to sell them something... Would you really blame them for unsubscribing? Then all that time, effort, and money you put into getting them on your list is wasted.

I'm at the point now where my list is looking quite healthy, and I'm refining ways to grow it quite successfully. However, I am noticing I'm getting more unsubscribes than I would like. Not lots, but each time it feels a bit personal... I hate to think that I'm annoying the people I'm trying to help!

So, over the next few weeks I will be focusing on how to improve my email follow-ups, and basically nurture my list!

You are going to see me post a number of videos, together with my key take-aways, which I hope you will also find really useful.

The first video I recommend you watch is Till Boadella's description of his Indoctrination Sequence that he uses to nurture his list. I already shared this on my blog with the notes I took from it, so please see that article here.

IF YOU WANT TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS, WATCH THIS! | DAILYVEE 319

Ooooh, this is a good one from Gary Vee!!  It's about the problems people have when they need to scale their business, but can't find people who are able to replicate the standard they expect.

Basically, how to duplicate themselves :)

Gary summed it up into 2 different problems - either:

- an inability to operate - i.e. having the systems, procedures etc in place that other people can follow

- or, it's an ego issue - holding these people to a standard that is all about how good 'you' are and how 'you' would do it, rather than how well they can achieve what the client needs

It's possible to be a great consultant, but a terrible boss :)

He says, that to scale you can't hold everybody to an arbitrary metric...  

So, you need to decide if you want to build a one-person shop, or a scalable business.  

There's nothing wrong with the first option - but the way to scale is to build your business around you, and how to monetise better what you are offering.

Be you, be your best self your way, and enjoy it!

How To Brainstorm Using Google Search & Stock Photo Sites

This video is really useful for whenever you get stuck for ideas...  Chris Do runs a working session with his team for how to use 'search' as a way to get inspiration.

The key points I took from this are:

• 'To thrive in the knowledge economy you have to learn how to learn...'
• That's where searching comes in - 'use Google as a collaborative creative partner'.
• Type slowly as Google will tell you what people generally look for
• Check out the definition of the word first to make sure it means what you though
• Go to images - if in 3 flicks of the screen you can't see what you're looking for, you need to type in another word
• Start broad, then become more specific
• Add 'concept' or 'idea' or 'metaphor' after the word to go deeper 
• Sometimes Google can be a bit 'noisy', or overwhelming...  so if you're looking for images, try shutterstock or other stock image sites
• Images are very effective when they combine two separate things, to find a common thread
• Find an image you like, go into it and see what meta tags have been attributed to it.  Sometimes the words in these meta tags are just what you're looking for
• Save any image that grabs you at all
• Keep drilling down on the images you like, looking at related images or those from the same artist / photographer, until you find the ones that hit the spot

Productive Music Playlist (1.5 hrs) - October 2017 - Vol.2 - #EntVibes

Oh, just found out that Evan Carmichael puts together a playlist of productive music on a regular basis.  How great is that?!  Here's the second volume for October - enjoy :)

How to use vector graphics on the web

This video becomes a bit technical half-way through, but it's a great introduction to vector images, what they are, and why they are often used instead of the jpeg or png image files that we might be more familiar with.

Jpeg and png type files are known as rastor files: these are composed of lots of tiny dots (pixels) that make up the whole image, so they lose picture quality when they are scaled up too much.

Vector files are usually type .svg files, which stands for scalable vector graphics: these are composed of code, which the computer interprets as the image.  This means they are totally scalable, plus load times are much quicker than the pixel images.

To create vector images yourself you will need an application like Illustrator...  But if you already have the svg files then you can just upload them.  For example, if you have outsourced the creation of the images, or bought stock images already in the svg file format, then you can just use these on your websites.