Valuable content emails are the bread and butter of email marketing.
They're what builds credibility and trust. And they keep you top of mind for when your potential clients are ready to buy.
But too often they're done very, very badly.
No matter how great your content is, if you just brain-dump it into an email it won't land properly.
And that means none of that credibility building, relationship building or getting top of mind is actually going to work.
Luckily, there's a simple way to structure your content emails that increases readership and maximises the chances of those readers taking action. Let's take a look using an example of an email that Brian Clark of Copyblogger sent out recently called "The Robots are Here".
One of the biggest impacts the net has had on business – in my view anyway – is the opening up of non-traditional niches.
What I mean by that is that in the past your client focus was very much defined by practical aspects of who you could reach.
Unless you were very big, you could usually only reach local or at best national clients.
Unless you lived in a big city, you had to focus on a relatively general niche to make sure there were enough of them near you.
You almost always had to focus on niches with “externally visible identifying characteristics”. In other words in order to be able to reach them with your marketing they had to work in an industry or a job function or be part of a demographic you could target.
That's all changed today.
While traditional marketing still works, of course, we now have other ways of reaching people.
Online advertising is so cheap (relatively) and the algorithms are so smart that you can put out ads to a broader audience and let the algorithm figure out who responds best to it.
You don't need to know in advance if it's people from a certain industry or with certain demographics or job titles. The algorithm can pick out common characteristics you couldn't possibly know.
Or (my favourite strategy) you can become a beacon that attracts the right sort of people for you.
You can't find “people who want to become scriptwriters” using traditional marketing targeting. But Lucy V Hay built a big following by publishing incredibly valuable resources for budding authors and scriptwriters and they found her.
You can't find “people who want to learn Airtable to automate their business” using traditional marketing targeting. But Gareth Pronovost built a hugely helpful YouTube channel teaching Airtable and potential customers for his courses found him.
Create valuable content for the people you want as clients (no matter how weirdly and non-traditionally they're defined) and they will find you – as long as you actively promote your content.
And it means you don't have to lock yourself into the boring old industry/job description/demographic niche model we were stuck with in the past.
Why would someone choose to buy from you rather than one of the many people who does something similar?
It's an important question.
We'd all like to think it's because we're better somehow. But in the real world it's for a myriad of factors.
Sometimes we're just in the right place at the right time. Often it's because of that magical word: chemistry.
I remember the first $1m consulting assignment I sold back in the day. We went out with the senior clients for a meal on the first day of the project and I asked their CFO why they picked us.
He initially talked about our capabilities and experience and methodology. But then he paused and (perhaps aided by the consumption of an amount of alcohol) said “you know what…the real reason was your team just kind of clicked with our team much better”.
Here's the important thing…chemistry comes from interaction. And more often than not it takes a bit of time.
Those interactions can happen face to face. But they can also happen online though emails or video or messaging. It just takes longer that way.
That's why it's vital to build a following. People who regularly tune in and interact with you in some way. Whether that's reading your emails, watching your videos, or chatting with you in your group.
Our interactions over time teach us whether we like someone and trust them. We get a feeling for whether they understand us and are on our side. Whether they're the sort of people we'd like to work with.
All those feelings influence our buying decisions which we then rationalise and pretend we made on purely logical criteria.
So in addition to understanding why someone would buy from you, you also have to understand why they would follow you and keep following you.
Because unless they stay with you, you won't reach the level of relationship where they'll feel comfortable buying from you no matter how better you rationally are than the competition.
So why would someone follow you?
A good way of answering that is to ask yourself why you follow the people you follow.
Think of the people whose emails you read whenever they arrive in your inbox. Or whose channel you're subscribed to on YouTube. Or whose posts you always take a look at on Linkedin.
What is it about them that makes you follow them like that?
In “lockdownworld” where you can't work with clients face to face, many consultants, coaches and trainers are turning to online courses as a way to deliver value to their clients and maintain their income.
And while a lot of focus has been put on how to create online courses, the technology to use, and how to market and sell them; very little has been published about how to make sure they actually serve their primary purpose.
In other words, how to make sure that your clients really learn from them, implement what they've learned, and get sustainable results from them.
Because if your clients aren't getting results, you're not doing your job. And your course won't get the testimonials and referrals it needs to succeed.
In this video, I talk to learning and development expert Antoinette Oglethorpe about strategies for getting more engagement and real learning from your online courses – and how to make sure that what your students learn gets put into place back in their workplace or lives so they get the results they're looking for.
Of all the problems I hear from people struggling to win enough clients, probably the most frequent is “I just can't find the time for marketing”.
It's an insidious problem. No matter how smart you are, no matter how brilliant the marketing strategies you're trying to implement: if you can't find the time for them then you won't get results.
And it's such an easy trap to fall into. If we're not naturals at marketing we probably don't know how to do it efficiently. And we probably don't enjoy it, so we kid ourselves that we're doing OK, we have enough clients for now, something will turn up anyway…and so we avoid doing the marketing we really need.
But it absolutely is possible to fit effective marketing into a busy schedule. What it takes is a combination of mindset, ruthless prioritisation, scheduling and techniques for doing your marketing efficiently. And that's exactly what you'll learn in this guide. Click here for the Ultimate Guide to Making the Time for Marketing »
Back in the late 1990s I had one of those “duh” moments.
I was attending a workshop on selling consulting services run by my employer, Gemini Consulting. One of the core lessons from the workshop was the observation that your sales processes should be based on how your buyers buy, not on how you want to sell.
“Duh”.
Simple. Obvious. Yet I hadn't thought of it like that at all.
Fast forward to today and that simple observation still applies to sales processes both offline and online.
But does your website really match how your buyers buy? In particular:
What phases do they go through in their decision-making process?
What do they look for at each stage?
Have you made it incredibly easy for them to find what they're looking for on your website at each stage?
From a hard-nosed commercial perspective, you want the visitors to your website to do what you want them to do. But in the real world, they're only going to do what you want them to do if it matches what they want and need to do.
Or to use Zig Ziglar's more positive version, “You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.”
In the current frenzy of excitement about designing complex “marketing funnels” to maximise our sales we seem to have lost sight of the fact that your clients have their own objectives. And if your website doesn't help them achieve those objectives then they won't stick around, no matter how clever your funnels are.
So what is it that our clients want when they visit our site?
And, of course, there's no one right answer for everyone. What suits a full-time online marketer with a team behind them isn't the same as what suits a small solo business with limited time to do their marketing in. And personal preferences play a role too.
But what I can tell you about are the tools I personally use. These are the ones that I've tested and I feel are the best to help me run my online business without being too complex or too time-consuming. They might well be a good fit for you too.
Ever done a Google search and noticed that some sites have star ratings next to their listings, while most don't?
If a site is showing up as 4 or 5-star, it's going to get more clicks than sites with no stars at all. And people visiting the site are going to be going there with a good impression before they even land on the site.
And although Google don't release details of their algorithm, many SEO experts believe that having good star ratings and reviews can help you move up the search results. If nothing else, because people are more likely to click to your site because of the star ratings that higher clickthrough rate will move you up the listings over time.
I've found that since implementing this I've gone up in the search results a couple of places for some of my main page 1 keywords.
As it turns out, despite the fact that hardly any sites have star rating in their search listings, it's pretty easy to make happen. It's fiddly, as you'll see, but relatively easy.
I implemented some simple changes to my site and within 4 days I had star ratings next to my site for searches for my name, and the next day the star ratings were there for other important keyword searches for me as you can see below.
You don’t need me to tell you that a responsive email list is the key to winning clients and selling products online.
For every clickbait headline from some attention-seeking guru proclaiming that email marketing is dead, there’s a ton of studies and analysis showing that email still drives exponentially more sales than any other channel, and is the preferred method of business communication across all age groups.
But, of course, knowing that building a responsive email list is key to your success and actually building one are two very different things.
In my early days online I did what most people do. I put a nice little “Subscribe to my Newsletter” box in the sidebar on my blog and waited for a flood of subscribers to come rolling in.
It didn't happen.
And there was far less competition back then, certainly in terms of people providing tips to consultants, coaches and other professionals about getting more clients.
It's even tougher to get subscribers today.
Today in almost every niche you can’t move for falling over newsletters and email courses. Today you have to work a lot harder to get the right email subscribers.
“Subscribe to my Newsletter” doesn’t cut it anymore. Nor does a simple box in your sidebar.
In this blog post, you’ll discover the three most important factors when it comes to turning visitors into your website into email subscribers. Get these three right as some of my students have done and you’ll often double or triple your email signup rate.
Ever been impressed with someone when you meet face to face, see them speak, or talk over the phone; only to visit their website and feel let down by their online presence?
Wonder if that might be happening when people first visit your site? It probably is if you're making some of these big web design mistakes.
Your website is the hub of your online marketing activity, and it's your clients' window in to your world. An effective “Client Winning Website” can have a big impact on your ability to attract and win clients. A bad one can put them off completely.
And it's not just the obvious things that can hurt you. Some of the most beautiful, professional looking websites can have huge problems when it comes to their effectiveness at getting you clients.
In this post we're going take a look at what, right now, are the biggest problems with most professional service websites and more importantly, what you can do to fix them.
Ian Brodie on 22nd February 2023.
And it's not just the obvious things that can hurt you. Some of the most beautiful, professional looking websites can have huge problems when it comes to their effectiveness at getting you clients.