Up for the Challenge? Try This Unusual Method to Help Achieve Your Business Goals

Jadah Sellner and Jen Hansard, two moms who co-founded a business called Simple Green Smoothies, added 28,000 people to their email list in 2013. These days, they have an active, engaged list of more than 385,000 people.

My first reaction when I heard those numbers was, “WOW.”

Want to know what propelled their accelerated list growth?

Four times a year, Jadah and Jen host 30-Day Green Smoothie Challenges. People who are interested sign up for the challenge and pledge to drink one green smoothie every day for 30 days. During the challenge, Jadah and Jen send weekly emails that include inspiration, shopping lists, recipes, and smoothie tips.

Challenges are a popular way to attract email subscribers and get people to spread the word about your business. They’re also a lot of fun for your community members.

Let’s take a look at how challenges work and how to design a challenge that will help you reach your business goals.

What is a challenge, and how will it help your business?

When you host a challenge for your audience, you select and promote an action you’d like your community members to take. It’s usually a short-term commitment.

To join your challenge and play along, your community members register for it either by signing up for your email list or joining a group on a social media site. Then you give the participants support, encouragement, and tips during the challenge itself.

Copyblogger hosted a content challenge in January 2016 that helped people build their cornerstone content.

Challenges are often free, but you can potentially charge for them as part of a larger program or online course.

Throughout the challenge, participants focus on one goal — whether that goal is eating healthier food, daily meditation, or writing a novel.

Challenges draw attention to your business. People get excited about challenges and share them on social media, so their friends and family can see what they’re up to (and play along). Dedicated community members will come back to participate in every challenge.

Let’s take a look at three successful free challenges.

Example #1: National Novel Writing Month

One of the very first virtual challenges that came on my radar was National Novel Writing Month. The annual NaNoWriMo challenge encourages participants to write an entire novel (50,000 words) during the month of November.

Writers sign up to receive inspiring and instructional emails during the challenge and get access to the community forums, where they can buddy up to get additional writing support.

The program started in 1999 and today NaNoWriMo is an official 501(c)(3) organization. More than 400,000 people participated in the fiction-writing challenge in 2015.

Example #2: The EFT Tapping challenge

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a form of acupressure — similar to acupuncture — during which you tap on energy meridians with your fingertips to treat emotional or physical issues.

Claire P. Hayes is an EFT practitioner and author, and she regularly hosts seven-day tapping challenges where people can join live daily calls with Claire and other participants.

Claire uses regular challenges to build her email list, explain what she does in an interactive way, and create trust with her audience members.

Example #3: List-building challenge

For my business (BethHayden.com), I’ve invited my community members to play along with me as I attempt to grow my list to 16,000 subscribers by the end of 2016.

Email subscribers who sign up for the challenge get special updates from me about my progress, including tips on what list-building tactics are working and which ones are flopping.

So far, more than 500 people have signed up, so I know it’s a hot topic for my community members. You can sign up here.

How to design and host your own challenge

You don’t need to already have a huge email list to run a challenge, but you do need to have some type of community already established.

If your list is small and you’re not connected with any influencers who can help you promote your challenge, it might not produce the results you want.

So, first decide whether or not you have a large enough audience for your challenge to be effective. If you do and want to host a challenge, follow the five steps below.

1. Identify your business goals

Before you begin brainstorming challenge ideas, think about what you’re trying to accomplish — and how a challenge might help you achieve your goals.

Are you trying to build your email list? Get media attention? Pre-sell a course you’re building?
Write down your primary goal, plus any secondary goals you might have.

2. Brainstorm challenge ideas and select the best fit for your business goals

Take 15 minutes and write down as many challenge possibilities as you can. Then take a five-minute break and walk around the room or get a cup of coffee. To generate even more ideas, try another 15-minute brainstorming session.

Assess each of your ideas based on whether it will help you meet your business goal, how difficult it will be to implement, and whether it’s likely to be something that catches on with your audience.

Remember to think in terms of benefits to your audience, not features of the challenge.

3. Design your challenge

To create your challenge, outline:

• Complete instructions for your audience, including when it will start and end
• How you’ll entice people to join
• How you’ll promote it to your email list, existing social media audiences, and influencers in your network

4. Host the challenge

Once you’ve set your details and announced the challenge start date, focus your content marketing efforts on promoting it.

Publish content related to the topic of your challenge, host webinars, and talk it up on social media. Encourage your participants to share their challenge results and get other people involved.

5. Evaluate the effectiveness of the challenge

After you wrap up your challenge, write down what went right, what went wrong, and how you can improve your plan next time.

Did you meet your business goals?

If you’d like to do another challenge (or run the same one again), set your next start date.

Engage and entertain your audience while growing your business

Challenges can be a fun and exciting way to generate buzz for your business, engage existing subscribers, and build your email list.

As we’ve seen from the examples above, challenges can work for all different types of businesses — so pick a smart challenge idea and run with it!

Have you hosted (or participated in) a challenge you particularly enjoyed? Tell us about it in the comments below.


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Build Your List With Permission-Based Referrals

“There’s a great, wide open Internet out there, continuously accessed by millions of people, and in all likelihood, at least some of them are interested in what I’m offering. Surely there must be a way to reach them, but how?”

If you’ve said or thought that, you’re hardly alone. One of the biggest email marketing challenges for many businesses, particularly those that are new at it, is building a list of opt-in subscribers.

The good news is, it can be done. However, building a large list of quality subscribers takes time, and some people that we speak to don’t feel they have time. They want — need — a big list, and now.

Big List Building Mistake: Buying Email Addresses

This urgency can push them to buy lists of allegedly “opt-in” email addresses, website “traffic” that they believe will result in opt-in subscribers, and any of the myriad products aimed at frustrated would-be list builders.

Aside from the fact that purchased email addresses cause spam complaints and (at AWeber) get accounts terminated, they’re simply a waste of money. You’ll benefit more from other list-building techniques that are:

• Free (with the exception of some time and effort)
• Opt-in (people are asking you directly for information)

A Better Way: Get Referrals From Your Current Readers

One of the best examples of this is growing your list by referrals from existing subscribers.

Word-of-mouth is one of the oldest and most powerful means of advertising, and nowhere is it more easily or quickly done than via email. Your subscribers are getting value out of your messages and probably know someone else who would as well. Sometimes a little reminder is all it takes to get them excited about helping you help others, so give them a chance to do that!

Encourage Subscribers To Forward Your Emails To Others.

Here is an example of text you can use in your messages to do so:

---

Thanks for reading! If you know someone who could benefit from this, feel free to forward it to them!

Not a subscriber yet? Like what you’ve read? Sign up to get future issues delivered straight to you:

http://www.example.com

Until next time!

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This Is Not The Same Thing as a “Tell a Friend” Form!

Note the difference between this and using a “tell-a-friend” form to get subscribers to sign up others to your list:

You should only subscribe/email people who are asking to be subscribed. Someone whose email address is entered into a “tell-a-friend” form by one of your subscribers hasn’t asked to be subscribed. Any email you would send to them would be spam.

Tell-a-friend forms also introduce two barriers to recommending your list to others:

• Mis-typed addresses
• They force the subscriber to type out the recipient’s email address, which takes more time and effort than forwarding, especially if your subscriber wants to recommend you to multiple people

Encourage current subscribers to forward your message, and avoid those barriers.

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What Is an Email Conversion?

 The success of a business boils down to whether customers buy what you’re selling. In marketing terms: whether they’re converting. And since email marketing programs exist to support the business, email conversions are a critical metric for most programs.

However, in part because email programs have many secondary goals that are unique from the business’s goals, the definition of a conversion has become more than a little hazy, creating misalignments at some brands. To bring some focus to this issue, we asked five experts two simple questions:

WHAT IS A CONVERSION? IS AN EMAIL CONVERSION DIFFERENT FROM CONVERSIONS IN OTHER CHANNELS?

Everyone had a fairly similar definition of a conversion (which we’ve highlighted in their responses below). However, as they expanded on that, things got blurry quickly. Interestingly, everyone agrees that there are a couple of different kinds of conversions—but they don’t agree on what those two kinds are or what to call them. The possibilities include:

micro-conversions and macro-conversions
email conversions and website conversions
direct conversions and indirect conversions
conversions and conversions to sale

Our experts make great points about why each of these distinctions is important.

ALEX BIRKETT, GROWTH MARKETER AT CONVERSIONXL, SAYS:

A conversion can be many things—it’s simply “the completion of a desired action.” That said, there are two general types of conversions: micro-conversions (opens, CTR) and macro-conversions (end-goal conversions like sales and signups). In general, I think many marketers are optimizing for the wrong type of conversions (micro-conversions) because it’s easier and you can see bigger uplifts.

So for example, if you send a bunch of people an email promising them free beer and pizza, you’ll probably get a sky high open rate and quite a lot of clicks. But then when they hit your landing page and find out you only sell socks, be prepared for a massive bounce rate—and lots of burned trust resulting in an eroded brand reputation. That’s why landing page optimization is such a large part of email marketing—if you maintain message match and keep the conversion scent through the funnel, the results are generally better at every stage.

Don’t get me wrong, measure micro-conversions. They can provide tons of insights. But play the long game and optimize for the macro-conversions. In other words, keep your eye on the sales, not the clicks.

STEVE LINNEY, FOUNDER OF EMRKTNG, SAYS:

A conversion is simply an action taking place on your landing page—or any other area of your website—that triggers an outcome you want to track. You define what the conversion is you are looking to measure, such as a new subscriber or a purchase.

For me, conversions don’t take place within the email, but on the website. However, website conversion rate is only one part of the story and you need to make sure that all parts of your email marketing funnel are rocking:

• Targeting your audience | measurement: send number
• Subject line | measurement: open rate
• Quality of message and offering | measurement: click-through rate
• Potential customers on your website | measurement: visitor numbers
• Visitors don’t like what they see and leave | measurement: bounce rate
• Visitors do what you want them to | measurement: conversion rate

A/B testing, refining, and tweaking should be always be happening to ensure you have the best user experience and offering you can possibly give. Keep in mind that testing is never ending as there is always something you can improve to ensure you give the customer the experience they are looking for and you stay ahead of the competition.

ERIN KING, SR. EMAIL MARKETING MANAGER AT LITMUS, SAYS:

Marketers often wrestle with determining the value of conversions if they’re not tied to sales, which can lead to the thinking that if a campaign isn’t making money directly and immediately, it’s a failure. The thing about conversions, for any channel, is that they don’t always have to happen immediately, and they don’t always have to follow a straight line.

Basically, an email conversion can be defined as when a subscriber takes the path you point them toward in your message. For example, if your email promotes an event, a click through to the registration page is progress, but a completed registration is a conversion. If you’re sending a monthly newsletter with links to your blog content, the conversion can be measured by how many of the featured posts are read, or how long your subscribers spend on the blog post-click.

Some emails lend themselves to direct conversions (I promote a product, you buy it). But there’s also value in “indirect” conversions, where your email inspires some other interaction with your site or product.

For example, say I send an email promoting a report download. My subscriber opens the email—and then does nothing. But my email reminds them that there’s other content on my blog that they want to check out. Later on, they visit and read some posts, see a promotion for a weekly email they’re interested in, and decide to sign up for it. Is this conversion the one that the original email intended? No, but the email was still the catalyst that started the subscriber down the path to signing up for a new email list, so it’s an indirect conversion.

APRIL MULLEN, SR. MARKETING STRATEGIST AT SELLIGENT, SAYS:

Very simply, an email conversion is when a desired action takes place as a result of a customer receiving an email from your brand. Many marketers, though, consider an email conversion taking place when email is attributed as the source after a customer makes a purchase or some other action such as registering for a webinar or signing up for a contest. That view is fairly myopic, though. Email is so much more than the final conversion event. It has a critical hand in the revenue-driving process by moving your customers down the funnel toward the website through a series of micro-conversions.

What’s a micro-conversion, you ask? They are all the smaller, desired actions that your customers go through to reach the end goal you had in mind for the campaign. Everything from delivered, opened, clicked, etc. should be considered as conversion events or micro-conversions that all have a hand in a campaign’s success.

In fact, if we really consider where the sale/registration/contest entry takes place, which is on a website, then email’s ultimate conversion event is really a click that passes a customer on to the website. I believe email’s ultimate goal is to sell a click because email isn’t actually the place where the final conversion event takes place (that is, unless you are one of those exceptionally innovative brands that has figured out a good experience to sell right from email without driving customers to your website).

The next time you see an email campaign that has incredible click-throughs, but low conversions, don’t blame email. Unless it over-promised something that the website couldn’t deliver, the email did its job.

JOHN CALDWELL, PRESIDENT OF RED PILL EMAIL, SAYS:

Broadly speaking, conversion means any desired, measurable action taken by prospects and/or customers, irrespective of channel. That was the definition of conversion in pre-internet direct marketing. It’s the broad definition of conversion in email, as well.

A conversion doesn’t always involve money changing hands. A conversion can be filling out a form or downloading a report. This is especially true with high-consideration, high-ticket, long-sales-cycle purchases, such as the business-to-business prospecting that marketing-services providers typically engage in. However, for some organizations, conversion always means a sale. Those are called conversions to sale.

Whether or not conversions involve immediate sales, it is important to measure the value of those conversions on a rolling monthly and quarterly basis. Measure the number of sales that result from the period’s conversions and divide the number of sales by the number of conversions to get the conversion-to-sale percentage.

But remember, any of these desired actions cannot be considered conversions unless they’re a result of some action taken by the organization. You want to be able to accurately gauge your marketing efforts without artificially inflating them with serendipitous leads and sales.

THE RISK OF CONVERSION INFLATION

Our experts make great points and the distinctions they make are valuable ones. But at the same time, it’s easy to see how confusion can arise and conversion inflation can occur.

The risk is that email marketing programs become out of alignment with business goals and objectives so that you may have a “successful” email program that doesn’t contribute to the success of the business. While the conversions associated with a campaign or email can vary from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, the conversions that business leaders talk about and care about exist primarily at the bottom of the funnel.

The easiest way to avoid fuzzy metrics, definition creep, and false equivalencies is to keep track of campaign goals and metrics, but then also translate those results so they match up with the business’s goals and metrics. Keeping your email-centric metrics separate and distinct from your business-centric metrics will ensure that your email marketing will be a success in the eyes of your business’s leaders.

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The Complete Guide to Email Automation for Beginners

If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably heard of email marketing automation.

Email marketing automation is an essential part of building a profitable email list for any online business.

In this article I’ll try to cover some important points:

1. How does email automation work? 
2. What type of events trigger automation? 
3. The main terms you need to know before getting started 
4. Email marketing automation tools 

If you are unsure of everything email automation can do for you, then read on…

How does email automation work?

With email automation, when an event happens, an email is triggered (automatically sent). The email is sent from your email marketing tool or from your marketing automation tool.

The relevance of the email, and its timing is important. With a bit of smart automation, you can send the right email at the right time and to the right person, with information that is relevant to them, based on the actions they take on your website.

Another important thing is cleaning your email list. By doing so, you know that the email addresses are real and still active. Read more about how to clean your email list here.

What type of events trigger an automation

Below are some simple examples to understand what I am talking about:

• Email after someone signs up to your email list 
• Email when a website visitor is a previous subscriber – When someone is an email subscriber and visits your website, some email marketing tools can track which pages they have visited on your website and then trigger an email based on this. 
• Survey response – You sent an email to your subscribers and asked them if they were interested in a product. Based on their answer, a different email (or series of emails) is automatically sent. 
• Cart abandonment email – If you collect the email address of the person during the sales process – or if you already have the email address as the customer is an existing subscriber – you can follow up via email to encourage them to come back. 

Did you know that the average cart abandonment rate for e-commerce providers is over 60%. More than half of shoppers abandon their purchase after adding products to their cart.

What are the main terms you need to know before you start with email automation?

Before you get started with email automation, you need to get familiar with some of the most used terms of email marketing:

• Opt-in/Subscribe – when someone opts in to receive emails from you 
• Double opt-in – when someone opts in to receive emails from you and they need to confirm their opt-in 
• Spam – when someone doesn’t opt-in and you send them emails, or when someone does optin and you overdo it 
• Unsubscribe – when someone unsubscribes from your email list 
• Trigger – describes an event that causes something to happen (an email is sent) 
• Sequence – the sequence of emails that are sent after an event happens 
• Email campaign/Autoresponder – a series of emails that are sent for a specific event 
• Bounce rate – the rate at which emails are not delivered. A soft bounce is temporary, but a hard bounce is permanent and means that your message can never be delivered to that email address. 
• CTR – stands for Click-Through-Rate and is the number of times people click on links within an email 

Email marketing automation tools

The main difference between an email automation tool and a basic email marketing tool, is the functionality and the price. An email marketing tool is used for sending regular emails such as newsletters. With a marketing automation tool you can build automation around those emails.

Some features of a marketing automation tool are:

• email sequence builder 
• landing page builder 
• analytics 
• program management – manage marketing campaigns across multiple channels 
• online behavior tracking – email subscribers visiting your website 
• and more. 

If you’re looking for a marketing automation tool, you have a large variety to choose from.

Here are some popular examples: 

• ConvertKit – designed specifically for bloggers 
• GetResponse – growing functionality, but not as powerful as some of the other tools below 
• InfusionSoft – complex to use but very powerful 
• Ontraport – doesn’t integrate with as many products as InfusionSoft does 
• HubSpot – very useful and comprehensive tool, but the price will be higher compared to the other two 

What are the steps for building an email automation sequence

For any sequence that you want to build, the required steps will be similar.

1. Find out who you want to attract

Start by analyzing the customers who have bought from you in the past and try to figure out what are the characteristics and interests of your customers.

2. Do some research about the issues of your existing customers/audience

The next step is to do some research and find out the issues your customers/audience encounter while using your services/product. Doing that will help you come up with an incentive for people to subscribe to your services/product.

3. Use the info collected and create your incentive

Use the information from the above steps to create a buzz around that topic. You could also create a guide as a solution or use the info in your opt-in message. This will get people to sign up and then all you have to do is to offer them a free trial of your product.

4. Direct people to make the action you want them to make

You need to create some sort of a “map”, to think in advance. First you have a welcome email, then some follow-up emails with links to the guide created in the step above. After that, what should they do?
They could become a customer, so you must move them to a customer list
If they don’t become customers, you can move them to a newsletter list

A tool you can use for that is Lucidcharts.

5. Create your emails

When you’re creating the emails, think about the relationship you want to build with the subscriber. Make them feel welcome, as part of the community, tell them about yourself and deliver your promises (free trial, a guide, etc.).

With every email you send, make sure that you are building a relationship as well as providing quality content.

6. Create the sequence in the email automation tool

You will need to create a sequence, add emails to that sequence and then specify when the emails will be sent.

An example:
Welcome email – send immediately
Email no.2 – 2 days later
Email no.3 – 4 days later
Free trial/discount offer – 5 days later
Offer reminder – 6 days later
Add them to a customer list if they bought, or to a newsletter list if they didn’t

*days are counted after the welcome email is sent

Note: Your series of emails will be different depending on the type of service you provide and who you are targeting.

7. Deploy your opt-ins and segment your audience

Now you can setup the opt-ins on your site. Depending on the marketing tool you use, you might have the functionality and opt-ins required, but it’s always better to use a specialized tool.

OptinMonster has some smart functionalities and it also provides multiple ways to collect opt-ins.

Some examples of OptinMonster functionalities:
opt-ins based on your blog categories; this means that you can segment people based on where they opted in.
different opt-ins based on the page they visit
different opt-in based on their location
different opt-in based on their actions (abandon the cart or product purchase)
A/B testing for different opt-ins

8. Drive traffic to the opt-ins

Now that everything is in place, it’s time to drive some traffic to the opt-ins. This could be organic traffic, referrals from other sites, paid traffic from Google, Bing, Facebook Ads, etc.

9. Analyze and optimize your results

Measure what works and optimize it. To improve your opt-in rate you can change the words, the opt-in style or the incentive.

The same thing is available for your email sequence: if you notice that people are not opening your emails, you can test different subject lines. Keep in mind that the way you communicate with your new email subscribers needs to be completely different to the way you communicate with existing customers. You will need to split these two out.
Wrap

Successfully segmenting your email list guarantees that messages are landing in the right inbox at the right time.

You can educate. You can connect. You can sell.

Remember, the number one rule of email marketing automation is to keep your users’ experience as your top priority, so think outside of the (in)box!

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Email Opt-In: Make it a Double, Or Not?

 When building your email marketing list it’s always tempting to take short cuts, hey running a business takes a lot of time, we get that. But, using an email opt-in form to help grow your list is a no-brainer; for your list and your biz. But it raises the question: Should I require double opt-in or single? There are benefits to both, of course, so let’s examine the facts.

Single opt-in – This option is preferred by many because it removes barriers to allow folks to sign-up and grow your list quickly. To single opt-in, the person just enters their email address and they are added to your list your list. Growing your list is faster, you don’t have to wait for someone to confirm, and you don’t have to deal with those who haven’t. The drawback with single opt-in is that you may end up with a list that has some junk in it. Since email addresses aren’t verified, there’s bound to be some typos that get through, and the potential for spammy or bad addresses increases. Also, without email verification someone could be added to your list without their consent, and you get spam complaints. Single opt-in lists tends to have higher bounce and unsubscribe rates, as well as higher spam complaints. Proceed with caution.

Double opt-in – This option provides you a more accurate list because when the person signs up for your list, they must verify their email address twice, once at sign up and once via a link sent to their email address. This helps to keep your list clean, bounces are lower since typos are usually caught, and keeps SPAM complaints lower since you know these folks want to hear from you.  Yes, it may take a bit more time and effort to grow your list, but it will be more accurate. And, if you’ve got some stragglers, who haven’t finished the double opt-in process, you can send them a reminder email with a link to verify. Because you know your subscribers have asked to be on your list, you should have better engagement when you mail to a double opt-in list, including opens and clicks. Win!

How do you build your email list? Do you roll with single or double opt-in. Tell us why in the comments.

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What Is a Content Library? Plus Answers to 9 More Questions about This Innovative Lead Gen Approach

In May 2013, a small company with fewer than 40 unusual employees made a historic lead generation move that resulted in stunning lead generation results. (I stress “unusual” in a good way.)
The company with those odd employees, of course, was Copyblogger Media (now known as Rainmaker Digital). The story of what happened follows.

The historic move:
Up until that point, Copyblogger had been offering an email newsletter to attract and capture email subscribers. Pretty standard in the online business world.

We wanted to up the ante.

So we launched My.Copyblogger.com — a free membership site, where people sign up to access (at the time) 15 free ebooks and a 20-part email course.

Think of a content library as a password-protected source of premium content that you can access once you register with your email address.

That’s essentially what a “content library” looks like. But how did it perform? Let’s look at the results to see.

The historic results:
According to the case study by Marketing Sherpa,

• Through the first seven weeks, the free subscription page averaged a 67 percent conversion rate.
• The first week’s growth was 300 percent bigger than the best week of growth for Internet Marketing for Smart People (a previous Copyblogger 20-part email course) — closer to 400 percent, if you include new paid subscribers.
• The most visited page on Copyblogger at the time was behind the paywall — with almost a third of all traffic logging in after arrival.

Those are some substantial results, particularly in such a competitive space as content marketing.

Now, I can’t promise you the exact same outcome, but I can promise you that a content library will, at the very least, increase the number of subscribers you capture.

The key, as always, is to build trust first by providing a ton of value before asking for anything in return.

If that concept is new to you, then you can review how to build the know-like-trust factor.

In the meantime, let’s dig a little deeper into the common questions surrounding lead generating content libraries.

1. What’s a “content library?”

You’ll hear sales and marketing people refer to a content library as a bank of all the content assets owned by a company that is placed in a central, internal portal so other departments within that company can access that content.

That’s not what we are talking about here.

Yes, a content library is a bank of content, but in the way we will be using the phrase, it is full of resources that your audience can access once they register with an email address.

In other words, the public can access these resources, which makes this type of content library a lead generation tool.

2. What type of content goes into a content library?

You could include:

• Ebooks
• Videos
• Webinars
• Audio seminars
• Podcast episodes
• White papers
• Infographics
• Tutorials
• Data and analysis reports

And more.

The trick is to offer enough value that prospects view signing up for your content library as a no-brainer — an insane bargain.

See Question 5 for some examples of ways you could structure your content library.

3. What makes a content library better than a conventional email newsletter?

When you offer more resources for the same price (in this case, an email address), you are naturally going to get better results.

Our case study is one such example.

With a content library, you are likely to elevate more of your visitors into an ongoing relationship — in other words, a content library will help you convert more prospects into solid leads.

But not just any type of lead.

See, the main difference between a typical email newsletter and a content library offer is that with the content library, you can now identify your site visitors, which ultimately helps you convert more leads into sales.

Let me explain.

4. What’s the difference between an email sign up and website registration?

In both cases, it’s true that the prospect gives you an email address. With a sign-up, you have permission to send that person email — namely, your email newsletter or latest published blog posts.

With a content library registration, you give your prospect access to a site — access to exclusive resources like ebooks, videos, webinars, forums, and more.

In the first situation, the content marketer is throwing stuff at the prospect. In the second, the content marketer is inviting you to his place — which is loaded with useful resources.

And like I said before, when people visit your site as signed-in members, you can customize your promotional messages, which leads to higher conversions.

5. How many resources should you put into a content library?

There isn’t a hard-and-fast rule.

However, you need to include more than one piece of content. Don’t forget: you are trying to create a sense of great value.

For example, a content library with two, five-page ebooks is not going to suggest high value. But four 50-page ebooks and seven 30-minute training videos, however, will suggest high value.

Here’s another way you could structure your content library:

• 30 exclusive podcast episodes
• 10 articles
• 3 worksheets

As you can see, the numbers of ways you can structure your content library is limitless. Which leads us to our next question.

6. Do I give access to all the content at once?

The short answer is to start by giving away a large amount of content to create a sense of high value.
The ebooks in the original My.Copyblogger content library ranged between 31 and 142 pages — and there were 15 ebooks, plus a 20-part email course.

However, you can start small and build as time goes on.

For example, make the promise of adding more content once a month (or the frequency that works for you).

That strategy has a number of benefits.

It brings all those members back to your site every time you release a new piece of exclusive content.

In other words, you don’t need all the resources in place before you launch.

If you only have four ebooks and two podcast episodes, you can launch with that offer. But as you add more resources, don’t forget to update your content library’s promotional copy and alert your members.

7. How do I get people to my content library?

If you already have an email list in place, then promote your content library to that list.

With My.Copyblogger, an announcement was sent out to our general email list, and because there were 15 ebooks, there were 15 unique email promotions sent out, each one customized to that particular topic.

We sent out one of these emails a week, usually on a Friday.

Depending on the number of resources you have, your campaign might end up lasting two or three months.

Before sending each email, suppress the email addresses of people who have already registered, so those members of your community aren’t annoyed by seeing the same pitch multiple times.

If you don’t have a list (or want to continue promoting the content library after you’ve finished the campaign to your email list), the next step is to create high-quality, tutorial-type blog content that leads to a promotion of the content library.

Once people are on your site because of this high-quality, tutorial-type blog content, give them an opportunity to register.

Here are four useful ideas:

• Include a footer at the end of each blog post that encourages visitors to register for your content library.
• Add a sidebar that appears on every page of your website.
• Create feature boxes that appear in the header of your website.
• Use pop-overs and pop-ups (yes, there is a difference).

Learn more about these strategies in Beth Hayden’s article, 4 Quick Solutions that Spawn Radical Email List Growth.

8. Won’t content that requires a registration hurt SEO efforts?

No.

True, the content behind the registration wall won’t get crawled or indexed by Google (or any search engine for that matter).

However, search “copywriting” on Google and you’ll see that Copyblogger ranks at the top of the first page of search results. The rest of the topics in our content library are also on the first page of Google for terms like “content marketing,” “landing pages,” and “SEO copywriting.”

And every single one of those pages is what we call a cornerstone content page — which drives social and search traffic to register for the content library on My.Copyblogger. 

9. Do I have to call it a “content library?”

Nope.

You can call it whatever you want to call it.

Here are my ideas for different industries like health, fashion, and cooking:

• The Cross-Fit Foundation
• 8 Beautiful Wardrobe Basics
• Your Wok Recipe Essentials

It’s a good idea to mention in the description copy that this is a library of resources — and be very specific about what is in it.

You want to give your prospect the sense that there are some really juicy resources behind that registration wall.

10. Does this mean I’m starting a membership site?!?!

I added all those question marks and exclamation points because what most people say immediately after asking that question is … I’m not ready for that!

You get a real sense they are scared out of their wits.

If that’s you, relax, because registering people as members doesn’t mean you’re suddenly running a full-fledged membership site.

It just means people are joining your community.

However, if you achieve critical membership mass, a nice touch to your content library would be to offer a simple forum where your members could chat, share ideas, and ask you questions.

Our Rainmaker Platform enables someone who is dumber than a bag of bricks when it comes to coding (like me) to set up a password-protected content library — plus a forum — by simply grunting and pointing (like I do).

In the end, what really matters is that members of your community — even if what you offer them is free — benefit from content that’s tailored to their customer journeys.


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5 Gmail Tools For Engaging with Subscribers

 Engaging with subscribers can be daunting. Do you invite your email subscribers to reply to your email campaigns, blasts, and newsletters? If so, you can get the most out of those replies by routing them through Gmail. Then using the following four tools to create a great follow up experience.

1. Rapportive – Know Who You Are Talking To

It’s impossible to know every one of your subscribers personally. But thanks toRapportive, a free tool for Gmail, powered by LinkedIn, you can get to know some of them before you start a conversation. When an email subscriber replies to one of your emails. This tool will see if their email address matches a profile on LinkedIn. If it does, it will give you the following information.

You can use this to get to know your subscriber right from the start. It’s great for sales profiling, as you can pinpoint your email subscribers pain points and needs and include them in your first reply to them.

2. Yesware – Know When Subscribers Engage With You

When you reply to someone, do you wish you knew when they read your reply, when they clicked on your links? How about how often they opened your email, and so on? If so, Yesware is the solution. This tool, which works with Gmail and other email services, offers a host of features, including the ability to see how your email subscriber interacts with your reply to their email.

This means no more guessing. No more sending a “Did you get my last email?” email. No more sending a “Did you read that report I sent you?” email. You’ll know what they did, when they did it, and based on that information, what your next response should be.

3. Boomerang – So You Don’t Forget

Whether your inbox doubles as a to-do list or you simply don’t want to forget to follow up with a specific email subscriber. Boomerang is a great tool to use. It will allow you to send an email while simultaneously setting an option to send the email back to your inbox if you don’t receive a response, if the email is never opened, if the email is never clicked upon, or regardless of what happens.

It’s simple, yet effective when it comes to making sure that your most important email conversations don’t just fade into the nothing.

4. Canned Responses – So You Can Stop Rewriting the Same Thing

When email subscribers reply to your emails, do you find yourself responding with the same thing over and over again? If so, Gmail has a feature in their labs that will help you out. It’s called Canned Responses. You can activate it by going to your Gmail Settings, clicking on Labs, searching for Canned Responses, and then enabling them.

The next time you find yourself writing a common response to an email subscriber. (or anyone, for that matter) You can save it as a Canned Response using the options in the dropdown menu at the bottom right of your email composer.

Just be sure to change any personal items (like names, websites, phone numbers, etc.) as needed in subsequent emails.

5. Advanced Search – Just Like on Google, but in Your Inbox

The best reason to use Gmail is for its Advanced Search capabilities. You can refer to this full list of advanced search operators for Gmail for all of the search options you can use to find specific emails from specific subscribers for specific reasons.

This will allow you to do things like dive deep into conversations you had with an email subscriber. That eventually turned into a customer several years down the road. They will be extremely impressed that you remembered them from the first time they contacted you with a simple question that you just happened to find with an advanced search query.

What tools do you use to make responding to email subscribers more productive and beneficial? Please share in the comments!

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Why a Sign up Form Is a No-Brainer for Email List Growth

 A list of contacts is essential for any business that wants to stay in touch with prospects and customers. That list also shouldn’t be set in stone. It should always be evolving thanks to adding new subscribers, attrition through unsubscribes, and email address abandonment.

In order to fuel continued and sustained list growth it’s a no-brainer to have an email sign up form on your website, blog, and other digital properties like social media sites. By providing visitors a quick, easy, and efficient way to sign up for your email list, you can proactively grow your list around the clock. Having a solid email list is important because every dollar spent on email marketing generates $38 in ROI.

In addition, companies of all sizes count on email marketing for its many benefits including its positive impact on revenue. In a survey of more than 350 marketers done by The Relevancy Group for its report “The Relevancy Ring: ESP Buyers Guide 2015,” 37 percent of marketers attribute 20 percent of their revenue to email marketing.

So, if you’re not using an email sign up form, you should make it a number one priority to do so. VerticalResponse provides sign up forms for free with every free or paid account. Plus, we have a list of the top six places you should feature your sign up form in order to grow your list, and a post chock-full of real-life examples of effective sign up forms for B2B, B2C, and nonprofits.

If you’re using an email sign up form for the first time, or you’ve been using one forever (good for you!), make sure you follow these three rules:

3 Golden Rule for Sign Up Forms

1. Don’t hide it:

Don’t make people hunt for your sign up form. If someone wants to subscribe to your newsletter or email list, put it front and center on your homepage (or across all the pages of your site) so it’s easy to find and fill out. Some of the most effective sign up form real estate on your website will be the top right corner or across the top of the page. Also very useful (and very popular across the web) are sign up lightboxes that appear on webpages. Take a look at retailer CB2’s as an example:

2. Explain the benefit:

Provide some context and the benefit that a potential subscriber will get for handing over their email address. The last thing anyone wants is more email in their inbox, especially if it’s not going to have something in it for them. Tell them exactly what you’ll deliver and why they should care. For example, “Be the first to know about limited-time sales, find out about special guests, etc.” The CB2 example above is a perfect illustration of this. What CB2 doesn’t include, but which you may want to, is the frequency that your subscriber will hear from you. Will you mail once a week or once a month or daily? Tell them like we do in our VerticalResponse newsletter sign up form.

3. Stick to the basics: 

You might be tempted to collect heaps of information on your sign up form to aid in the personalization of your emails, but try to resist this temptation. Stick to the basics like first name and email address. The more fields you add, the less likely someone is to fill it out, so only ask for what you need.

These no-brainer email sign up form tips and examples will help you grow your email list easily and efficiently. Here’s one last idea: Don’t forget the power of old-fashioned pen and paper in your place of business. Sign up sheets are incredibly tempting for customers to fill out, especially after you’ve wowed them with your exceptional products and services.

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