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In the age of SEO and social media marketing, one type of marketing still reigns supreme in terms of online conversions: email marketing. But email is so widely used by businesses that unless you know how to write a stellar email, your emails are likely to get lost in the overloaded inboxes of your prospects.

There’s nothing worse than managing to convince someone to give you their email address, carefully drafting a sales email and sending it only for you to check the stats and see a low open rate.

So here are 10 tips on how to avoid getting your email overlooked and make sales instead:

1. Use a sender name that’s familiar

Prior to even starting on the subject line, it’s important to consider what name will appear in a recipient’s inbox when they receive an email from you.

Because people are so wary of spam, even if you write an amazing subject line with amazing content, if your sender name comes up as a company name or your job title you won’t see a very good open rate. Instead, you want to use a sender name that’s more personable like your first name. If you feel your first name isn’t enough you can put your first name “from _____ company.” That way people get an idea of the email’s contents but it’s not like getting an email from a complete stranger.

2. Keep the subject lines short

Your subject line is one of the most important parts of the email. Think of it as the headline of your email— the few words that will convince a recipient whether or not to read the body of the email. With many people using email on their mobile devices these days, you need to consider that a long subject line will likely be cut off.

Reserve the longer sentences for the body of your email and focus on getting the main point across in the subject line. Try to limit it to no more than 70 characters.

3. Keep the subject line concise

Because your recipients are already flooded with emails everyday, your subject line needs to get right to the point of the email. You do want to entice the recipient, but if you’re too vague, they’ll likely skip right over your email.

For example, “We’ve got an offer for you!” sounds interesting but it is also vague. Think about how many other email marketers have offers for their recipients… it’s every single one of them!

What is the offer? Think specifically about how this email will benefit the recipient.

A better subject line than the example above would be “Seize the chance to win tickets to the #1 summer festival.” In this example, the topic of the email is clear and to the point. There’s no guessing games, and it’s still enticing to open.

4. Use personal language

Just like how you want to be personable in the sender field, you also want to make the rest of the email personal. Don’t talk about your subscribers list or use language referring to a group of people. Speak as if you’re having a one-on-one conversation.

Emails that include the first name of the recipient in the subject line have higher clickthrough rates than emails that don’t (The Science of Email Marketing, 2014).

This is just one way you can make the email more personal and stand out in the inbox. You can also personalize your emails by referring to specific locations either in the subject line or in the body of the email. For example, sending location-specific offers or deals.

No matter what you decide to do with the subject line, always use “you” or “your” in the body so it still sounds like you’re addressing the recipient directly.

5. Use action-oriented verbs

Your email marketing is essentially a series that should lead your recipient through a sales funnel to a call-to-action that eventually encourages them to buy. That’s why it’s best to use verbs that encourage the recipient to take action.

Subject lines that start with action verbs are more enticing because they instill excitement and engage the recipient in the present moment.

An example of a less actionable subject line might be: The circus comes to town
An improved, actionable subject line is: See the Greatest Show on Earth this weekend only

The second example uses “see” to give the reader an instant sense of what they can do, as opposed to the first example which sounds more like an objective news report.

Using actionable verbs throughout the body of the email is also more appealing as they maintain a vibe that encourages the recipient to take action.

6. Create a sense of urgency for more clicks

Phrases like “today only,” “right now,” “available until 5 p.m.,” or “1 day left” build a sense of urgency. It puts a deadline on the actionable verbs.

Subject lines that create a sense of urgency and exclusivity can give a 22% higher open rate (HubSpot, 2016).

Timing these urgent emails are great for clicks too. For example, sending an email on a Friday afternoon with a subject line “Where to get the best happy hour deals this evening” is very relevant to a recipient in that moment and is far more likely to be opened.

Don’t hold back with the language of urgency in the body as well. Reminding the recipient that they have limited time to take advantage of your offer will encourage more clicks.

7. A/B test your subject lines

Different subject lines will work for different businesses. That’s why it’s best to experiment a bit with which subject lines your email list is most receptive to.

A/B testing is a sure fire way to track with certainty which of your subject lines work best for your specific audience.

Figure out what your audience likes— do they like subject lines that include their name or just addresses them as “you”? Perhaps they prefer a line structured as a question. Continue to test your audience and tweak the subject lines until you find the ones that give you the best open rate.

8. Nurture your prospects before you sell

If a recipient gives you access to their inbox, you need to be considerate of that. It’s not an invitation for you to flood their inbox with sales copy. That will put you on the fast track to the junk mail folder.

You need to nurture your prospects until they’re ready to buy. Give your recipients a reason to trust you, become a source of information. If you’re friendly and helpful, your prospects are far more likely to become buyers. If you’re designing an email automation campaign, write three nurturing emails to send first, then two calls-to-action.

9. Make calls-to-action clear and direct

When you’re asking your recipients to take action, you only have a couple chances before they find it annoying you keep asking them to do something. It’s important to be very clear about what you’re wanting prospects to do.

Make it so easy for the recipient of the email to follow up that even the most technologically-challenged people could take action. Remind your readers why it’s in their best interest to buy and tell them directly what you want them to do next.

10. Insert multiple links in the body for calls-to-action

It makes it even easier for people to take you up on your call-to-action if you place multiple links to the same page within the body of the email. This will make it even more unmissable for your reader and super clear about the action they should take.
Conclusion
Don’t fall victim to the boring and forgettable email promotions. If you’re putting effort into email marketing, make sure that they’re personal, concise, and clear about the action you want them to take after you’ve established credibility with your recipients. With these tips, you will be sure to see more conversions out of the inbox!

In just the past year, we’ve seen some big changes to the popular social media channels that we know and love. Facebook came out with Facebook live, and more recently, Facebook stories. Twitter recently launched a live video feature, Instagram came out with live video and IG stories, and Snapchat came out with lens filters, stickers, and memories. Are you starting to notice a pattern here? It’s all about the visuals.

And for good reason, too. Humans are visual creatures. We’re incredibly better at remembering pictures than we are at remembering text. This is partially because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as a lot of tiny pictures, and it takes time for our brain to read those words and then process them into images we can understand.

But when we see images, we process them so much faster. In fact, according to a study by Brain Rules, when people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. But if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. So the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is really not some kitschy, cliche phrase— it’s the truth. The fact is that we simply process images faster and more efficiently than we do text.

Source: Mammoth Infographics

So if you haven’t started using visuals in your marketing strategy yet, it’s time to evolve with the times. Last year, 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging at 38% (Social Media Examiner, 2016). The hard truth is that if you aren’t using visuals in your marketing, you’re losing.

So here are some different visuals you can incorporate into your strategy, and how to best use them:

Images

When writing a piece for your blog or some other form of content, splitting up the body of text with some relevant images is a good way to keep people engaged with what you’ve written. In fact, articles with images get 94% more views than those without, according to marketer Jeff Bullas. Keep in mind that people’s attention spans are shorter than ever and text-heavy content is more difficult to get through.

Images are also important to use on your social channels. Studies show that Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement than those without images (BuzzSumo, 2015) and tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images (Buffer, 2016). Regardless of the social platforms you use, make sure you’re including relevant images on any posts you make.

You can get creative with your images too. These don’t just have to be your classic photo taken by an iPhone (although those work just fine). They can be memes, which are just images paired with humorous captions and widely embraced by Millennials. And it’s easy with tools like Meme Generator.

Or they can even be screenshots. Often, screenshots are a good way of visually explaining how something works— be that your product or service, how to sign up for something, etc. It also builds trust between you and the viewer. It makes them feel like they’re sitting right there with you looking at your computer screen and the internal workings of your business. You can even draw on screenshots and point out specific things in the image. Awesome Screenshot is a handy tool for this.

For the sake of not infringing on copyrights, but also to add your own branded touch, it’s best to use your own original images. There are tools out there like Canva which allow you to easily create unique and engaging images for free. You can also use good quality photos for free from photo-sharing sites like Flickr. But if you do use someone else’s image, be sure to credit them with the rights to the image.

Video

Videos are steadily on the rise for the most effective form of marketing. By the year 2020, video marketing will make up 79% of global internet traffic (Tubular Insights, 2017). Videos are altogether more engaging, entertaining, and captivating to viewers.

And there are plenty of different types of videos you can create to amplify your brand voice and add extra value to your marketing:

• Tutorial videos – 4x as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than read about it (Animoto, 2015)
• Animated voiceover videos
• Product demonstrations
• Customer testimonials
• Webinar

Whatever you choose to do, make sure your videos make sense with what you’re doing as a brand. A Moz study shows that posts with videos receive nearly 300% more inbound links. Just like with images, include videos in both your content marketing and social media marketing strategies.

More than 60% of marketers and small business owners said they plan to increase investment in video marketing in 2017 (Animoto, 2016). Make sure that you are one of those marketers.

Live Video

As I mentioned in the beginning, all of the most popular social platforms seem to be updating to integrate the live video feature. You might ask: “Why live video and not just traditional pre-recorded video?” Well, live video is far more interactive. You get to engage with the person speaking in the video, right there in the moment. This is an incredible opportunity for marketers in every industry.

Facebook users spend three times more watching live videos than they do watching traditional videos (Animoto, 2016), and the equivalent of 110 years of live video is watched on Periscope, the Twitter-owned live video streaming app, every single day (Periscope, 2016).

Not only is live video more interactive, but it shows a sort of rawness and transparency that traditional video doesn’t. It makes the broadcaster seem considerably more human and accessible. And that, for viewers, makes brands much easier to connect with.

Infographics

Infographics are an awesome tool for visually depicting complex statistics and data in a digestible and compelling way. Designing a good infographic does take a bit of skill, as the layout and design is crucial in making the content understandable to the viewer. But by combining the right colors, shapes, and fonts with the most important, accurate, and contextually relevant information, you can turn the most boring statistic into something exciting.

Bloggers in particular are a big fan of infographics. The best infographics are shared and circulated around the internet at a high rate, which means a lot of publicity for the brand that produces that infographic and heightened credibility for you.

Conclusion

You absolutely must include visuals in your marketing. Visual content hits the human brain faster and harder than any other form of content out there, leaving a greater residual impact on your brand. If you can create quality visual content that engages people and you promote it consistently, your brand is guaranteed to grow. Whether it’s images, videos, or infographics, start integrating more visual content in your content and social media marketing. It’s not a suggestion— it’s a must!

Last year, we shared tips on “How to Improve your Facebook Marketing.” We offered eight tips to really get your business moving on Facebook. Let’s review, shall we?

• Make a Facebook Business Page. Essential for your branding on social media and comes with great built-in analytics to measure the success of your Facebook marketing.

• Post 5 to 10 times weekly. A great frequency for keeping your audience engaged without wearing out your welcome on their newsfeeds.

• Include photos and links in your post. Visuals are more tempting to click-on, and links make good teasers.

• Keep most lines of text short. Shorter lines of text are more digestible than longer lines of text.

• Have a goal for every post. Each post you create should have intent. Text posts, link posts, and photo and video posts each yield different types of engagement.

• Have calls-to-action and contests. Motivate your audience to engage with your business, and simultaneously generate leads.

• Use Facebook data wisely. Keep your eyes on your Facebook Insights— often!

• Always continue to experiment. Social media is living and breathing. It changes quickly, just like people. Don’t be afraid to get creative and try something new!

Now that we’ve reviewed the tips from Part 1, are you ready for more?

Let’s talk about ways to further optimize your marketing on Facebook…

1. Provide unique and valuable content

This may seem obvious, but there are so many brands on Facebook using stale or recycled content that simply doesn’t appeal to their audience. You may feel pressured to just keep getting content out there so that your page doesn’t look inactive. But remember, that quality will always beat quantity.

Always keep your audience in mind when you create content. What will interest them? What will add value to their lives? What does your business offer that others don’t? If you can create real value for your audience, you not only establish yourself as an expert but you’re halfway through the sales process.

2. Use Audience Insights

Studying your Facebook Insights regularly is essential when it comes to finding which posts your audience best respond to. The Insights also provide valuable information about who your audience is. This helps you target your content and create formats that work best for the people who are already engaging.

Maybe your audience likes photo posts and doesn’t like text posts. That is data-led understanding of how to best engage your audience. Pay attention to the feedback you are getting on your page. This should serve as a measure for constantly optimizing your content.

3. Boost Posts

Facebook offers a really easy way to put your posts in front of a more targeted audience, and can show up higher in that audience’s feeds. This can increase reach by 50% or more.

But it’s also important to know which posts are boost-worthy because there is a small cost to boosting. Posts that promote a product or service offered by your business are obviously a good idea to boost. But also, posts that direct people to your website or promote a limited time campaign your business is running.

4. Email Acquisition from Newsfeeds

Many Facebook marketers will have call-to-actions all over their Facebook pages.

Contests and calls-to-action are great as custom tabs on your Facebook page, but it’s likely that many great leads out there aren’t ever going to see these tabs because they aren’t visiting your page. That’s why meeting the users where they spend the most time on Facebook— their newsfeeds —is optimal.

A program called ActionSprout allows you to reach Facebook users by offering a button to encourage direct action right on their newsfeed. Users can click a “Sign,” “Support,” or “Demand” button on your post and they will be redirected to a page to complete the action.

This is a fantastic piece of software to integrate into your Facebook marketing efforts because it so easily supplies calls-to-action!

So these are just a few tips to keep you going. But always keep in mind that Facebook, like all social media, is an ever-changing medium. Our social media marketing efforts should always be intended to direct users away from the source and to our website or blog. The purpose of social media marketing, when it all comes down to it, is to generate leads.

Keep experimenting on Facebook to see what works for you. You will never know what works best until you try! But until then, we’ll be here to offer a helping hand with your social media marketing success.

You may remember last year when we published “How to Improve your Twitter Marketing (Part 1).” After a year of advancement in social media marketing, we’re back again with another five tips for you to best market your business on Twitter.

Experiment with Twitter ads. Similar to Facebook ads, Twitter can promote tweets with your goals, specific audiences, and budget in mind. You can select the goal of driving more traffic to your website, increasing followers, increasing tweet engagements, or increasing brand awareness. These ads can be targeted as broadly as geographical location to as specific as audience behaviors.

There is much to be tinkered with in establishing your audience. Much of social media advertising is really trial and error to find what best works for the people you are trying to reach. So get experimenting, and when your ad campaign is over, be sure to review the results so you can improve for next time!

Make lead generation cards. Did you know Twitter could do this? Twitter has a service to set up a lead card that allows you to capture email addresses and the corresponding Twitter account with a simple click from Twitter users. These are great to use in accordance with specials and deals, and will systematically increase your leads.

Don’t be afraid to share content multiple times. On different social media platforms such as Facebook, this is more often than not a “no-no.” But Twitter is different — the timeline on Twitter is a live streaming feed that does not necessarily boost things you will most likely be interested in. Not everyone is on Twitter at the same time, and most will not seek out your profile if they’ve missed a tweet of yours. So tweeting the same content multiple times will drive more engagement than if you tweet it just once. You can also use it as an opportunity to experiment with different text or images when you’re sharing for a second, third, or more times.

Check Twitter chats. This is a great feature of Twitter because the people using it are actively interacting. There are a wealth of different topics within Twitter chats and those topics related to your industry are likely to contain good business opportunities like generating leads, building relationships, and establishing yourself in the industry.

Plan ahead, create a schedule. It’s best to plan at least two to three weeks ahead in the Twitter world, particularly surrounding holidays and special events. It can also get difficult to constantly stay on top of Twitter from day to day. Planning ahead will free your time up to follow live trends and focus on generating leads.

We hope these tips were helpful! Remember, you always want your Twitter to be used as a vehicle to direct audiences to your original website or email content. Bare this in mind when you set your goals and strategize.

In “How to Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing Part 1,” we offered five tips for making the most out of LinkedIn. Let’s quickly review those tips:

● Connect with everyone: The more connections, the more opportunities
● Add your company profile: Establish your actual business on LinkedIn, not just on your personal profile
● Publish an article once a month: Establish yourself as an industry expert, build rapport and stay relevant
● Endorse others: Support others professionally because the more you give, the more you get in return
● Join targeted groups: Join niche networks within LinkedIn to spread your message faster and make more efficient connections

So now that the “Part 1” tips are fresh in your mind, let’s move onto to some more tips that will get you to make the most out of your LinkedIn…

1. Perfect the Summary Section of Your Own Profile: This section tends to be overlooked. If you know that many people prefer to go to LinkedIn rather than your website, you will understand how important it is to be pitching your best within the LinkedIn summary. You only get 2,000 characters in this section so it’s important to speak directly and persuasively to your audience. It’s recommended to speak in first person, use complete sentences, and at the end of the summary section include your contact information. Sure, it’s available to them elsewhere on your profile, but why not make it even easier for them to contact you?

2. Beef Up Your Company Profile: Add a photo! The default icon is boring and discouraging for viewers. Add lots of links — to your blog, to your website, to your social media accounts. Don’t be that company that’s only known on LinkedIn. Get the branded URL. During editing, you can change the URL from a combination of numbers and letters to something more on-brand and easy for people to remember.

3. Answer Questions, Ask Questions: A really useful and underused feature of LinkedIn is the Question & Answer. Similarly to publishing articles, answering questions thoughtfully establishes your expertise and increases your visibility. Users are drawn to those who are able to provide the best answers within online communities. There’s even a rating system on LinkedIn like on other online forums to highlight the best answers. Make a point to sit down and answer some industry-related questions once a week.

Inversely, it’s also beneficial to ask good questions on LinkedIn. This will not only yield good answers, but good connections.

4. Make Use of the Introduction Feature: Did you know that your 1st-degree connections on LinkedIn can introduce you to their 1st-degree connections? This is a great tool for seeking prospects for sales. By requesting an introduction from one of your connections, that person can set up a message introducing the two of you. And voila! — a prospect connected!

5. Make Use of the Recommendation Feature: Did you know that you can write recommendations for your connections and also request recommendations? By going to a connection’s page, clicking the “Send a Message” drop-down menu, and selecting “Recommendation,” you can write a nice message about that connection that will appear on their page. We highly recommend this recommend feature because they set connections significantly apart from their competition, and writing the connections builds rapport between you and that connection.

Not to mention, it motivates connections to write recommendations for you as well. You gotta give some to get some! But don’t be shy in requesting a recommendation from someone if you know their words would look attractive on your page.

Make the most of your LinkedIn! As we said in Part 1, you want to limit yourself to three social media sites to really focus your marketing efforts. LinkedIn should definitely be one of the three. Your efforts on LinkedIn will drive meaningful connections and yield prospects that would take you much longer to get offline or through any other social media site. For more information about features on LinkedIn, check out the LinkedIn help page: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin

It’s important now more than ever to visualize your company as a virtual space rather than just a physical space. The world of online modern marketing may seem daunting to some – especially those who have grown comfortable with the good old-fashioned paper and telephone methods of marketing. Fortunately, we have some tips to help immerse your business in the digital world!

1. Set up a presentable and practical website
A business’s website is like a virtual shop window. When people search for services and products online, much like in person, they search for something that will allow them to have the easiest and most pleasant experience possible. Thus it’s important to have an organized, good-looking website.

It should be easy to navigate and provide potential customers with all the information they need to know. Quickly, a potential customer will move on to another business if they find it too difficult to find the information they are seeking.

Don’t have any idea how to build a website? Do not fret. There are many businesses you can hire to design your website and to customize it to your needs.

2. Sell products and services directly online
While an organized and informative website is key, customers still may be too discouraged to proceed with using your business if they cannot order the products or services they want directly from your website. While you may think that asking a potential customer to view your website and then pick up the phone to call you is not a big deal, it’s actually still more effort than is necessary for your potential customer.

If you have provided enough information for the potential customer to understand your products or services and they have an idea of what they want, why not just eliminate the extra step of using the phone? Ordering online is far more convenient when you know what you want. It also requires less time from the business because they don’t have to spend so much time on the phone with customers!

3. Engage customers via social media
Part of what makes the internet so amazing is that you can connect with so many people in such a revolutionary way. So why not take advantage of this resource of connectivity? Building a network can be a great way to build your customer base.

If you are mostly involved with business-to-business sales, then LinkedIn is the place to be. This is a social network of professionals and allows you to keep in close touch with clients and associates.

If you are doing more B2C, then Facebook is a great starting point. Facebook is helpful for reaching out to potential customers – especially with the use of Facebook Ads.

Engaging people on any social media platform is key to building relationships and creating an image. If someone “Likes” your Facebook page, you can “Like” their page. Showing any sort of presence on social media at all also alerts Google that you are an active business and you will be rewarded in the Google algorithim by appearing closer to the top of relevant searches.

4. Tap into mobile efficiency and loyalty
With more than two-thirds of all Americans owning a smart phone, it’s a good idea to get on board with the mobile trend. Many businesses are now creating their own apps in order to build a customer base. Not only do these apps make it easier for customers to order products and services, but it also creates brand loyalty. If your customers have put in the effort to download your app—that is a notable level of loyalty! This also creates value for your business because you can more easily track these customers who have downloaded your app.

5. Create more valuable customer data
In this new age, tracking consumer behavior has never been so easy. When you have an online presence with a website with orderable products and services, active social media pages, and mobile accessibility – you are able to access a wealth of data on marketing and sales. This information is crucial to growing your sales. With an online presence you can determine who is buying your products, where these customers are located, how they found you, what time they ordered your product, what platform they ordered your product on, and so many other interesting and helpful information. How convenient that websites and social media have their own built in trackers for you to collect this data?! And you can always further make use of this tool by submitting customer surveys.

Growing your knowledge of the online world is important to understanding how to improve your marketing. We hope these tips were helpful!