Wednesday 25 March 2015
Tuesday 24 March 2015
How to Get 60 Leads in 24 Hours With a Landing Page and a LinkedIn Group
A few weeks ago a startup asked me to figure out the cheapest and most sustainable way for them to get 25 qualified leads to try their product. Like most startups they did not have a big budget for marketing experiments and needed to bootstrap to get some initial customers in the door.
24 hours later I generated 60 qualified leads for them using nothing but a simple landing page and a LinkedIn group. This process was so successful that they decided to repeat the experiment again.
I’ve done this many times and it works like a charm every time. Here is a step by step of how I did it.
Step 1: Nail Down Your Target Audience
There are billions of articles and books on the importance of defining your target market. I’m not going to give you a lecture on how to define your target market. I will say that for this technique which I’m about to outline you have to know exactly what type of people you want as leads.
In my situation above it was CIOs of enterprise on-demand companies. Some examples would be CIOs at Verizon, Comcast, Merry Maids, Home Depot, Geek Squad, etc.
In your case it’s whoever you think your customer is. Not too long ago I wrote an article titled ‘How I Sold My App to 10 People Before I Wrote a Line of Code and Then Launched It’.
In the article I share how I pitched my app idea to tons of different types of people to see who would actually pay for it. The goal was to get 10 people to pay me money before I start work on it. I ended up getting those 10 people to pay me and that’s how I knew who my target market really was before I started building the app.
That’s just one way to do it. There are millions of other ways to do this, which I will not delve into now. So as mentioned: know who your target market is.
As I said my target market for this example above was CIOs of on-demand enterprise companies.
Step 2: Largest LinkedIn or FB Group for Your Target Market
You need to find the largest and most active group there is on LinkedIn or Facebook for your target market. Notice the underline on ‘most active’. There are tons of groups which consist of a bunch of robots. You need to find the biggest and most active group for your target market.
In my case CIOs usually hang out on LinkedIn (not FB). So I did a few searches and found this group:
The CIO Network group on LinkedIn is 140,000+ members strong and extremely active. Taking a look at their discussions I knew this was the one to go after. Here are some of the discussions and frequency of posting:
Another thing to look for is any promotional materials being advertised in the group. After all you will be marketing to this group so you want to know how people do this. In my case I found some updates which looked like promotions:
Become a member of the group and test it out. Post some updates yourself, get a feel of the discussions which are added and how people respond to them. Get familiar with the group overall. Make sure this group has the types of people you want to have as leads.
Step 3: Write a Killer Piece of Content for This Group
Now find an old piece of content written by yourself or your team or write a new piece of content. This content must really engage the people in your target group. I’m talking about something that stirs folks up, gets them to reply and upvote and read at least 80% of what you’ve written.
In my case I picked the following article:
A Letter to the CIO of a Services Enterprise from the COO
A Letter to the CIO of a Services Enterprise from the COO
See how this article speaks directly at CIOs about something they are all facing today? This grabs them and pulls them in, exactly what I’m trying to achieve.
Not too long ago my friends from BuzzSumo wrote an article titled: ‘Why Content Goes Viral: What Analyzing 100 Million Articles Taught Us’ where they report on what types of titles get most social media shares and why. I suggest checking that article out as you come up with your title.
So in short you need to have a killer piece of content for your audience. Want examples? Go to BuzzSumo and type in the keyword for your target market, you’ll find the most shared pieces of content.
Got your piece of content written and published? Ok, let’s collect some leads!
Step 4: Create a PDF Whitepaper Out of Your Article
This step is pretty straight forward, create a downloadable PDF out of your article. Format it nicely with your company bio or info all the way at the end of the whitepaper.
I ended up turning the LinkedIn article into this PDF.
The PDF is pretty basic, see how there is some information about the company towards the end? That is really the only thing you need to add to it.
Take out any dates associated with the article. You do not want your readers to know that it was an old piece of content or written and published somewhere else.
Step 5: Create an Opt-in Landing Page for Your PDF Whitepaper
These are typically called squeeze pages, the idea is that you’re “squeezing’ an email out of your visitor in exchange for something in return. In my case I created a page which looked like this:
Check out the live page here.
The page showed the very beginning of the article and asked the visitor to put their email address in to get the full PDF of the whitepaper.
The idea is that you pull them in with the copy on the landing page and then try to get an email address out of them. So be very picky with the copy you have on this landing page.
There is an article out there titled: Proof of Heaven, Propaganda and Feeding Your Audience Exactly the Meal They Asked For by Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers which is a gold mine when writing copy for pages such as this one. Read it, it has awesome tips in it on how to make this copy as best as possible.
I know people are going to ask so I’ll just say it, I used Unbounce to make this page above. However I’m a huge supporter of LeadPages as well. Both are awesome products and you can make a page like the one I made above in 5 minutes with either product.
Step 6: Make Sure Your Landing Page Is Hooked to Your Email Provider
You want to collect an email address and make sure people who sign up get a nice email back with the PDF they want to read. So make sure to integrate with MailChimp or another email provider such as Aweber which will send out emails to your subscribers automatically. Here is what my auto email looked like:
Subject: A Letter to the CIO of a Services Enterprise from COOHi Jerry,Thanks for downloading my letter titled “A Letter to the CIO of a Services Enterprise from COO”. To access the PDF just click on the link below.[DOWNLOAD PDF] A Letter to the CIO of a Services Enterprise from COO <--I hope you enjoy this content! I’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on the 5 most important market dynamics for the technology leaders in 2015 I talk about in the letter.Best,Alex Beletsky
COO, Dispatchhttp://dispatch.me
Just make sure this email is working well. Test your landing page out.
Step 7: Find the Owner of the Group and Ask for Promotion
Now you are ready to get traffic to your landing page from the group you identified. The idea is to get emails of leads who are interested in your content. Once they sign up to get the PDF you can follow up after and try to sell them (more on that later).
In my case I find the owner of the LinkedIn or Facebook group and reach out to them asking the following:
I’m a member of your LinkedIn group and recently came across one of your articles on your blog about the changing environment for CIOs. I really enjoyed the article.I’m currently in process of writing a guest article for CIO.com and wanted to see if I could interview you for the article. Your group and company would get good exposure form it. I have another opportunity to publish a similar interview on CIO-Today.Let me know if you’d be interested.Cheers,-Dmitry
In most cases the person responds and says “sure”. They have nothing to lose and a potential to gain some good exposure. After they respond with an email I end up writing this email:
Sound good, I’ll interview and promote you on these top three CIO sites. In return would you be able to promote a whitepaper for CIOs which I just wrote to your group? Just a quick update to the entire group. Here is the link:
http://try.dispatch.me/lettertocio/
Now I wait until the owner responds. The idea is that you scratch their back and they scratch yours. You interview them and promote the interview to three different sources which are well known. It can be three slightly different interviews.
Most of the time the owner of the biggest LinkedIn or Facebook group for your target demographic is some type of expert or at least well regarded in the field for what they do. So getting an interview published with them in a targeted publication should not be that hard.
In return ask for a direct email blast of the group but an update is also acceptable. Never hurts to ask for an direct email blast of course.
If it’s an email blast you’ll need to do more copy editing to make sure the email speaks to your recipients. Come back to that article ‘Proof of Heaven, Propaganda and Feeding Your Audience Exactly the Meal They Asked For’ by Joanna Wiebe, it will help you craft this email.
A very good friend of my Dan Fagella built his entire business to $40K/month in 2 years just by following this very same approach:
- Find an expert in the field
- Interview them
- Promote them and ask to be promoted in return
Here is an article titled How I grew my Startup to $40K Using Emails and Good Content detailing the complete procedure and how you go about accomplishing this.
Remember to make sure the group owner promotes the landing page you created.
Step 8: Watch the Leads Roll In and Follow Up
That is it really. You get a few interviews published with the group owner on hot publications. The group owner gets some exposure. In return the group owner promotes your landing page, the group members see it, click it and subscribe to read the PDF. Your job now is to:
- Count the number of total leads you got
- Follow up with the leads within 2-5 days of them singing up to get your PDF
Unbounce or whatever service you use keeps tracks of the leads. You can integrate it with Salesforce if you like.
You have about 5 days until your leads become completely cold and forget all about you. So you want to follow up and ask how they liked your PDF within 5 days.
Also remember it takes about 5 follow ups to close a deal. A very good friend Saph runs a site helping people write better email copy, I suggest you take a look at this section on sales follow up emails to make sure you’re effectively following up.
My sales follow up email looked like this:
Hi (First Name),(Insert Your Name) here from (Company Name). Alex mentioned that you just expressed interest in his ‘Letter to the CIO of a Services Enterprise from the COO.’ I wanted to follow up and make sure you received the PDF in the email OK.I was just checking out your profile and saw that (Insert personal bit here)(Insert question about the personal bit above)We’d love to learn more about you and your work at (Insert Their Company Name)Looking forward to connecting.-(Your Name)
Conclusion
That is it! Give it a try. I’d love to hear your feedback and comments as you get going with this approach.
If you want to get some quick qualified leads you do not need fancy ad campaigns and you most certainly do not need to spend a lot of money. A targeted piece of content toward a popular and targeted LinkedIn of Facebook group will do wonders in terms of generating leads.
Tuesday 17 March 2015
Monday 16 March 2015
Thursday 5 March 2015
3 Of The Richest Billionaires Under 40
Facebook has created more billionaires under 40 than any other company, according to a new ranking.
In the Wealth-X list of 10 richest billionaires under 40, four made most or all of their fortune from Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg tops the list with estimated wealth of $35.1 billion. His fellow Facebook co-founder and fellow 30-year-old, Dustin Moskovitz, ranked second, with $7.7 billion. And Sean Parker, the Web bad boy who has founded several companies but made his biggest coin from Facebook, comes in at number five with $5.2 billion.
If you add in Eduardo Saverin, another co-founder, the fresh-faced Facebookers have a combined $52 billion.
You could even argue that Jan Koum, the third-ranked under-40 rich guy, made his fortune in large part from Facebook, since he sold his mobile messaging platform, WhatsApp, to the social media site.
Here is the full list of the top 10 richest people under 40:
- Mark Zuckerberg (age 30) — $35.1 billion
- Dustin Moskovitz (age 30) — $7.7 billion
- Jan Koum (age 38) — $7.7 billion
- Scott Duncan (age 32) — $5.5 billion
- Sean Parker (age 35) — $5.2 billion
- Yang Huiyan (age 34) — $5.1 billion (inherited)
- Alejandro Santo Domingo (age 38) — $4.9 billion (inherited)
- Elizabeth Holmes (age 31) — $4.5 billion
- Eduardo Saverin (age 32) — $4.4 billion
- Arun Pudur (age 38) — $4 billion
Wednesday 4 March 2015
10 Ways to Improve the Open Rates of Your Marketing Emails
Did you know that there’s a form of marketing that returns $44.25 for every $1 spent? I’d ask you to guess what it is, but if you’ve read the title of this article, it’s probably pretty clear that the answer is email marketing.
Far from being “dead,” email marketing still has one of the highest engagement rates and returns on investment of any marketing strategy. The key, for any company, is standing out from the crowd.
One way to determine whether your email marketing efforts are effective is to track your email open rates. There are plenty of mistakes companies make when sending out digital messages that can drop these rates substantially, making this metric a great barometer of your campaign’s overall health.
Here are 10 ways to keep your customers clicking:
1. Create an engaging subject line
The subject line is the first thing a customer sees on any email. If you haven’t tested and optimized yours, you’re leaving money on the table. A/B testing isn’t just for websites and landing pages -- it’s essential for email marketing as well. Aim for a casual and personal opening line, and test, test, test.
2. Write to one person
As you might expect, an email is much more likely to be opened and engaged with if it sounds like it’s been written directly to the recipient. Use the recipient’s first name in your opening, and then write your message’s body text as if you were writing to one person alone. This level of focus and familiarity will engage your readers and keep them opening your messages in the future.
3. Write quality content
If customers come to expect that your business sends them interesting, engaging and informative emails, your open rates will skyrocket. If, on the other hand, you’re only sending information they could easily find elsewhere -- or worse, all promotions, all the time -- your messages will end up in the trash bin. Sending high-quality email less frequently is one of the best ways to keep open rates high.
4. Send from a person, not a company
When deciding to open email, recipients first check to see if they know the person sending the message. An email from a company gets marked as advertising immediately, which can get your email deleted. An email that appears to be coming from an actual individual at your firm is more personal and much more likely to get opened.
5. Send at the right time
Timing is everything in marketing -- especially email marketing. Be sure that you’re sending your emails at the best times given their message, audience and intent. You can find this out through testing, or do research on your industry to see what results tend to be.
For example, consider a study by Experian, which demonstrated that messages sent on Saturday and Sunday had the highest unique open rates, compared with the lowest rates on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
6. Avoid spam filters
Email filters are becoming more and more sophisticated, and if your message ends up in the spam folder, your open rates will plummet. To stay out of spam filters, obviously avoid sending emails that look like spam. For example, those that include a subject line in all caps or the words “sale,” “free,” “rich” or “deal.” Make sure your email doesn’t read like a brochure, and limit the number of links you include to keep your messages safe.
7. Segment your list carefully
One key to keeping content relevant to the recipient is to segment your email list. There are many ways to do this, including by industry, purchase or time since your last interaction. By breaking your list down into groups of similar recipients, you’ll be better able to send highly relevant, highly focused email blasts, improving your open rates in the process.
8. Don’t buy leads
Companies that try to buy large quantities of leads to jump-start their marketing programs will find their open rates very low. Unsurprisingly, unless you have email leads from people who are actually interested in your business and have some reason to listen to you, email marketing won’t be very effective for your brand. Offering a freebie or running a contest in exchange for an email address are far better ways to build your list organically.
9. Keep your list fresh
In addition to collecting high quality leads, it’s important to keep your list fresh and clean. Review it periodically and remove inactive subscribers or emails with a hard bounce. Also look over your list from time to time and correct any obvious misspellings, such as “@yhoo.com.” Not only will this improve your open rates, it’ll cut your costs by ensuring you aren’t paying for subscribers you can’t mail to.
10. Format your messages for mobile devices
If your company’s email messages don’t read well on mobile, you’re in trouble. Roughly 74 percent of smartphone owners use their phone to check email, and mobile now represents 51 percent of all email opens. When your emails display well on mobile, you’ll improve your open rates, in addition to enjoying higher engagement and more clicks on included links.
Have another tip that belongs on this list? Share your best strategies for increasing open rates in the comments section below!
Tuesday 3 March 2015
Five Questions That Smart Conversion Optimization Consultants Should Ask
Conversion optimization consultants need to be two things: smart and curious. In order to optimize website for more conversions, a consultant doesn’t just make changes. Instead, the consultant asks questions.
If you are a conversion optimization consultant or want to do some CRO work on your own website, ask these questions.
1. Who’s the audience?
CRO is a small part of the huge industry of marketing. There is a lot of overlap in field of digital marketing.
If there’s one thing that holds this unwieldy field of marketing together it’s this: audience understanding.
In order to be successful at marketing, the marketer must know their audience. Marketers accomplish nothing meaningful without first identifying their audience.
The conversion optimization expert can “fix” a website’s conversion problems only if he or she understands the audience.
The illustration from Moz below shows how the field of digital marketing understands itself in all its overlapping glory:
2. What’s the value of the product or service?
According to CRO big dog Oli Gardner, a “winning landing page” has five elements:
- A Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- The hero shot.
- The benefits you’re offering.
- Social proof.
- A single conversion goal — your call-to-action.
That first point is critical — the USP. Here’s how Oli describes it:
The starting point of a marketing campaign revolves around your ability to define a point of differentiation. What is it about your product or service that sets it apart from the competition? You need to communicate this in a succinct way on your landing page. Try to break down your offering to its most basic level, to describe the specific benefit your customers will get by choosing your product/service.
When a conversion optimization turns her expert eye on a landing page, she wants to know one thing — what’s the big deal? Why is this important? Why should I care? What does this offer? Why is this special? Why are you selling this?
However you answer that barrage of questions, it should focus on one thing: value.
No matter how good a CRO consultant is, he can’t just make someone buy something with just a few conversion tricks — bigger buttons, snazzier graphics, etc. He has to understand the value of the product or service.
3. If this were my site, what would I do first?
Those two questions are simply the pregame warmup. We have to wrap our minds around the event as a whole before we can make any changes to specifics.
Conversion optimization is an incredible field precisely because it requires comparitively little time, little cost, and little effort. It utilizes existing resources to create substantial improvement. Sometimes, a small tweak can produce a torrential uptick in conversions.
That’s what the smart consultant wants to discover. She will identify the most obvious problem or easiest opportunity for improvement.
Here are six additional questions that will help you identify your page’s low-hanging fruit:
- Is the value proposition obvious?
- Is the headline clear and compelling?
- Are the graphics professional and motivating?
- Are there benefits focused on the user?
- Are there genuine testimonials?
- Is the CTA obvious?
A shortcoming in any one of these areas can signal a problem that is stopping up the flow of conversions. Pick the easiest one to change, decide on an improvement, A/B test the two elements, and watch your conversion rates improve.
4. What is one thing I can do to reduce friction?
Friction is public enemy number one of conversions.
Peep Laja of ConversionXL defines friction as “a psychological resistance to a given element.” Jeremy Smith calls it, more broadly, “anything that gets in the way of conversions.”
In case you haven’t realized it yet, conversion optimization is a mind game. The best CROs in the business know how to identify psychological barriers and totally demolish them.
There are several kinds of friction, and each one requires a different angle of attack.
- Design friction – Aspects of the overall design of the page that limit conversions. This could include layout, color, images, font kerning, etc.
- Copy friction – Features of the text that reduce conversions. It could be grammatically awkward, boring, too long, etc.
- Time friction – This involves page load time, as well as the time it might take to scroll through the page, fill out a form, etc.
- Cognitive friction – Cognitive friction is a catch-all category for those elements within the mind of a user that can prevent conversions. For example, if a user doesn’t trust website, doesn’t like the “feel” or anything else, this might be categorized as “cognitive friction.”
If you can look at your website from a user’s perspective, you will be better able to identify the points of friction and eliminate them.
If you don’t see any friction, look again. Every single website and landing page has friction. That’s just the way it is. Find it, and kill it.
5. How can I make the call to action stronger?
This last point is money.
The CTA of a website or landing page is where all your conversion optimization efforts come to a climax. This is where the user converts (or not). Nearly every CTA on the planet can be made stronger. You just need to figure out how to do it.
Here are a few points that will help you figure out how to make your CTA really work.
- Make it look like a button.
- Make it bigger or more obvious.
- Use a color that has more contrast.
- Use copy that is more compelling or exciting.
- Place more white space around it.
- Add trust signals near it
- Add more than one CTA to your page.
Most of massive increases in CRO come from CTA changes.
Conclusion
Conversion optimization has a very straightforward goal: make more money by improving conversions.
There are plenty of ways to do this. But it all begins with asking the right questions:
- Who is the audience?
- What’s the value of the product or service?
- If this were my site, what would I do first?
- What is one thing I can do to reduce friction?
- How can I make the call to action stronger?
Ask these questions, conduct your A/B tests, and watch your conversions rise.
What questions help you identify areas of conversion optimization?
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