Cyberwalker Blog

How to create a lead capture box

Here’s  a breakdown of how to design a lead capture box for email marketing on your web site.

 

How to create a lead capture box

 

Attention getting image: Show an image that is fun unusual or attention getting to grab their attention.

Offer: Give something useful and compelling to your subscriber.  Don’t cheap out!

Lead Magnet: Give them a download or something of high value. Video, case study, ebook. Something great!

Minimal info: Don’t ask for their measurements. Ask for their first name and email. Less is more. It will convert. If you ask for their favorite color and shoe size they will get cold feet and you won’t get the subscription.

Disarm: People are suspicious so allay their fears and give them a parachute to get out. It wil make them feel safer.

CTA button: CTA is call to action – request that they do something. Most people are afraid to ask. Be bold!

 

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10 ways to drastically improve the open rates for your emails

If you poke around on the web you’ll find average email marketing rates run 10% to 15% on average and 8% for massive low engagement lists. For new knowledge follow to the link. You might think it would be hard to adjust your strategy to get higher rates of say 20% to 25%.

What if I told you you could get open rates of 40% to 50%? Here’s 10 tips to drastically improve your open email open rates.

1) Write provocative titles
Writing a provocative subject line in your email can prompt people to open your email, just make sure you don’t disappoint with the email content and call to action associated with it. Questions are always good. See this article on How to write great email subject lines 

2) Send rare and high-value offers and content
“How to make your dog behave with one phrase” is far better content than “how to buy a jug of milk”. One is very compelling and would make people (who own dogs)  excited, the other is pretty mundane. “How to make your husband behave using one word” would also be another great topic. Let us know if you figure that one out.

3) Personalize
Address the subscriber by their first name and relate to them like a friend or familiar person. Getting emails from teams or brands rarely creates a connection. Use a smart CRM system paired with an email automation system like Infusionsoft to ensure that wild cards are used to pull firstnames from your database for each recipient of your emails.

4) Consistency
If you send consistently great emails that people believe have high value, you will train them to to open your emails as soon as they see them. People associate your content as useful and they rarely fail to open them.

5) Sell less, give away more
Never hard sell to your list. In fact rarely sell to your list. Send them helpful high quality content more often than selling to them. A suggested ratio is 1 offer for every 10 emails. Some email marketers are more aggressive with one for every 7 emails. If your list’s engagement rate is low look at what offer you are sending and  scale it back to only the best offers with less frequency.

6) Engage your list
Ask your list for feedback, interaction and action. Get them to share themselves and share that content back with the list. I like asking people to fill out polls and then give the tallies back to the list. Or ask people for comments about a contentious issue and share that back.

7) Exclusivity
Make people on your list feel like they are part of a special group. Name the group they are part of.  Ensure they feel like an insider and are getting exclusive content for their (and their listmates’) eyes only. Feeling part of an exclusive group creates loyalty and drives engagement.

8) Cull your list
Ensure that people who are on the list want to be on the list. Give your list easy ways to unsubscribe and ask them to unsubscribe if they don’t find your content useful. You can even use smart CRM and automation tools to ask people who do not open your emails if they still want to be on your list.

9) Give them cool stuff
Offer them early access to stuff no one else has seen. Maybe an early copy of a book. Or a rough cut of a great video. Design content specifically for them.

10) Never charge them full price
When you offer a product or service to the list, make them feel as if they are getting the deal of the century. Cut them the best deal you can and only offer that deal to the list and nowhere else.

Best time to send email to sell more

You have a killer email that you want to send out to your list. You want to catch people at the perfect time and have high open rates and engagement rates. you want to sell stuff.

What time do you send it? What day of the week?

4pm Tuesday?

9:45am Wednesday?

8am Saturday?

Unless you are a seasoned email marketer you’ll likely guess wrong.

The conventional wisdom among email marketing gurus is mid morning on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.  With open rates peaking on Thursday morning. Actually the gurus say 10AM is the magical time. And I have evidence that 930am to 1030am is the optimal target time.

I learned this when I worked as the Infusionsoft (now Keap) guru on best-selling author Neil Strauss‘ team. Neil is an email marketing mastermind and I owe him a lot from my time working with him.

Of course Neil’s audience is primarily ambitious young men in their 20s and 30s. Over the years we have used this wisdom in most of our clients campaigns and it seems to work nicely. But I never personally tested it. A little voice in the back of my head always asked: Does this hold up for every list?

Is age of recipient a factor for open rates?

The easy answer is pretty much yes, with some variables. Age is a factor. Teens and younger 20somethings (read: college students) get out of bed later in the AM so later in their schedule is better than early in the AM to receive an email. They are typically in bed until mid morning. 1pm is a good time catch them. Now this sounds like a stereotype (and not all college kids are in bed til 10AM), but we are talking about aggregated behavior here to get the most out of a volume send.

Retirees have a different schedule. Early day is better. Afternoon not so much.  Why? Sleep cycles of older people have them rise early.

Working people tend to be in front of their computers or smartphones or tablets between 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday. As you would expect Mondays are a bad day as people are prioritizing urgent work and not browsing their inbox. After noon on Friday and even anytime Friday at all is  generally a bad time to send a marketing email, except for calls to action around a deal or offer, as they seem to engage going into a weekend. Again, this needs to be tested for any specific list.

What about email sends on weekends?

There’s some evidence that if the target audience is an interest group around niche leisure time that weekend sends are a good idea. However, I have some evidence to the contrary, which I will explain below.

I recently decided to test it and what I discovered was surprising. My test audience was a large 25K list that belongs to a client who I am consulting with. It is made up of people interested in a niche Caribbean recipe site. It consists largely of  women living in the U.S.,  in their 30s, 40s and 50s. But there is also decent contingent of men (20%) on the list. There are Canadians and British subscribers (totalling 10%) mixed in to the list too.

The site they follow (and subscribed on) tracks the biggest traffic volumes on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday is actually the site’s biggest traffic day. They are weekend home cooks, essentially. It would suggest that the weekend would be a better time to send an offer, right? Nope.

We tried a Saturday at 10AM send and the open rate and engagement was half of the Thursday AM send. People are not in front of their computers or paying attention to email on their phones on weekends.

How to test send times

Here’s how I tested for optimal send times.

I segmented the list on Keap (a smart CRM and email campaign system) to test for my client when the best send times would be for this audience just so we could optimize revenue against from list.

We sent the same email to 750 different people every hour on a Thursday from 8AM to 5PM – we also added a 930AM send.

Here’s what we found in the data within 48 hours of the send:

Best times to send for highest open rates noon and 1pm however engagement rates (with the email offer) were better at 1PM and 2PM.

Best time to send for high engagement rates: 930AM and 10AM were better on the first day of the send for open rates and engagement with the offer. On Day 2 (24 hours after the send) the 1PM and 2PM group had slightly better open rates and very good engagement rates.

But the best engagement rate over all came from the 930am group even though the open rate was about 0.75% (three quarters of a percent)  lower.

After 48 hours, the best engagement rate was 50% better from the openers at 930am than at 10am and similarly at 11am. The engagement rates were similar to the 930am group for those that received emails at the 1pm and 2pm sends.

There also a weird anomaly for a high open rates for the 5pm group. Like an end of day email check when work is done, however it had a significantly lower engagement rate. People were opening, but not clicking the call to action.

Actual sales from the campaign transacted as follows:

27% of all sales transactions occurred between 930am and 10am, 27% after work hours between 630pm and 11pm

This suggests that people rarely buy immediately, but they save emails and go back to them when there is something of interest. You need to give them a deadline, however, and threaten to take the good deal away if they don’t act.

However, 80 per cent the sales from the campaign came from the people who received the 930am email.

Your list behavior may vary.  It’s worth doing the legwork to test the list.

The bottom line: Send to your list between 930am and 1030am on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Preferably Thursday. Keep the offer open over the weekend.  Send a casual reminder email, but don’t expect high open rates on the weekend.

The best time to send marketing emails to maximize sales and engagement

You have a killer email that you want to send out to your list. You want to catch people at the perfect time and have high open rates and engagement rates. you want to sell stuff.

What time do you send it? What day of the week?

4pm Tuesday?

9:45am Wednesday?

8am Saturday?

Unless you are a seasoned email marker you’ll likely guess wrong.

The conventional wisdom among email marketing gurus is mid morning on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.  With open rates peaking on Thursday morning. Actually the gurus say 10AM is the magical time. And I have evidence that 930am to 1030am is the optimal target time.

I learned this when I worked as the Keap guru on best-selling author Neil Strauss’ team. Neil is an email marketing mastermind and I owe him a lot from my time working with him.

Of course Neil’s audience is primarily ambitious young men in their 20s and 30s. Over the years we have used this wisdom in most of our clients campaigns and it seems to work nicely. But I never personally tested it. A little voice in the back of my head always asked: Does this hold up for every list?

Is age of recipient a factor for open rates?

The easy answer is pretty much yes, with some variables. Age is a factor. Teens and younger 20somethings (read: college students) get out of bed later in the AM so later in their schedule is better than early in the AM to receive an email. They are typically in bed until mid morning. 1pm is a good time catch them. Now this sounds like a stereotype (and not all college kids are in bed til 10AM) just like not every baby uses a Bob-2016-Revolution-Flex stroller, but we are talking about aggregated behavior here to get the most out of a volume send.

Retirees have a different schedule. Early day is better. Afternoon not so much.  Why? Sleep cycles of older people have them rise early.

Working people tend to be in front of their computers or smartphones or tablets between 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday. As you would expect Mondays are a bad day as people are prioritizing urgent work and not browsing their inbox. After noon on Friday and even anytime Friday at all is  generally a bad time to send a marketing email.

What about email sends on weekends?

There’s some evidence that if the target audience is an interest group around niche leisure time that weekend sends are a good idea. However, I have some evidence to the contrary, which I will explain below.

I recently decided to test it and what I discovered was surprising. My test audience was a large 25K list that belongs to a client who I am consulting with. — It is made up of people interested in a niche Caribbean recipe site. It consists largely of  women living in the U.S.,  in their 30s, 40s and 50s. But there is also decent contingent of men (20%) on the list. There are Canadians and British subscribers (totalling 10%) mixed in to the list too.

(BTW, if you need some help with your email marketing strategy I have a couple of consulting slots available each week – drop us a note)

The site they follow (and subscribed on) tracks the biggest traffic volumes on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday is actually the site’s biggest traffic day. They are weekend home cooks, essentially. It would suggest that the weekend would be a better time to send an offer, right? Nope.

We tried a Saturday at 10AM send and the open rate and engagement was half of the Thursday AM send. People are not in front of their computers or paying attention to email on their phones on weekends.

How to test send times

Here’s how I tested for optimal send times.

I segmented the list on Keap (a smart CRM and email campaign system) to test for my client when the best send times would be for this audience just so we could optimize revenue against from list.

We sent the same email to 750 different people every hour on a Thursday from 8AM to 5PM – we also added a 930AM send.

Here’s what we found in the data within 48 hours of the send:

Best times to send for highest open rates noon and 1pm however engagement rates (with the email offer) were better at 1PM and 2PM.

Best time to send for high engagement rates: 930AM and 10AM were better on the first day of the send for open rates and engagement with the offer. On Day 2 (24 hours after the send) the 1PM and 2PM group had slightly better open rates and very good engagement rates.

But the best engagement rate over all came from the 930am group even though the open rate was about 0.75% (three quarters of a percent)  lower.

After 48 hours, the best engagement rate was 50% better from the openers at 930am than at 10am and similarly at 11am. The engagement rates were similar to the 930am group for those that received emails at the 1pm and 2pm sends.

There also a weird anomaly for a high open rates for the 5pm group. Like an end of day email check when work is done, however it had a significantly lower engagement rate. People were opening, but not clicking the call to action.

Actual sales from the campaign transacted as follows:

27% of all sales transactions occurred between 930am and 10am, 27% after work hours between 630pm and 11pm

This suggests that people rarely buy immediately, but they save emails and go back to them when there is something of interest. You need to give them a deadline, however, and threaten to take the good deal away if they don’t act.

However, 80 per cent the sales from the campaign came from the people who received the 930am email.

Your list behavior may vary.  It’s worth doing the legwork to test the list.

The bottom line: Send to your list between 930am and 1030am on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Preferably Thursday. Keep the offer open over the weekend.  Send a casual reminder email, but don’t expect high open rates on the weekend.

11 simple ideas to generate blog content quickly without much effort

Content marketing requires that you publish a lot of great content. And specifically you’ll need to publish content that demonstrates your (or your company’s) expertise on a particular niche topic. The idea is that you draw people who find that content useful and interesting toward your company, teach them that your are an authority on the topic, and through the process develop trust and over time a relationship, which is the foundation for a sale.

But what if you are not much of a writer? Or you find generating content ideas tedious?  Or you have no time to pen the next great post? Or perhaps you don’t have a budget to hire a journalism grad or professional writer to produce content for your brand? No problem. Just use these 10 simple ideas to generate content quickly without much effort.

1. Top 5 and Top 10 lists

Go find the best resources on a topic on the internet that can be pulled into a list. 10 things you need to know about X, or 5 must have tips on how to Y. Find web sites that  publish the material. Describe their tips in a few sentences. Put a link to each one and list them. Write a brief intro and BOOM!: You’ve got one awesome article ready to publish.

2. FAQs

That’s Frequently Asked Questions.  Here’s an example of a great FAQ. List 10 questions that your customers ask your sales reps. Then answer them. Don’t be self promoting. ie Q: Who is your favorite plumbing company. A: Ours! More like: Q: What’s the best way to unclog a garbage disposal. A: We like this Youtube video for do it yourselfers (LINK) but give us a call and we can talk you through it or send one of our pros out to get it done for you.  

3. Retop a rewrite

This is an old journalism trick that editors teach young reporters at newspapers. Find a piece of news or an article (usually from a competitor in the media business) that is of interest to your customer base. Rewrite it into a summary using your own words. Do not use the quotes – paraphrase these. BTW – No copying and pasting – that’s plagiarism. ie. Source: “Apple announces the ultra thin new iPhone 9” Rewrite:  “Thin is in – but some say breakable – for the latest smartphone from Apple” 

4. Write definitions

Pull together lingo or or complex terminology from your business or market and define them.  Over time build a glossary of terms that is specific to your industry and publish this on your site.

5. Transcribe an interview

Call a seasoned know-it-all n your shop and record an interview on a topic her or she is expert in.  Or call a industry colleague or supplier. Ask them 10 questions about an area of expertise. Transcribe the answers and clean up the Ummms and Errrs and turn it into an article with a brief introduction. ie.   “Have you ever wondered how to  organize a bedroom closet? We called Susan Littleton, a professional closet organizer, who provided the following tips on how to optimize space in a bedroom walk-in closest.”

6. Record an interview

Too busy to transcribe an interview? Record it on Skype and post the audio or video file on your blog and write a brief description to introduce it. Use Recorder, which is an add-on app from Skype or try Rev.com to do online transcription.

7. Photo slideshow

Explain how to do something using a slide show. Grab your phone and take step by step pictures and describe each step as captions. Niche “how to” content is hugely in demand.

8. This week in history

Go back in time five years, 10 years or further and pull up an old article or post or newspaper clipping or even a photo that marks a historic day  that is of interest to your audience. Rehash the piece into a retrospective or post a series of old pictures.

9. Aggregate great tweets

Use Twitter’s search engine to find people who are experts on a topic and aggregate their tweets together. (Use a screen grab software like Snag-It) ie.  Top 5 hurricane preparedness tips from smart people on Twitter!

10. Social media interviews

Speaking of Twitter post a request on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram for help with a question that everyone wants to be answered – that your audience will love. Aggregate the best answers into a single post. Credit the contributors and link to their social media accounts.

11. Directory Listings

If you have an information resource that will help people find what they need, like a directory of industry products, people or associations, or even a listing of relevant businesses you recommend – like this funeral homes near me website – then publish the resource on the web. The content may not be very sexy (like funeral homes in Canada) but if it is highly useful to people and hard to otherwise find then you will draw in people who need it and it will result in generated traffic.

11 simple ideas to generate blog content quickly without much effort

Best time to send email to sell more

You have a killer email that you want to send out to your list. You want to catch people at the perfect time and have high open rates and engagement rates. you want to sell stuff. What time do you send it? What day of the week?

11 simple ideas to generate blog content quickly without much effort

Content marketing requires that you publish a lot of great content. And specifically you’ll need to publish content that demonstrates your (or your company’s) expertise on a particular niche topic. The idea is that you draw people who find that content useful and interesting toward your company, teach them that your are an authority on …

Continue reading “11 simple ideas to generate blog content quickly without much effort”

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