Cyberwalker Blog

5 online sales tactics that many businesses ignore

Working in sales today just isn’t what it used to be.  The Internet has knocked the entire sales process on its butt.  Physically knocking on doors, calling businesses, or sending out direct mail advertisements, while still effective, can take a lot of time and cost a lot of money for your business. Nowadays, you can reach thousands of people sitting at your desk typing on your keyboard sing online sales tactics.  And since many business ignore them you are at an advantage if you implement them.

Online sales tactics you should not ignore

Here are 5 online sales tactics that will help you generate leads online. Most businesses don’t use them all. Or, know how to use them together.

1) Build a content site.  No really. Not just a goofy brochure that says why you are great. Produce great content on your web site that engages your customers and shows them your expertise and teaches them to trust it. Having a web site for your business is like having a phone line . A great one creates perception they dealing with a good company. It’s like have a great knowledgeable receptionist that answers your phone and delights and helps callers. In fact, in some ways have a great web site is more important than a phone line. More people use search engines to seek out businesses they are looking for than they use the Yellow Pages (see image and article that shows Yellow Pages  decline from SearchEnglineLand.com).

Yellow Pages Decline in usage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If a consumer does a search and they don’t find you, they won’t come to you.  Bottom line: Before you do anything, get a great web site and fill it full of helpful content .

2) Produce great content. Publishing articles, blog posts, FAQs and even video  to your web site is crucial for your business.  If you  provide valuable information to your target market you build trust and become a go-to resource for your potential customers. You can use in turn to attract search engine links using Search Engine Optimization techniques (see #3). It can also be used in social media and in your email marketing.

3) Optimize Your Site for Search.  In the business we call this SEO.  Search engine optimization.  What does that mean? It’s the work done to your web site to rank it well on search engines.  If you have a web site but you aren’t using smart SEO strategies to show up in search engines well, you are killing your potential for attracting new business.   The closer you are to the top of the first page of results page on Google and Bing search engines, the more likely it is someone will seek out your business.  SEO will get you there. It gets overlooked all the time.  Read our article on if you should learn SEO yourself or hire someone to do it for you. SEO is extremely important. And you will be blown away what it will do for your business.

4) Social Media.  You can generate a great volume of leads from social media platforms.  Once again there are specific ways to go about doing this. To be competitive in your marketplace the social media platforms you need to establish for your business are:

  • Facebook – Get a Facebook page, and/or a Facebook group and start a community around the topic covered by your business. Facebook is the number one platform you should start on.
  • Twitter -Tweet great helpful content every day – from your site from related sites that help your potential customers
  • LinkedIn – Build alliances with businesses or find contact information for people you want to work with. Use it to prospect. Share what your business is up to. Share content from your website on your company page.
  • Google + – It’s Google’s version of Facebook. It’s not mandatory but some people use this over Facebook. Google also references your Google+ page in relation to your web site. It’s important for SEO.
  • Pinterest –  If you have a product or service that you market to women especially, you want to use Pinterest. It’s highly visual and the stats say women use it most. It’s also a powerful emerging platform that’s very appealing. Share great images and content.

Use social media to attract your target market.  You can create business alliances. You can establish expertise for your brand. And you can post valuable information that brings people to you. You can do it all while you sleep! (Tip: Use Hootsuite and schedule posts)

5) Email Marketing.  There aren’t many people that know how to properly email market. However, when used correctly, email marketing can turn the traffic that comes to your web site, or through social media, into buyers of your services and products. Done right it’s email selling, not email marketing.

Want to learn how to do it all?   Our Digital Fundamentals online course will train you on all five ways to generate leads for your business. CLICK HERE.

3 Email Marketing Pitfalls

As the former email marketing lead for CWD, it’s has been my job to write great emails for companies. This makes it really easy for me to spot ineffective emails that business owners send out on a regular business. And there are a lot of them. It doesn’t take long to learn effective email marketing skills. However most business owners have no idea that they are damaging their brand with the emails they send.

Here are 3 Email Marketing Pitfalls to avoid:

1) Not addressing your contact personally:  Most email marketing software systems use merge fields or merge tags.  You can use merge fields to pull a contact’s information out of your database and use it to personalize the email you are sending.  Instead of addressing your contact with “Hey Friend,”, which is highly impersonal,  use a merge field to insert their name. In your email it will look like “Hey  MERGE FIELD,” and when the email comes to them it will have their name in it: “Hey Bob,”. Addressing them with “Hey Friend” is a sure fire way to get them to stop reading your email.

Don’t have their first name?  Address them by title. Or, by the group your are speaking to.  ie. “Hey Entrepreneurs” , “Hey Singles”, “Hey Foodies”.

2) Talking to much about YOU:  Sorry to say it,  your contact doesn’t care about you. They care about themselves. They want to know what they are getting from you. How will your product or service help them? How are they going to benefit? The best sales people get into their customer’s world.  Find out what they want first. Then sell it to them.

What’s a great way to find out what your audience wants if you aren’t sure? Survey them.

3) Selling too soon:  If your contact has never purchased from you asking them to buy right away will be jarring to their system. It may even push them away. You have to build a relationship with them before they feel comfortable buying from you. This takes time. Be patient. Email marketing is foreplay.  It’s the appetizer before the main course. If it’s not good, you’ll turn people off. If it’s good you will build a list of faithful followers that will be beneficial to the success of your business.  If they love you enough they will share your business with other people.

How to grow your web business with digital marketing

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Do you want to learn digital marketing tactics that will allow you to grow your business online and increase your earning potential? Become an Ultimate Digital Marketer.

Join our Ultimate Digital Marketers group and learn how to grow your web business with digital marketing. You’ll get access to all our digital marketing secrets for FREE. You also get exclusive promos and discounts of up to 50% on all our online courses available in our Ultimate Digital Marketers web store.

An affordable digital marketing solution:

Cyberwalker Digital created the group to provide an affordable solution to business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals who are interested in learning digital marketing strategies including:

  • Building content rich WordPress web sites,
  • Search engine optimization tactics to increase web traffic,
  • Writing engaging web content,
  • Use the new rules of email marketing to market products and services,
  • And building high-converting online stores.

When you use our digital marketing tactics, you can make more money for your business by growing it online and ensuring anything you offer converts to sales or engagement.

The content we provide is FREE and the courses we’ve created are a low-cost solution that will teach you everything you know. You will learn more taking our courses than you will hiring an agency you pay $5,000-$10,000 per month to run everything for you.

How to grow your web business:

Bring more traffic to your web site and turn that traffic into potential buyers for your products and services. The strategies we teach, we’ve used  to make thousands of dollars for our clients.

To help you understand the POWER of these techniques, here are some results we’ve produced:

  • One client quadrupled their (already decent) traffic in 120 days and went from zero presence on Google and Bing to 73 keywords in the top three results.
  • Another regional business client is beating all their multi-million dollar competition in a major market growing their local business by 66% in under a year. 
  • We worked for a famous author to implement a marketing automation tool and e-commerce solution that his team used to build a $2 million+ business.

If you want to generate leads for your business and turn those leads into sales there is only one thing you need to do.  Fill out the form on this page to join Ultimate Digital Marketers.

How to use email marketing to grow sales

Effective email marketers use email as the medium to: 
1) Generate new leads and turn potential buyers into buyers, and
2) Keep existing buyers engaged so they are more likely to buy in the future.

If you are having trouble doing either of these things you could be using tactics to market your products or services using email that is ineffective and in some cases damaging to your brand.

To find out if what you are doing is an effective use of email marketing to grow sales, it’s important to decipher if you fall into one of two categories. Are you an email blaster? Or an email marketer?

It’s crucial you know the difference.  The bottom line is: Email marketers use email to develop connections and brand affinity and email blasters turn people off in the hopes of landing a few sales. They use brute force to blast their message.  Read these definitions to identify where you stand:

Definition of an email blaster: An email blaster uses email to try to get people to buy their stuff. They don’t consider that there are different groups of people with different needs on their list of contacts. The goal of an email blaster is to sell their stuff to whoever will buy it.  They send emails with no strategy and no direction.  Their email content is all about them. And they send emails to anyone that they have an address for.

Definition of an email marketer: An email marketer creates a long-term sales strategy that has a specific end goal. They send emails to various groups of people.  The emails deliver valuable content that speaks to what the people want.  They build desire, trust, and loyalty. They ask people to buy when appropriate.  Their email content is all about their people and shares expertise that is of interest to them.

If you find yourself in the email blaster camp, don’t feel bad, that is where most people find themselves. Why? Email marketing is still a relatively new form of marketing. At least it is evolving. There are only a handful of highly effective email marketers. But the club is growing, thankfully. Here are five things they do to use email marketing to increase sales.

How to use email marketing to grow sales

1: Segment your list of contacts. Categorize your contacts based on what you want to send them.  You want to think about speaking to the group versus sending them stuff they don’t care about. Then need to create different email funnels for each group because the content you are sending them will (and should) be different.

 2: Establish a long-term email marketing strategy.  To do this you need to decide what the end goal, is. This is the action you are driving your contacts towards. It could be different for each email funnel you create.  However, usually, the end goal is to have the contact make a purchase. Or take a specific action that forwards your business.

3: Develop various email funnels and map them out.  Once you decide what the end goal for each funnel is you can work backwards to design a system that drives people to that end goal.  For example, if the end goal is getting a potential buyer to buy, your entire email strategy should be focused on sending them emails that primes them for that action. You want to build trust and delivery value during this process.

4: Create valuable emails. Emails should be used to deliver valuable content to your contacts on a regular basis. Get them used to receiving emails from you. Make the emails good so they want to open them.  A good way to do this is to give stuff away.

5: Track your performance. Effective email marketers are constantly tracking their open rates and the actions of their subscribers and tweaking their strategy. If emails aren’t getting opened you need to make changes.

How to write email subject lines that are irresistible

Did you know that the email subject line  is the most important part of your email?  It’s more important than the body text, more important than what you are giving away, more important than what you are trying to sell.

Why? Because if your headline isn’t great, your emails won’t get opened.

Here are five expert email marketing strategies on how to write email subject lines that are irresistible…

Email marketing strategies for great subject lines:

1) Blend in to the inbox: When your email looks like all the other emails in a person’s inbox the recipient will see it as an email they need to open. They may even open it accidentally, but that’s okay, you got their attention. Examples:

  • “Quick question”
  • “Thanks for your help”
  • “Thought you’d like this.”

2)  Make your email sound important: When your email is important it gets opened. There are certain things that make an email important. If it comes from the president of a company, it’s important. If it’s about crucial businesses matters, like safety or legal requirements for businesses, it’s important. If it’s an exclusive offer for a select group, it’s important. Examples:

  • “A Message from __________________ (President’s name)”
  • “Gift from ____________________ (President’s name)”
  • Safety regulations for Warehouse Managers
  • Exclusive industry insider offer

3)  Play on human curiosity: Did you know that the National Enquirer is the fifth most read publication in the world? People buy the National Enquirer because  the headlines are crazy and they sound close enough to reality to be true. People like weird. They feel compelled to open things that they are curious about. Or, things they can’t believe till they see them. NOTE: If you go weird, the content of your email needs to be the truth.  Example:

  • “Adopt Pinky, the cat that uses the toilet”
  • “The health secret I learned from a Balinese Medicine Man”
  • “Drink beer. Lose weight.”
  • “The Mad Hatter reminds me of you”

4) State the value of the email’s content: If you are giving away tangible advice in your email. Or a giving away an attachment that is very valuable, you can simply say what it is. Example:

  • 5 Email marketing secrets the experts use
  • 3 Super weight lose foods
  • 10 Fitness mistakes you might be making

Use these four email marketing strategies to create effective subject lines and track your open rates to see if they increase.

5) Be familiar: If I send you an email and we know each other, chances are you will open the email because you know me. Write headlines that assume you are connected. In the right circumstances these can be highly effective.

  • Tips because you are amazing
  • I wanted you to see this
  • Do you have a few minutes?
  • You will love this info

How to write email subject lines that are irresistible

5 online sales tactics that many businesses ignore

Working in sales today just isn’t what it used to be. The Internet has knocked the entire sales process on it’s butt. Physically knocking on doors or calling, while still effective, can take time and cost money. You can reach thousands of people typing on your keyboard. Here are 5 effective ways.

3 Email Marketing Pitfalls

As the former email marketing lead for CWD, it’s has been my job to write great emails for companies. This makes it really easy for me to spot ineffective emails that business owners send out on a regular business. And there are a lot of them. It doesn’t take long to learn effective email marketing skills. However …

Continue reading “3 Email Marketing Pitfalls”

How to grow your web business with digital marketing

Want to learn digital marketing tactics that will allow you to grow your business online and increase your earning potential? Join Ultimate Digital Marketers and learn how to grow your web business with digital marketing. You’ll get access to digital marketing secrets for FREE. You also get exclusive promos and discounts of up to 50% on online courses.

How to use email marketing to grow sales

Effective email marketers use email as the medium to: 1) Generate new leads and turn potential buyers into buyers, and to 2) Keep existing buyers engaged so they are more likely to buy in future. If you are having trouble doing either of these things you could be using some ineffective tactics to market your products or services using email. Read this article to avoid them.

How to write email subject lines that are irresistible

Did you know that the subject line is the most important part of your email? It’s more important than the body text, more important than what you are giving away, more important than what you are trying to sell. Why? This article tells you what you need to know to become a great subject line writer.

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