Back-to-Basics: 5 Email Marketing Fundamentals You Should Revisit

While summer may be in full swing in the Northern Hemisphere, back-to-school and the back-half of the year will be here before you know it. Before you ramp up your emails, there are some key email marketing fundamentals you should revisit:

1. Always keep a goal in mind
There are several reasons to send email: To share news, build loyalty, educate, invite people to events, drive traffic to your site, sell your product or service, etc. But what is your specific purpose?

Before you create an email, think about the outcome you want. Are you trying to grow your business or email list? Sell a product or get more donations?

Have a goal in mind and tailor your email’s information and call-to-action to that idea or plan. Are you trying to establish yourself or brand as an industry expert? Send a frequent email newsletter with educational information, tips, how-tos, and industry news. There are many types of emails you can send; keep them all on track to your specific goal.

2. Follow these basic email tips

• Mail regularly – You want your email subscribers to think of your business when they need the product or service you offer, so remind them of your presence with email. Mail at the least, once per month.
• Send what you promised at sign-up. If subscribers signed up for tips and tactics delivered twice a week, that’s what you should deliver. Part of keeping your email readers engaged is sending the information they actually wanted.
• Use images and links – Always include a mix of images and text, and include links back to your website, products or services.
• Make it readable – At every step of the email creation process, think of your readers. Use a sans serif (no curlicues or swishes on the letters) font such as Verdana, Arial or Times New Roman in black or dark grey for easy reading.
• Include a postal address and unsubscribe link – A postal address and unsubscribe link is required by CAN-SPAM.

3. Understand delivery
Getting your email to your subscriber’s inbox is important – if it ends up in a SPAM folder, all that hard work you put into it won’t be seen by anyone. Do you understand the basics of email delivery, and more importantly, how you can affect it?

Most business emails are made up of HTML; there’s usually a template involved, which includes images and links. HTML emails are multi-part MIME, which means there’s the nice HTML version, and a just-in-case backup that’s only text. If you’re using an email service provider, like VerticalResponse, you don’t need to think about this, we take care of it for you. Once you’ve created your email and hit send, the email moves through the Internet ether and through a number of authentication gates until it gets to your reader’s ISP (internet service provider). This is where your email gets a thumbs up (or down) and then moves on to your reader’s inbox, hopefully. The ISP gate is where the content of your email in part determines where your email will end up. Working with an ESP like VerticalResponse helps your email get to this gate; we make sure all the tech stuff you need is there, but you need to make sure the content is relevant and valuable. A few things to keep in mind when creating your email to ensure top-notch delivery:

• Have a good balance of text and images, and make sure your important information is listed in the text just in case images are blocked.
• Use links in your emails, but make sure you only link to trusted sites. Bad links can cause delivery issues.
• Keep your HTML code clean, or use a pre-designed template from your ESP.
• Send what you promised at sign up to keep your readers engaged. ISPs look at many things, and engagement is part of that.
• Mail only to people who have requested your emails.

For more help and information on email delivery, here’s our free guide To the Inbox and Beyond – The Ultimate Guide to Email Delivery.

4. Build quality lists
The better quality your email lists are, the more likely your email will get delivered. Only use “opted in” email addresses for your marketing – Those who have agreed to receive emails from you. You’ll see higher engagement, better inbox placement and fewer unsubscribes and spam complaints. Once you’ve been mailing for a while, segment your lists. Never consider buying a list – It goes against the rules for most ESPs and spam laws, plus it’s not the best way to start a relationship with your potential customers. Slow and steady list growth wins the race every time.

5. Use an ESP
An email service provider (ESP) can help your small business generate and send emails that are targeted to your customer niche, and provide results. We’re here to make it easy. We’ve put together a list of criteria you’ll want to look for in your search for the right ESP.

Have any email fundamentals you think are important to add to the list? Let us know below.


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Get Traffic Without Paying For it

DID you know you can increase website traffic without marketing?

I know, I know…It sounds too good to be true. But, it is.

Marketing is one of the most important aspects when it comes to business, and should be a primary focus from the very start. However, if you only focus on the usual traffic generation tips and tricks, then you’re going to be missing out on a lot of audience reach and potential customers.

Check out these simple strategies for increasing your website’s traffic without having to do a single bit of marketing:

Types of Website Traffic

Before we can focus on ways to jumpstart your traffic, we should first cover the various types of traffic. It’s a pretty well-known fact that having a high volume of traffic coming to your site is one of the signs of success in the online portion of your business. It means there is content that has drawn people to your site, and more visitors means more potential sales.

There are four types of website traffic you need to be aware of before you can implement strategies to increase your website traffic:

• Organic traffic
• Referral traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Social Traffic

Of these four types, the organic traffic is definitely the most important. This type of traffic comes from search engines, and brings in more valuable, targeted users. After that, referral traffic is high up on the list, but that really depends on what type of website is sending you referrals. If they’re coming from popular websites, you’re more likely to get quality traffic. Low-quality sites will bring in less than stellar traffic and, as such, won’t benefit you all that much. Direct traffic comes from a user visiting your website’s URL directly from a browser – They either bookmarked you or typed it in directly. Finally, social traffic comes from (you guessed it) social media networks.

Increasing Website Traffic

When it comes to implementing the following strategies, it’s best to keep your actions repetitive. Keep doing these things as often as possible, and you will really start to notice a significant (and steady) increase in your website traffic. It won’t happen overnight, or even within a single month, but it will happen. It will pay off, and you won’t have to spend a single cent on buying traffic or advertising your business.

Things to Do

Network, Network, Network!

This one really can’t be stressed enough, which is why it gets listed at the top. Social network traffic is extremely important for business and is pretty easy to get when compared to the other types – especially organic traffic.

Get active on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and even Snapchat. Don’t spam your followers, but make sure your clickable links are prominently displayed. Share their content, comment on their posts, and start a discussion. The more you network, the more connections you will get. Once you build a community or become part of one, you will see a steady increase in website traffic. Leave valuable comments on other blog posts and social media posts, and others will click on your link to check what you’re all about.

This is why you need to make sure your website’s pages are shareable, too. If they aren’t designed to be shared, you may want to consider adding some social plugins to your site in order to make it easier for readers to share your posts across social networking platforms.

Collect Those Emails

From the very first day, you start your website – especially if it contains a blog – make sure you are building your email list. Don’t force visitors to subscribe, but offer a valuable incentive for them to do so. This lets them subscribe willingly while getting direct benefits out of it. If they subscribe willingly, you will be able to send them posts directly to their email without them unsubscribing and considering your emails to be spam.

If you want to get more blog readers, one of the best things to do is to link your email list to the RSS feeds on your blog. This ensures your readers are notified as soon as you publish a new post. Your readers will stay in the loop, see your newest content, and keep your business fresh in their minds. They will be more likely to think of you when they need the type of product or service your brand offers.

Expert Tip: Use this cutting edge tool to collect emails!

Optimise Your Content

Pages and posts that are search engine optimised (SEO) are going to rank higher in search engines and, as such, will help you increase website traffic without marketing. If you have, say, 60 posts that are ranking even fairly high within search engine results and they each get 10,000 clicks, that means 600,000 clicks per month and millions of page views for your website.

How exactly do you do this? SEO can be pretty complicated and involved, but there are some basic practices you can implement right away to boost website traffic:

Conduct keyword research

1. Summarise your product or services
2. Highlight the keywords and phrases within that description
3. Take that list of words and create as many combinations as possible
4. Find more ideas via Google Keyword Planner
5. Test out all of those ideas with the Keyword Planner by using the “See how they perform” option.
6. Pick the options with the highest volume and lowest cost per clicks. These are your “Target Keywords”
7. Implement these into the content on your page, or hire an experienced freelance writer who is able to do it naturally

Optimise the entire site

• Use a unique meta description for each page, making sure to incorporate one or more relevant target keywords. Keep this under 155 words.
• Put a target keyword into the URL of each page/tab
• Optimise the images by using ALT tags with related keywords.

Use quality content

• The content of your site should have enough value to keep your readers engaged. This means your site should have at least 300 to 400 words of unique content on each page.
• Start a blog for your business, and publish a post as often as you can. A couple times per month is good, though more would be ideal.
• Promote your content across various social media platforms.

Use Power Words in Headlines

Using power words is one of the best ways to compel a user to click on your post and read the content of that page. A headline like, “Best marketing automation software you should buy” is likely to get more hits or clicks than one like, “Marketing automation software you should buy.”

It’s recommended that at least 70% to 75% of your time should be spent on the title of your web page, blog post, or article. You want to ensure it uses power words and is catchy enough to snag the reader’s attention.

Build Your Backlinks

Backlinks are basically hyperlinks that connect a single webpage to a full website. Not only are they incredibly important for search engine optimisation, but they also make it easier to increase website traffic without marketing. Backlinks will bring referral traffic to your website and/or business’ blog. This will boost your search engine ranking and domain authority, which will result in you getting more organic traffic.

Utilize YouTube

According to Fortune Lords, roughly 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, with nearly 5 billion videos being viewed each day. In fact, roughly 900 million hours of video are watched on YouTube each month.

If you upload quality videos to YouTube and then link back to your website, you are likely to receive tons of referral traffic to your website. If a video happens to go viral, then you are likely to receive millions of traffic! There is also the added benefit that, assuming none of the Terms of Service is being violated, your videos will remain online indefinitely. That means that source of referral traffic will never go away.

Remember to Use Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are a bit longer (hence the name) than specific target keywords, but they drive specific traffic to your blog and have far less competition. One of the best ways to find these is to check the related Google searches below the results. For example, a search for “find long tail keywords” brings up the following results:

Targeting these long tail keywords within your content can boost your organic traffic by more than 50%.

Focus on Building Your Brand

Increasing website traffic without marketing can be pretty difficult, but one of the most powerful things you can do is to focus on building your brand. Place an emphasis on providing quality, value-driven content to your readers and monetize your blog when possible.

A website that has a strong brand that stands out from the masses will have returning visitors and dedicated readers who place their trust in your authority. This helps you to stand out within your business niche and will bring in continuous support for your business without you having to spend oodles of money on marketing efforts that may or may not pay off in the end.

Things to Avoid

The following actions are pretty common mistakes. This list of “Don’ts” will adversely affect the value of your website and brand’s authority, and will decrease your website traffic.

Spamming Your Followers

This seems pretty common sense but is a huge mistake a lot of people make. Spamming of forums, social networks, and other websites should be avoided. It won’t drive traffic to your website for more than a short period of time, and will just annoy the other users, followers,  and website owners. It’s best to stick with the “80-20 rule of social media networking.”

Publishing Poor Content

You’ve undoubtedly seen this before: A website owner or blogger wants to get has many click-through rates as possible, so they post something once or twice per day. The content is of fairly good quality at first, but then just goes downhill from there.

Posting often may get you some great click-through rates, but it will tarnish your brand’s image to have poor content on your site or blog. Maintaining a solid reputation and brand authority within your nice will bring in the targeted traffic you want.

Buying Traffic

While there is some benefit to buying traffic now and then, it generally brings in non-targeted visitors who are probably not very relevant to your brand. There is also the added drawback of the traffic mainly coming from websites that are considered to be of low quality, which would affect your website ranking. If you want to keep a high-quality website, it’s best to avoid buying website traffic.

Final Thoughts

The above tips help show you what to do, and what to avoid when it comes to finding ways to increase website traffic without marketing. After a few months of regular implementation of these techniques, you will likely start to see your traffic climb.

If you put all of that effort into your content, but don’t see the result you’re looking for, you may want to review your content and hire an experienced freelance writer or web designer.

Looking for another great way to drum up some traffic? Check out PushConnectNotify and leverage the power of push notifications to really increase your traffic flow! It is super easy-to-use and a great way to optimise your site while securing leads.

What are your tried and true techniques for jumpstarting your website traffic without having to break the bank? Let us know in the comments below! 

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The Secret Weapon to Generating Traffic

A SORE SPOT for many new online businesses is figuring out how to generate traffic to their website – and everyone seems to have a different opinion.

If you ask the content marketers, you’ll hear that the best way to generate traffic is with your blog. Pump out consistent, quality content, and watch the visitors come in droves.

The SEO companies will tell you that it’s all about optimizing your site for keywords and making sure you get relevant backlinks. Proponents of paid traffic recommend things like Facebook Ads, AdWords and media buys.

And who could forget the social media marketers – promote your business on social platforms and hope your content goes viral.

In fact, there are many ways to generate traffic, but the real reason certain bloggers and businesses are successful is because they know their audience and buyers.

They don’t just want any traffic; they want highly targeted traffic. Everything you do should be geared towards attracting the right kind of traffic, specific to your website. If you know your audience and cater to their needs, you will build a tribe of engaged followers and brand advocates – and you’ll guarantee yourself a steady flow of traffic.

That’s the secret.

Let’s delve deeper into target audience and buyer research to help you find out exactly what traffic you should be going after.

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience can be a challenge when you are a new company or blog.

Investing in your site is wise decision, but investing in the wrong ads or content marketing strategy could result in wasting money. To avoid this here’s what you need to focus on first.

Drill Down Your Niche

As most small business owners know, one of the key factors to take into consideration before you start marketing your product is to know your target audience. You know the saying: market to everyone, and hit no one. This same concept also applies to your business website.

The very first step is to figure out your niche. If you’re selling a product or service, you probably already know what general category it falls under.

You may be running a service similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, which enables entrepreneurs and small business owners to have simple online tasks completed by inexpensive workers.

This service falls under the category of increasing productivity. But for the purpose of your blog, we need to get more specific. You can take productivity and drill it down to something like: virtual executive assistant, online concierge service or online data entry.

The more specific you can get, then the easier it becomes for people to find you.

Profile Your Reader

Profiling your reader is an important step when it comes to boosting traffic. In fact, 41% of B2B and 38% of B2C marketers are putting more effort into understanding their audience, and for good reason. Just like you don’t market your products or services to everyone, you don’t write for everyone either.

It’s much more effective to write for one group of targeted people. To do this, first find out what you already know about your existing buyers. Next, use market research to find out about your potential leads and future buyers.

Pool your information together; this is the starting point of creating a buyer persona. Make sure to include specifics like gender, demographics, age, family status, and more.

But how do you research your market, especially if your site isn’t generating any traffic?

You can look to your competition to get some insights into target buyers.

How to Determine Your Competition

You may already know who your competition is, but if not, try the following tactics to locate some of your main competitors.

The first page of Google’s search results can often tell you all you need to know. You can search for your broad category or niche, but don’t forget to also try keywords that a reader might use when searching for your site.

Pay special attention to any results marked with “Ad.” The companies advertising here are paying for every click, so if you see them appearing consistently, you can be confident they’re driving valuable traffic – so consider them a strong competitor.

Another source is Alltop.com – a directory that curates headlines from the best blogs and news sites around the web, covering hundreds of topics. You can use the search feature to locate some of the top sites related to your niche.

Profile Your Competition’s Readers

Alexa is a great tool to gather information about your competition’s readers.  There is a free and paid version. While the paid version will give you more details, the free version of Alexa usually provides enough information to get a general idea of who’s visiting your competition.

Just enter your competitors’ URLs and Alexa will bring back all kinds of useful data such as: the gender of visitors, education level, country, whether they’re accessing the website from home or work, and even keywords readers are using to access the website.

Find Out Where Your Competitor’s Traffic Is Coming From

By this point, you should have a list of competitor’s websites that fit your targeted demographic. Now let’s figure where their traffic is coming from.

To do this, you can use SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb is similar to Alexa, and it will give you some of the same data as they do. But where it truly shines is that it breaks down social media traffic. You can see which social media platforms are sending your competitors the most traffic.

This is an excellent source of information because you can know exactly where your desired target audience hangs out. You might have been investing money in Twitter Ads – with little return – when in reality your particular is audience is spending all their time on Facebook.

Another useful feature of SimilarWeb is that you can also see where visitors went before and after they visited a competitor’s website. This will help you gain a better understanding of topics that interest your audience.

Using Facebook to Discover More About Your Ideal Reader

Facebook’s Audience Insights tool is a great resource for gaining information about your potential readers.

With the demographic information gathered from Alexa and SimilarWeb, you can use the Audience Insights filters to create an audience based on that data.

Add your competitors’ sites to the Interests section to see what Facebook pages, brands, and personalities your targeted audience has liked. Of course, not all blogs will show up in this section so don’t worry if nothing appears – just try another one.

Try out the Audience Insights tool to see what information you can glean about your potential readers.

Using Facebook Groups To Gather Data

The only way to make your product or service even better is by listening in on what your audience is saying.

This is what makes Facebook groups an invaluable resource. It’s a real world discussion by your targeted demographic. It’s a great place to understand what they don’t like, what they do like, and what problems they are currently facing.

Once you join a Facebook group, use the group’s search bar to search for terms like:

• “need help”
• “newbie”
• “how do I”
• “need advice”
• “advice about”
• “question about”

This will help you quickly figure out your audience’s pain points.

Customer Surveys

Behavioral data is information gathered on people’s actions. It can tell you specific things like how many people shared your article, how many people opened your email, and how many visitors you’re receiving from YouTube videos.

But it doesn’t really tell you why people do the things they do, or what made them share one article and not even bother with a similar article.

To really understand your audience, you need to create a customer survey. Once you have access to Facebook groups relevant to your audience, then it will become a great place to gather feedback.

Wrapping It Up

Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Without it, you won’t have much of a business for long. But generating traffic is often difficult for small businesses, and there are many ways to go about it.

The good thing is, you don’t need a lot of traffic if the traffic you do attract is highly targeted – which comes from knowing your audience.

To learn about your audience, first analyze your product or service to come up with a clear, targeted niche. Then, determine who your precise target market is by creating a buyer persona of your ideal reader.

Use tools like Alltop, Alexa and Facebook Insights to single out your main competitors. Take note of their traffic demographic and what platforms drive most of their traffic.

Use niche-related Facebook Groups to perform research and gather data on your audience’s pain points. If possible, run a customer survey to gain valuable feedback.

These strategies will help boost traffic to your site by helping you discover your ideal audience, pinpointing the exact content you should create for them, and making it clear what social media platforms you should be on.

Even if you currently have little to no traffic, you’ll know precisely who and where your audience is, and what they desire.

Over to you – what tips and tricks have you used to learn about your audience? What strategies have you struggled with, and which one became YOUR secret weapon to uncovering the ideal viewer?

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