The Beginner’s Guide to Solo Ads (Solo Ads 101 is now in session!)

IN the online marketing world, it seems like there are endless opportunities to market you or your business.

Marketing opportunities like pay-per-click (PPC), native advertising, search engine optimisation or display advertising are among the most common.

But have you heard about solo email ads?

Solo email ads can be a great addition to your advertising portfolio.

Not sure what solo email ads are?

No worries, we’ll cover some of the important basics for you.

What Are Solo Email Ads?

A quick list or solo email ad is a one-time email blast sent on behalf of another party to their own email list, typically for a fee. Typically this is a flat-fee or performance based.

The ‘quick list’ component actually refers to a list that has already been built, but by someone else. This is not the same as purchasing an email list where you do get the email and contact information of people.

The list being emailed to is created, owned and maintained by the person or company you are paying. You do not have access to their list as the email is sent by the person or company who owns it.

You will typically provide the sender with the copy you want to appear in the email. In some cases, the sender may choose to edit your copy or write their own.

Now that we are on the same page of what solo ads are, let’s dive into some details.

Should You Buy Solo Ads?

The first thing you need to do is ask yourself, “Should I buy solo ads?”

While emailing thousands and thousands of people might sound good on the surface, there are some key questions you need to ask yourself.

Questions like:

• How responsive is the list? Has the list owner blasted it too many times and now it has dismal open rates?
• Does the list contain prospects of your ideal target audience? If the list is not targeted or related to your audience, chances are they won’t be interested in what your email has to say.
• Do you have proper tracking in place? You need to be setup to track these initiatives to know if you are getting what you are paying.
• What does my return on investment need to be in order to make this worth it? You’ll need to know what goals need to be met in order to make sure you are not going to lose more than you invest.

While there are certainly additional questions that might be specific to your situation, I’ve found that these are among the most critical that must always be answered.

Solo Ad List Responsiveness

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the importance of the solo ad list and their engagement.

Most solo ads will just tell you how many people are in their list in that they like to “wow” you with the potential to reach such a large audience.

While the size of the list is important to an extent, what’s more, important is how active the list is with the emails they get.

If you are purchasing solo ads from a person who blasts emails every day for anything and everything, chances are there will be a low engagement within that list.

So out of the thousands of people in that list, only a small percentage will be paying attention to any email coming from that sender. In reality, you aren’t going to be reaching thousands of people – just a fraction of what was promised.

If possible, ask the sender about their typical open rates.

Of course, it is not always the responsibility of the sender to generate opens since subject lines play a huge role in this. In fact, 33% of people say that subject lines determine whether or not they will open an email.

Finding the Right Audience For Solo Ads

While it is definitely important to find solo ads with an engaging audience, it’s more important to make sure you are messaging the right audience.

Think about this, would you talk about the top backyard landscaping tips to people who are apartment owners?

Probably not since they won’t have much use for this information since they don’t have a yard.

So with solo ads, you need to know not only your target audience but the audience of the list you will be emailing.

Most reputable solo ad providers can give you a good idea of the demographics of their list.

If a provider can’t give you these details, I recommend finding someone else to buy solo ads from.

Once you have identified a list that has your ideal audience on it, you need to evaluate if it will be worth your time and money.

Setting Up Your Solo Ads For Success

In the digital marketing world, everything needs to be tracked. This includes your solo ads.

Some solo ad providers will supply you with their own data, but it is important for you to track the data yourself.

This can easily be done with Google Analytics.

The ideal way to do this is by using UTM parameters in your URLs of the solo ads. UTM parameters work in Google Analytics and are essentially tags that can get passed to your analytics account with some detailed information.

For example, your URL might look something like this:

• www.yoursite.com/sales-page?utm_source=solo-ad&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=website-you-bought-the-ad-from

There are 3 required fields when using UTM parameters:

• utm_source – this is used to identify the source of the traffic
• utm_medium – this is the medium that the link was on (email, CPC, etc.)
• utm_campaign – this is used to label the campaign the link was marketed in (in this case, it could be the website you purchased the solo ad from)

When using UTM parameters, keep in mind they are case sensitive – so be sure to be consistent with your naming conventions.

You’ll want to use these URLs in your solo ad campaigns and then be able to tie your initiatives back to sales. Of course, you will want to be sure to have goal tracking setup as well in Google Analytics.

Having proper tracking installed will help you know if solo ads are worth it for your business.

It’s important to stay on top of your metrics, especially after you participate in a solo email.

Know Your Break-even Point With Solo Ads

With any investment you make with your business, you should always know what your expected return on investment is. You probably don’t want to spend more money than you will make – that’s typically not the best way to run a business.

Let’s say you found a solo ad with 1,000 emails and it is going to cost you $1,000.

This means that you will be spending $1 for every email that goes out.

Now, take the low-end worst case scenario expected a conversion rate of 1/2%. So this means you would expect 5 sales from this list of 1,000 emails.

With your $1000 investment, this would lead to a cost of $200 per sale. Therefore, at a minimum, you would need to have a product or service that will bring in at least $200 per sale to break-even.

If your typical sale is $500, then this particular list would be worth a potential investment.

However, if your typical sale is $50 then this would not be a good list in that you will be losing money.

But if you are confident that you can write a compelling email subject line and engaging content that will drive people to your website in order to purchase you can increase your expected conversion rate and re-run the numbers.

Over time, you will be able to have a good idea of what your typical conversion rate is and make more educated decisions when exploring solo ad opportunities.

You may find that your solo ads initiatives are driving a 2% conversion rate which would mean you would only need to make a minimum of $50 per sale to break even. But if you are selling a $200 offering, with a 2% conversion rate you could net $4000 in sales. Subtract out your $1000 investment and you would be left with a $3000 profit.

Ca-ching!

When you can get efficient with solo ads, it’s like printing money. Just be sure you have a tool in place to evaluate the return on your investment.

Knowing Solo Ad Basics Can Go A Long Way

Understanding the core basics of solo ads can help you be smarter to your approach. When you know what to look for, how to track it, and how to evaluate your return you can make smart business decisions.

Look, there are many shady providers of solo ads out there – but there are some really great ones.

Knowing the basics can help you weed through the garbage and find the right provider for your solo ads.

While there are not any guarantees around using solo ads, by asking the right questions and implementing proper tracking you can put yourself in a better position to make the right decisions.

Interested in using solo ads? Great!

Looking for a way to track their effectiveness before you get started? Well, kudos to you for being so business savvy.

Knowing how well solo ads perform financially is important and ClickPerfect provides the insight you’ll need to evaluate your success. This simple tool will help you learn more about the benefit of sending to a solo ad list as well as overall customer responsiveness.

Happy sending!

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3 Ways to Sell On Social You Aren't Using Yet

When most emerging e-commerce brands turn to digital marketing to increase sales, many think of SEO, display advertising, and paid search. If you’re one of those companies, then not only are you leaving money on the table by not testing less expensive options, but you are missing a wave of new consumers that are not yet ad blind on those next new things.

Here are three ways to sell on social media that you aren't using yet:

1. AI customer support chat bot.

The promise of AI is finally here, at least as far as sales support is concerned. What’s worse than a potentially interested customer reaching out to you at 1 am with credit card in hand, only to lose interest when the support team finally gets around to answering questions at 2 pm the following day?

With the emergence of tools like Thezboy, customers can be captured at a higher rate since support is instantaneous and can be designed to carry a prospect from basic question and answering, directly into an order, all within the confines of the Facebook support channel on messenger.

Further, with AI customer support where bots employ machine learning and understand word variance, the support actually gets better over time as it begins to predict next possible questions and provides suggestions to management on everyday items to address that would negate the need to use support at all.

Thus, not only is AI expected to initially augment and then eventually replace the majority of support tickets that occur on the internet, but also the basic ping-pong conversations that take place between prospects and most customer service desk-centric sales departments. The future is very bright here, both from a sales perspective and labour cost savings.

Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business

2.  Peer-level influencer marketing.

When social media first started its ascension into our hearts and minds, as a business community, we were quick to latch on, even though there was little way to relate activity performed on social to sales made offline. In time, however, tracking has become more sophisticated, and it is now possible to equate the slightest activities to downstream outcomes via Google Analytics, UTM tracking, specialised coupon codes, and custom phone numbers.

With those expanded tools, another boom started: word-of-mouth marketing presently referred to as influencer marketing. When most people think of influencer marketing, they might think of Kim Kardashian, or perhaps me, and Tyra Banks? There’s a lot more to it than that.

Peer-level influence as exemplified by services like Intellifluence is specific and more personal. Are you more likely to trust the recommendation of a reality TV show celebrity selling running shoes or your friend that runs a marathon every weekend? Even though your friend almost certainly has a smaller audience, you know her to be authoritative and knowledgeable on that subject, and thus more likely to trust her opinion vs. someone probably being paid millions to endorse the product-of-the-week.

Now that tracking allows brands to very quickly and easily utilise thousands of smaller individuals in the same way that they might have previously employed an untargeted display ad campaign, and iterate faster on which influencers are producing an ROI for the campaign, it is no wonder that this concept is the breakout marketing practice of 2017.

Related: Influencers vs. Ambassadors vs. Advocates: Stop the Confusion!

3. Psychographic ad targeting.

Psychographic segmentation, as a practice, is rapidly becoming a staple both by major brands and political pundits alike. The concept is by segmenting users by their stated or implied activities, interests, and opinions (AIOs), along with values they hold, behaviours they exhibit, and general attitudes, one can develop a significantly more targeted ad campaign. Companies like Aimclear explain how psychographics are expected to eat the traditional display ad budget by showing how much of typical display ad spend is wasted attempting to reach the wrong people and how much less can be spent with Facebook’s detailed behaviour targeting.

I wanted to mention psychographics last because as a targeting and segmentation practice, it can also be used to define the approach on the AI customer support chat bots. Imagine the power of being able to customise a support bot based on past chat behaviours and sentiment so as to more ideally mirror the prospects’ values within the support channel. Reaching common ground is a common sales technique, but has never been automated in such a way before.

Related: The 6 Best Advertising Strategies For Small Business

Finally, psychographics can also play a significant role in peer-level influencer marketing. The more nuanced and better understanding of a buyer persona, the more targeted an influence campaign can be, selecting those individuals that closest match your intended buyers. Now, imagine running such a campaign and using the chat bot to close the sale for you. Wow.

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