More Stuff About Drip Marketing

Auto Response Insights: The Power of Email Drip Marketing

Generating targeted online leads is an effective way to build up a list of prospective customers, and integrating an auto-responder can provide a virtual sales agent that sends automatic e-mail follow ups based upon opt-ins to your mailing list. Consumers today spend a lot of time searching for high quality vendors, and immediately reaching out with an effective email response 24/7 begins to establish trust with your potential customers to improve conversion rates.

Automating Your Sales Force 24/7

Imagine that a customer comes to your site and learns about your company for the first time. With a web presence, you’re able to connect with a wide variety of potential clients looking for products and services in your market. When consumers are faced with a choice between multiple vendors, studies have shown they are most likely to work with companies that provide follow-up after the initial inquiry. By sending out a clean, professional automatic e-mail to prospective customers, you’ll be able to begin cultivating relationships that turn into loyal, profitable client relationships.

When crafting an auto response message, keep in mind that you’ll want to reinforce the positive aspects of your brand while allowing the consumer to make an informed decision. You can personalize the e-mail by addressing the message to the name provided in the lead form, as well as customizing the message based upon the information provided on the lead form. Auto-responders are an effective way to begin establishing a positive image for your company in the eyes of the prospective customers, and can help shifts your website from a lead generation engine into a fully-powered revenue growth generator.

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Targeted Mailings: Postal Drip Marketing

Returning home from a busy day, a potential client opens his mailbox and his interest is immediately drawn to a well-organized mailing about your products.

Creative postal mail campaigns that speak to the needs of your customer base can further the dialogue that you have with customers, providing targeted messages based upon their particular needs. Properly planned postal drip marketing can inform, delight and reach out to a targeted audience to build brand loyalty.

Establishing Dialogue with Your Customer Base

In order to set your company apart from the competition, it’s important to craft a marketing strategy that creates positive brand awareness among the existing and prospective client base. Crafting the proper message and design can ensure that your brand message will stand out among the dozens of postal marketing messages that consumers and business decision makers receive every day.

Since mail is generally read at the end of the day, you have a prime opportunity to reach out to prospective clients who are receptive to messages from superior products and services – creating a brand message that focuses on piquing a prospective customer’s interest can begin to establish the dialogues that lead to customer acquisition.

After you have establishing initial awareness for your brand, high quality drip mailings help establish trust and generate momentum for your company. Segmenting your client base according to their particular needs can ensure you send out messaging that will speak to them on a personal level.

The very same lessons from online targeted marketing apply to effective off-line mailing campaigns: by providing customers with add-on value in terms of information and discounts, you’ll cultivate the relationships that drive your business growth.

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Interactive Automatic Responder Emails Campaigns

If you aspire to excellence in growing and sustaining your business, it pays to pay close attention to the very best companies in business today. There are a variety of firms, both big and small which have successfully leveraged automatic response campaigns to generate positive brand buzz, sales and recommendations from friends. The days of a static email follow up with links are long gone – today companies can leverage high quality HTML-based emails with a wide variety of features.

No matter which industry vertical you’re in, you can incorporate advanced techniques to maximize the success of your email campaigns. At the core of your auto-responder should be an appealing, simple design that fits with your larger brand message. Finding a design that actively communicates your brand ethos is central to ensuring a high quality campaign from beginning to end. Allowing consumers to view the email in HTML or text further enhances its use, making it useful for a wide variety of potential readers – those who like the enhanced design can read it on line, while a text-only option is available for those who are browsing.

Rather than providing a long, comprehensive email always be aware that most people use email to find further sources of information. Providing a summary paragraph with a link for further information, such as a full article, demonstration or video can help improve your click through and open rates – this can also drive consumers to your site for further action where they can further connect with your brand.

Generating Follow Ups through Interactivity

There are several creative examples in which developers have introduced interactive features through HTML elements into newsletters. One of the best examples of these features is an interactive booking calendar used by Royal Caribbean for cruises.

Consumers were able to customize an e-Card to send to friends recommending they check out a particular vacation – who doesn’t love to hear about potential getaways from friends? Capturing consumer interest and longings is important for identifying a primary source of follow up interest in a variety of campaigns. Whether you want a consumer to take action or merely get your brand on their mind, having the right structure for your campaign can ensure the best possible results from your email.

Always vary the content and offers in your auto-responders according to the types of consumers, and make sure repeat customers and loyal clients are treated differently than first time buyers. Showing keen attention to the types of consumer preferences will further help ensure them you are working hard to help them find relevant solutions on a regular basis. Consumers should be able to have fun and enjoy the content – the sample principles which apply to general media marketing also apply to email responders. You’ll want to give your consumers a chance to interact with the brand in a variety of ways, according to their particular interests. Customization options and personalization can always enhance the potential reach of the campaign, ensuring the ultimate success of your brand campaign.

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Responding to Consumers on Social Media

What makes social media truly unique in the media landscape is the nature of consumer interactions: social media allows consumers to actively seek out, respond to, praise and criticize vendors in real time. Since social media provides consumers with a virtual megaphone, it’s important to create a credible presence in order to actively respond to their ideas and comments – not only will this help you retain a larger portion of your potential client base but assiduous actions will earn you praise and increase your brand equity. In nearly every line of business today, actively responding to consumers on social media is an effective way to create a positive brand image that generates referrals, good will and, ultimately, improves your following and conversion rates.

How to Interact with Social Media Comments

A recent survey from the Pew Center for the Internet showed that nearly 1 in 5 American adults utilizes social media to actively post updates, including over 1/3 of all people under the age of 30. While these numbers may seem low, consider there are many other users who actively use social media without providing their own content, updates or feedback. These users are spread across demographic, educational and racial lines, meaning that your entire potential user base is using social media to gather information at any given time.

Years ago, many consumers turned to friends for recommendations on local vendors and, failing that, turned to the Yellow Pages. Today, social networks through referrals and advertising combine those functions into one, and you can come up at the top of your target consumer’s list by building an effective, responsive brand presence. There are countless times throughout the day when a consumer will post – do you know a good recommendation for a #dentist? (# hash tags signify keywords on Twitter.) If you represent a local dental firm, you can immediately message this user with a special offer introducing your firm. A targeted, personalized, friendly offer can create good will if done properly. The key to any successful response is professionalism, personalization and relevance – you have to be timely and accurate to get ideal feedback.

Keep in mind that social media requires companies to tread carefully – don’t be overly commercial about your messages since you don’t want to alienate the community. A thoughtful response to a status such as “Hi there, we’re a local dental office with over 20 years experience, ADA certification and fair prices – we have appointments this week in your area if you’re interested.” This opens the door for further interactions by the consumer, leaving the opportunity in their court – you can extend this even further by offering a follow up, online appointment booking or a special coupon for an initial consultation that might further enhance your conversion rates. Social media is more about conversation than hard selling, so always be open to providing ideas, sharing and realize that you are just reaching out. With an effective strategy you can convert a higher number of messages and may even draw indirect interest from others looking for similar services.

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Drip Marketing 2.0: Streaming your Dental Practice Updates

Today, consumers generally are turning more to online sources for information ranging from news to communications and management of their daily lives. As a result, drip marketing through social media is becoming even more effective way to work with your customers to build a successful brand. Take a look at Wikipedia: the social information site has over 10 million user contributed articles, and has grown based upon a collaborative effort. Opening up your company to input, ideas and campaigns based upon user feedback can make your drip marketing stream even more effective. Based upon the information you generate from your followers, from monitoring your competitors and tracking the results of your campaign, you can build an effective conversion funnel through online networks.

Consistent, On Target Social Drip Marketing

When creating a conversion funnel through social media, you have the opportunity to convert new clients and up-sell existing customers at each stage of the campaign. Independent of which industry you work in, there is a wealth of opportunity to provide on target messaging through social networks. Some of the same marketing principles which apply to traditional drip marketing are magnified in a social context since you can capture a broader array of relevant information to segment, update and adjust your offers based upon consumer feedback.

A major advantage of social drip marketing is its cost effectiveness: distributing a landing page, advertising message (or status update) and tracking its results is much more cost effective than traditional media buy or print campaigns. Both the targeting and flexibility options for social drip marketing are enough to make it worthwhile for nearly every type of business – the value of data you’ll gain in the process makes it well worth the effort even if it takes time to begin generating strong revenue from your social campaigns (and many companies, such as Dell and Apple, have done just that.)

Types of Social Media Marketing

Often times, traditional lead generation campaigns are based upon an extension of cold-calling since marketing messages are broadcast over large media buys. Just as traditional broadcast media has changed, so have methods for reaching social media audiences. Keep in mind that you can target users through videos and video advertising at a much more refined level, given that more video has been uploaded to YouTube in the past few months than has been produced by traditional television networks throughout their history – social media is producing a revolution in lead generation targeting. Online video provides an opportunity to create messaging which has all of the advantages of television without the high cost and lagged distribution.

Since more consumers are making decisions on the go, mobile drip marketing is a great way to reach potential customers at the point of purchase. For example, a recent study from Doubleclick suggests that a growing number of consumers rely upon reviews and recommendations from friends before selecting a local vendor (http://www.doubleclick.com/insight/research/index.aspx ). Therefore, getting your brand messages across to targeted groups via Facebook, Twitter and You Tube is an effective way of influencing the influencers – getting your message out to those who are most likely to recommend your brand can help create an online conversion funnel that only expands over time.

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How e-Commerce Companies Leverage Auto Responders

In the highly competitive sales landscape, conversion rates for retailers must be considered in a broader perspective than just a single checkout. Consumers today have a wide variety of potential shopping destinations, and successful e-Commerce companies leverage multiple layers of conversion funnels for a drip marketing campaign that recognizes this fact. As a result, whether you make a purchase, decide to postpone the checkout or want further information on a product, retailers are there to help you make an informed decision.

With a long, complex buying process consumers today often require immediate follow ups when they’re unsure of a product, want to buy related items or are considering making a pre-order. Having an effective automated way to follow up with these consumers can help to ensure you establish your store as a source of reliable information, credible offers and top quality customer service from the very start.

Importantly, having multiple intake and opt-in sources is crucial to ensuring you have the proper response to consumer inquiries today. Since it can be hard to identify where a consumer is in a buying cycle, having several newsletters for major product lines, a special offers announcement letter and an existing customer database can help further segment your audience for maximum success.

A Look at Amazon’s Auto-Responder Messages

As the single largest retailer on the web today, Amazon has a major market presence in nearly every vertical, from its traditional soft lines in books and music to hard lines such as sporting goods and household supplies. If you’re an existing Amazon custom you may be amazed at how well targeted their email campaigns are – in fact, each consumer received an email targeted specifically based upon their buying habits, showing a high level of personalization. While the actual sales through rates on the emails are quite high, the more important result is that consumers trust Amazon with their business, which opens minds and wallets in the future.

Right after you make a purchase you should immediately confirm the consumers order and map out the process for their benefit. Consumers want to ensure their payment was successfully processed, and that their order will arrive safely and securely from the very beginning. Make sure they know how to track their order, when to expect it to arrive and how to call with any questions or concerns. Successful retailing today is about meeting consumer expectations from pre-sale to well beyond fulfillment – since the buying cycle never ends, neither does the customer service cycle.

Ranging from your immediate sales follow up to coupon and special offer opt-in list, you can forge close connections with your consumers on the basis of the quality of your content, personalization and attention to their needs. Your auto responders should allow them to connect with your brand through phone or email so they can immediately connect with a concern, order or question – having a kind, attentive person on the other end of the line will ensure your future emails are read, embraced and acted upon.

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Building Up a Newsletter Subscription Base

You’ve likely seen hundreds of opt in boxes and newsletter offers just in the past few weeks. Think about which offers you opt in to and which you ignore – these decisions can help shed light into the psychology behind building up a newsletter base. Previously, consumers were easy to attract with free offers, promises of discounts or monetary rewards – today, consumer conditioning requires a much more unique approach that will encourage consumers to welcome you into their inbox. Email inboxes today are crowded with a vast array of messaging from sales to invitations; finding the right balance can help you to not only increase your opt-ins but also to ensure they are much more receptive to your subsequent messages.

The most successful marketers and brand builders today have newsletter subscribers in the thousands for one simple reason: top newsletters offer quality advice, compelling solutions and have a track record of adding value to the lives of their subscribers. Since you’re the single person closest to your personal brand, think about what value your company truly brings relative to your competition – whether you have better products, more compelling customer service or better pricing, leverage those advantages to genuinely attract consumers to your brand.

Grow your Personalized Opt-in List

When a potential client subscribes to your newsletter, they are opening the door for a potential future business relationship. This gesture should be returned in kind by respecting their individual preferences, location and stated goals. When you send a newsletter to a consumer, you should be absolutely certain he or she is receiving relevant, targeted content – your first newsletter delivery is a major chance to make the right impression on him or her from the very start. Whether you work in different markets or serve different types of consumers, segmenting your newsletter list will help you build up a following over time.

A single, isolated consumer subscribing to a newsletter will not be responsible for growing your brand. By contrast, sending our quality content that is forwarded, bookmarked and recommended is the single most effective way to build up a genuine following. Creating a viral effect with your newsletter requires hard work, creativity, a laser focus on targeting and consumer interests, along with a willingness to reach out, adjust your approach and try something new. You shouldn’t necessarily expect instant success with your newsletter, since it takes time to cultivate a successful brand following.

Looking toward the long run, building your email list requires respective your consumers’ privacy, interests and concerns from the very first decision to submit their email to the continual decision to remain subscribed to the list over time. There are a variety of adjustments, challenges and obstacles to overcome during the process of building a brand – we’ve seen great success stories by helping our clients navigate the challenging but highly prosperous world of online marketing, and can extend these same benefits to your business, no matter which stage of growth you’re at.

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Customizing Videos for Drip Marketing Campaigns

When working on direct mail marketing campaigns, it’s important to take steps to segment each aspect of the campaign accordingly. A direct mail recipient in Boise, Idaho for example will want to see a campaign targeted to their area, while a business owner in downtown Los Angeles will want to see a marketing message that resonated in the city of Angels. We have years of experience in optimizing traditional drip marketing campaigns for conversion outcomes, and can help determine the ideal course for your online video series accordingly.

Importantly, video campaigns don’t exist in isolation – rather, videos are a core part of your overall marketing campaign and should be viewed in that context. For each element of your campaign from an introduction to your brand to targeted special offers, videos can help improve the targeting on your campaigns. With low marginal production costs and the potential for widespread distribution, creating a series of videos linked to each mailer, campaign and offer is not only possible but optimal for businesses looking to increase market share today.

Segmenting Videos for Drip Marketing

Depending on the different types of consumers you’re targeting through a drip campaign, you should conceptualize the process in terms of the different segments of videos you can produce. For example, a local dentist targeting college students to become potential first time patients is a very different video than a video promoting braces to local families. Consumers today expect you to speak their language, and an effective video campaign can ensure you’ll all on the same page when it comes to content selection. When you connect with consumers, you provide them with a solution to a problem, and that immediately gets their attention.

Just imagine, going back to the earlier example, how effective a video showing the results of teeth whitening on an actual college student would be when supplemented with a special such as “refer 3 friends and get a free teeth whitening.” Not only would this type of video spread virally, but you’d likely be booked solid for weeks, and that’s exactly what our goals are. Producing the right videos with the right distribution channels is a core part of successfully converting clients on special offers. By understanding what types of marketing messages work offline you can integrate these topics and approaches into your online video campaigns for great results. There are thousands of businesses actively promoting video content every day so the question is: are you ready to take your drip marketing campaigns to the next level?

Many business owners view online video as separate from traditional marketing, but today consumers fully expect professional presentation when they arrive at web sites, landing pages and social media profiles. Providing compelling video content to connect consumers with solutions should be part of your overall conversion funnel, and we can work with you to ensure you’re producing the right videos for your campaigns from the very beginning. We help you take the guesswork out of video production with high production standards, precise topical coverage and distribution methods that will open up the door to new customers.

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How to Integrate Organic Search Strategies into Drip Marketing Campaigns

Working with countless small businesses to integrate offline and online marketing campaigns, we’ve come to learn important ways you can leverage SEO to help grow top line sales. When working on a new promotional or seasonal campaign, you can also increase the footprint of your website in the search engines by adding in new content. As a result, you’ll realize dual benefits from targeting more potential search trends, as well as increasing the reach of your promotional campaign.

As the search engines update their indexes more frequently (in real time with integration into Twitter, in fact), you can promote your campaigns through a variety of methods. There are a wide variety of distribution techniques to target search traffic, including press releases, social media announcements, guest blog posts and much more. We work with companies to help them integrate SEO into a complete framework that ensure publicity, traffic and interest in their campaigns through a variety of means.

When organizing a drip marketing campaign, you can now rely upon real-time distribution, feedback and data that can help inform the next step in the promotion. Applying the same principles from traditional marketing to real time data can help you test, analyze and improve your campaigns rapidly, helping more towards a better ROI.

Shifting to Real Time Campaigns

We have years of experience in optimizing successful drip marketing and direct campaigns which help you improve ROI from your efforts. These same principles can help inform a more successful marketing campaign utilizing SEO techniques, including distribution, targeting and lead generation (conversion) techniques. The largest advantage to real time SEO campaigns is that they can be updated and integrated in real time, helping you to instantly react to changing market conditions.

A number of studies have demonstrated that consumers are utilizing traditional search in new ways, looking for recommendations, citations, social media updates, press releases and news, rather than just web pages. We can help your firm update your drip marketing campaign to integrate these distribution methods for better results. With minimal incremental costs you can extend the reach of your targeted campaign to include a wide distribution that can reach beyond any particular mailing or demographic list – a proper SEO campaign can generate leads you might not ever thought possible. Integrated SEO campaigns can open doors to new connections, clients and opportunities for your business.

Importantly, we focus on developing your core brand message by utilizing a common theme to messaging across your broad selection of services. Traditionally it took days to determine the effectiveness of a drip marketing campaign to collect enough data to fully understand the conversion funnel. Today you can get real time feedback on your campaigns to adjust offers, landing page messages, pricing and taglines. As a result you can accelerate the promotional cycle to help make possible a broader selection of marketing segments.

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How Big Businesses are Using Twitter: a Focus on Best Buy

With a major advertising campaign Best Buy is promoting its “Twelp Force”, a team of technicians and customer support representatives who provide answers, solutions and references to curious customers. If you’re having a technology problem and need help, Best Buy is there to point you in the right direction – that is, in the direction is its services and products. Building out its social media campaign is a smart strategy and can influence the way your company goes about promoting itself on social networks.

Although the sheer scale of the Best Buy approach to real time feedback for consumers might be outside of your reach, we can work with you to craft a personalized social media campaign to help you reach out to new consumers. At any given moment there are a variety of consumers actively searching for the products or services you provide – if you’re not there to integrate them in a personalized way into your social marketing campaign, chances are your competition will. Stay one step ahead of your competitors by helping consumers with resources, good information and quality marketing messages – as a result, they’ll be more likely to turn your way when it comes to making a purchasing decision.

Providing Valuable Information as a Drip Marketing Method

Consumers today are often more difficult to reach through direct marketing messages, and are likely to look for ways in which you are different from your competition. In addition to working to improve the efficiency of your operations, social media provides a great way to quickly update your marketing campaigns more quickly than traditional methods. The traditional formula of market, collect data, re-market is accelerated and amplified with social media – rather than shooting in the dark based upon internal data, you now have a wealth of demographic and consumer data at your fingertips.

Best Buy recognized this fact and now has over 10,000 active followers and reaches out to hundreds more on a daily basis. While the company has a vertically integrated footprint across the nation, in products and services, it also has leveraged a marketing campaign that can inform your own social methods. When you begin social marketing you don’t necessarily need a list of leads as you might in a traditional marketing capacity – instead, you’ll only need a profile of the ideal consumers you want to attract. Building your customer base and list from the ground up can lead you to ideas, new market segments and campaign angles that can make your entire drip marketing campaign more effective.

Rather than starting from square one, you’ll immediately begin learning from the marketplace, adopting new methods, techniques and ideas to help grow your business online. While Best Buy is actively converting consumers to its products, it’s also gathering ideas, feedback and comments that can help it expand into new markets, offer customized specials that can help you stay one step ahead of your customers as you earn the loyalty of a new generation of consumers.

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Split Testing Your Marketing Messages to Optimize Drip Marketing

There are many ways to split test a website for conversions, and finding the most effective marketing messaging can help accelerate the path to finding the right core messages for your online drip marketing campaign. Understanding your audience through split testing different marketing angles can help restructure your campaign to create a better conversion funnel.

While the overall layout of your landing pages matters in terms of the conversion rate, split testing is a great way to determine which textual and visual messages resonate most effectively with your target audience as well. Since segmentation is a core part of your marketing campaign, you can begin testing which types of messages convert best with a particular customer base and leverage those lessons across social media, pay per click as well as integration into off line marketing.

Best Practices for Optimizing Your Brand Messaging

Rather than testing textual elements in isolation, thinking in broad marketing principles can help make your split test make intuitive (as well as statistical) sense. Some of the very same principles from traditional off-line drip marketing apply broadly to the process of optimizing your website based upon split tests. The key strategy to split testing is to test marketing hypothesis so you start with a good base – by testing key elements that reflect your broader marketing strategy you can hone in on the most effective practice for optimizing your site.

For example, if you’re a local lender who wants to target college student loans, you can start with two basic campaign themes: by testing how well a “We Make College Affordable” campaign performs against a campaign with the theme of “Student Loan Options”, you can determine a larger theme for your campaign. In some cases, you will want to segment your landing pages by campaign and geography so you can determine which types of potential visitors convert best given each unique marketing message.

Importantly, your split tests don’t occur in isolation since you’re really determining how to most effectively communicate brand messages. We have worked with countless clients to test different drip marketing hypothesis, including price points on offers, special coupons and limited time offers to determine which call to action elements ultimately produce the most revenue. When you design a split test, always keep in mind your ultimate business outcome whether it is signing up new customers, encouraging downloads of a white paper or getting signups to your newsletter. By tracking the differences in conversion outcomes during the test you can begin honing in on the most effective way to structure your site.

The split testing process is ongoing since there are seasonal, economic and market based factors that shift over time. Therefore, continuing to optimize your site for new campaigns is an important way to continue to grow your customer base and stay one step ahead of your competition. Consumers today are highly value conscious, and you can leverage these trends in order to effectively grow your brand in a tough environment. Split testing helps to shift marginal campaigns into high gear, and keeps them growing into the future.

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Auto Responders with Custom Offers to Build Trust

Each morning you open your inbox to a bevy of potential offers, questions and introductions – the main question a person asks himself or herself is “reply or ignore?” As much effort as you might put into your auto response functions, always consider the auto-responder from the consumer’s perspective Consumers are ready for a better solution to their particular problem when looking for a vendor, and designing an auto response function with this principle in mind can help ensure long run success of your campaigns.

Building client relationships is akin to building long term friendships – when you first meet someone, the goal is to extend your hand and let them know you appreciate their company. There’s a gradual evolution of interpersonal relationships in both the social and business world – making the right connections requires starting on the right foot, not too slowly or too quickly. For example, many affiliates often feature a hard sell upon subscription to a newsletter, which can risk alienating an entire segment of their target audience, hit or miss. Since you’re aiming to build a long run business rather than just getting the instant gratification of a conversion, your auto responders should be a welcoming hand rather than an open offer.

A warm, sincere introduction to your personal service or brand can help ensure you begin building trust with consumers. By starting off slowly and engaging your potential customers in a long term conversation you greatly increase the chances of winning their business in a genuine manner, ensuring they will be loyal to your brand, refer friends and help you build up a network of clients. Business today is highly competitive in nearly every industry and consumers have a wide selection of choices – keep your brand at the forefront of their mind with an auto responder that introduces the genuine advantages of your offering.

Converting Customers with Conversational Marketing

Some of the leading thinkers in brand strategy today think in multi-year or multi-decade cycles when building new ad campaigns. The reason for this approach is the changing nature of the consumer and the longer buying cycle, where consumers become interested in the idea behind your brand. Today, your company is no longer just your products or services but the larger ethos of your company – your brand is what you stand for beyond just profits. In the new era of customer communications, client relationships are about conversations, trust and integrity.

If you look at the way IBM follows up immediately to client requests this pattern is immediately clear: building upon their “blue” theme, the company provides consumers with insights into not only their projects but their larger vision for technology services. After reading about these details consumers are attracted to the affinity of the brand in a wide variety of ways, encouraging them to learn more and enter your brand’s larger mission.

When constructing auto responders, it’s important to view them as a larger symbol of your company’s core messaging.

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How Split Testing Can Help Improve your Conversion Rates

Imagine walking into a store to see overly attentive associates, a difficult to understand store layout and sales prices which are hard to find. Chances are you’re going to walk out of that store. Now imagine you walk a few stores down to find a friendly, easy to navigate store that greets you with a smile and helps you to find exactly what you’re looking for. There may be only a few key differences between those two stores, yet the changes made all of the difference when it came to your purchasing decision.

This same analogy applies to optimizing your website for conversion, since the placement and nature of various elements can determine how effective the conversion rate on a given site is. Rather than trying out different ideas in isolation, comprehensive split testing can determine the best layout, colors and elements to maximize your website conversion rate.

The Various Ways in Which You Can Optimize For Conversion Rates

Making a few adjustments in the layout and design of your website can result in wide differences in terms of the ultimate conversion rate. A small movement in the conversion rate on your landing or checkout page can make the difference between a profitable and a marginal campaign. When designing an experiment to split test your website, you’ll want to determine which elements might contribute to the resulting conversion on a page.

Start at the top of your page to identify elements to test including blocks of text, images, columns and button placement. Adjustment to these elements can help improve conversion rates by making it much easier for visitors to complete their conversion path. There are a variety of elements which are most important to split test in order to get the most effective movement in your conversion rate.

To start, always split-test your headlines and sub-headlines, as these text elements are designed to grab the attention of the visitor. A properly structured headline can result in much improved landing page performance, and can lower your bounce rate, encouraging visitors to read further. By opening with the most effective headline, you can maximize your chances of ultimately converting the visitor into an opt-in signup or purchase.

At the same time, the first paragraph text is also crucial since it provides a chance to compel your visitor to take action. By identifying a potential problem and offering a compelling solution, high quality text can result in a clear path to conversion for the visitor. Make sure you’re writing for your audience in a compelling way so that you begin to build a relationship with the user based upon credibility and a human element.

Once your text is optimized, always make sure to split test your sign-up form including the call to action buttons, form fields and placement of the opt-in. Giving users multiple choices including e-mail submits, direct purchases and follow-up forms can determine which action ultimately results in the most revenue for your company. A well designed experiment can vastly improve your return from a given landing page campaign.

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Building a Relationship through Email Marketing

Today, building customer relationships is more about conversations than it is one way marketing messages. When we design our clients’ email marketing campaigns, we integrate the segmentation, messaging and principles from traditional drip marketing to ensure the success of your email campaigns. Connecting with consumers via their inbox is more than just getting attention for your offer: proper, successful email marketing campaigns aim to build long term relationships with clients.

When approaching a prospective client, it’s important to be sensitive to his or her own particular interests. The sample segmentation principles which apply to drip marketing also hold when organizing email campaigns – you shouldn’t send out the same email to your entire customer base since they are looking for different solutions, options and products. We can help you to determine proper targeting methods for each of your lists to help maximize the long run success of email marketing.

At its core the messages you send to your customer should aim to inform, entertain and educate in addition to their core role in selling. When aiming to build a long run relationship with a client, your communications should help provide them with solutions, rather than just providing sales content, no matter how compelling the offers might be.

Connecting with Consumers through Email

Put yourself in the position of a customer and ask what types of email communications you’d like to receive. Some of the best companies online today successfully utilize e-mail marketing primarily because they learn from and respect their customers – email campaigns should be unobtrusive and genuinely add value to your customers. Each client’s time is valuable, and showing respect for that fact will help you make decisions that build long run relationships.

Many companies build up a standard email list for a newsletter, which can be effective when it is properly written. On the other hand, however, it’s important to highly personalize each email for its subject, salutation and contents – consumers will appreciate the efforts you make to better understand their needs. Buy.com is one of the leading companies in this segment, and has earned a reputation for quality customer service through its customized savings offers via email and reliable follow up. The company ethos defined by a commitment to excellence should flow from the very concept of your email newsletter all the way to your specific distribution methods.

Timing, relevance, quality and personalization are core principles from drip marketing which we help apply to the world of email marketing. Consumers’ inboxes are full of marketing collateral today, and breaking apart from this pack requires you differentiate yourself from the competition. By aiming to cultivate a relationships by asking for feedback, making personalized offers and showing concern for your clients can help to improve read rates, retention and, ultimately, conversions. With an ultimate aim to improve your mind share and brand image you’ll find email campaigns are much more effective than putting your foot on the sales pedal – like all forms of marketing, proper understanding of your customer is at the core of any sales relationship.

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How Auto-Responders Can Integrate into Online Marketing

After investing countless hours into your lead generation campaigns to begin capturing contact information, many companies wait too long before contacting their leads. Each minute you wait before contacting a prospective customer gives your competitors a chance to solidify a new client relationship, leaving your form information in the cold. We work with a wide variety of companies to help integrate auto response campaigns that immediately warm your leads, beginning a process of building trust and opening up the prospect for closure.

Customers use online information to help make informed decisions, and immediately reaching out to a prospect ensures they don’t have to continually search for further sources. Once you assure a customer you can provide a reliable solution to their problem, you’ll be able to help increase your conversion rate. While the process just begins with an auto responder, including this feature in your campaign can vastly increase your ability to close your leads at various stages.

Today, consumers have a vast resource of potential companies to work with, all just a single click away. With all of the hard work and time you put into generating targeted traffic to your site, it’s a smart investment to get the very best conversion rate possible – in order to accomplish that goal you must start by establishing trust with your users.

Establishing Trust with an Auto-Responder

When a consumer looks to buy a product or service they look for signs of trust. One of the single best ways to build up trust among your consumer base is to demonstrate your commitment to service. Think about the very best brands online today: from Zappos to eBay, these companies were built on a dedicated to customer service above all. While it will take some time to build your company up to this level, you can get started in growing your customer base by demonstrating you are committed to building long run relationships.

Customers can buy shoes anywhere so when they turn to Zappos they’re expected quick shipping, reliable customer service and a trusted service from beginning to end. With an auto responder you immediately reach out to the customer, providing them with your contact information, more background about your products and services, as well as a wide variety of potential up sells. An auto response mechanism is superior to an immediately phone call since consumers often have to warm to your brand and an auto responder can work 24×7, even when your sales force is sound asleep.

There’s no time to cause when it comes to online marketing: your consumers are actively looking for better, faster, more affordable products and solutions around the clock. Let your lead generation campaign work for you by integrating a professional, active auto responder which will help connect you with consumers in real time. Make the proper investment in turning leads into customers with a properly organized campaign from the segmentation of your lists, the right media buys and an effective auto response follow up to maximize your conversion rates.

Posted in Drip Marketing, Web Marketing | Leave a comment

Special Report from SmartBox Web Marketing

Welcome to what could be the most advantageous adventure you will take this year in getting more patients to your office. I know that sounds like a bold statement but it is true. The report you are about to read is packed with information many brick and mortar businesses, including dentists, have yet to discover – but every word is true and every step is a game changer.

This information will open your eyes as to the possibilities for practice growth and profitability simply by changing from “the ways things have always been done” to a progressive realization about how your practice needs to market in the 21^stcentury. If you are like most dentists, by the time you read the information your brain will not be able to shut off thinking about the possibilities.

Click the link to download the report now: http://www.smartboxwebmarketing.com/reports/86-of-100-dental-report.pdf (PDF)

At the same time I want to let you know about the information that will come your way every few days to supplement the report – real life examples and explanations that will have light bulbs going off in your head all the time as you think about what could be in store for you and your practice. Here are a few of the topics I’ll be covering:

Definitive proof that patients are searching for dentists in your home town and thoughts about positioning yourself to capture most of them. This one realization is what will have you realizing what so many of the dentists I work with now know as gospel – It’s not about the economy. It’s about being on the front line.

Tips about how to avoid marketing mistakes that could actually make your practice seem to “disappear” from view. In today’s world with today’s modern patient there are inadvertent mistakes – even outright bad ones – that could destroy your chances of being on the top of the minds of patients when they are looking for a dentist.

How to determine the return on your investment with advertising budgets – something the Yellow Pages and newspapers don’t want you to know.Ever wondered if advertising does you any good? Ever wondered how you could know for sure? I’ll show you.

Why playing with the Google-giant in their own ballpark is so important in getting new patients. Sorry, but the truth is that if you want to be in the ballpark when it comes to getting new clients you have to play in the big leagues.

What you and WalMart should have in common. It’s not just WalMart that knows this trick…it’s every grocery store, every box store and every neighborhood convenience store you’ve ever went into. You need to use it too.

It’s not what you know that is important. It’s what has yet to be invented that is scary. Let’s face it. You have seen things already that 20, 10 or even 5 years ago could not have even been a dream. Now picture yourself and your practice in five years, 10 years or 20 years. If you don’t stay ahead of the curve you’ll only be left behind.

The President, second graders and over 80% of your home town “get it”! This one fact will be a game changer for your practice. Why is it that the President just went to a small town in the middle of nowhere, a place you have to get lost to find, to introduce this initiative? It’s not about changing the landscape of small towns. It’s about big business – your business included!

How’s your F.I.S.O.? How to get the pre-qualified big cases you want.Smart marketing doesn’t just bring you inquiries. It brings you pre-qualified new patients that are ready to book an appointment. This shows you how to achieve the difference.

“X” marks the spot! Even pirates knew you needed this to succeed! ‘Ey, every pirate movie ever made had one of these. This is still important to you, just tweaked a bit for the modern age.

Free, full-time advertising you had better use or be hurt. “Use it or lose it” like the old saying goes: Why a major corporation just gave you a way to advertise your business and what will happen if you don’t!

The information you are about to read and the subsequent information I’ll email you every few days has taken months to put together. It describes the best ideas, outlines the latest and futuristic trends and lays out all sorts of possibilities for your practice – all designed to get you more patients. They are out there waiting for you – so let’s get started.

If you haven’t already downloaded your information do so now, clear your mind and be prepared to have your eyes opened. Let’s get you more patients!