Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

1 Word you absolutely must remove from all your marketing

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marketing content, copy

What is the main reason someone should buy from you or hire you?

That’s a question, which many small businesses struggle with. And it hurts their marketing. It means they are unable to provide their prospective clients with a clear, compelling reason to buy from them, rather than a competitor. And as I mentioned yesterday, clarity is essential.

The thing about solutions

This is why we see the word solutions used in amateur marketing all the time, to describe what a business does.

Note – If you’ve already, clearly stated the value you bring, it’s okay to use the word. I’m talking about when business owners use solutions instead of being specific.

For example:

  • HR solutions.
  • Email marketing solutions.
  • Cost effective solutions.
  • Training solutions.
  • Or “we offer a range of solutions”, etc.

They’re telling us nothing.

Their message is weak. There’s no reason for us to contact them. So their marketing is largely ignored. And it loses them a fortune.

I don’t want that to happen to your business, my friend. So here’s a far more effective approach.

The alternative is to get specific

Determine the core value you bring to a prospective client. Then, communicate it with impact and brevity.

For example, instead of saying you, “offer a range of email marketing solutions”, get specific. Tell them, “We can help you increase sales and boost your profits, with professional, proven email marketing.”

Back in the 1980’s, business owners were advised to develop an elevator pitch. The idea was to create a compelling 5 or 10 second business introduction. Commerce today, online and offline, is like a series of elevator pitch-type interactions. Your prospective clients are busy. Really busy. They’re being bombarded with emails, calls, social network updates, text messages… it’s relentless.

They don’t have time for long or vague marketing messages. They want answers. Fast! That’s why a specific, brief and well-crafted message has never been more important or more effective.

So get specific.

Look for the core reason why a prospective client should hire you, rather than a competitor. Look for the tangible value your service offers. Then, communicate it in a compelling way. It’s far more powerful than claiming to offer a non-specific “solution”.

10 Email marketing mistakes that can destroy your open rates

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email marketing

One area of marketing I often get asked about, is how to improve email open rates. So, I thought I’d share ten of the most common reasons for unopened email marketing with you.

In no particular order.

  1. The email subject line didn’t motivate the recipient to open it. Getting this right is trickier than it sounds. That’s because many of the words used to inspire people to open an email, are also triggers for spam filters.
  2. You sent the email at the wrong time of day or on the wrong day. This can have a huge impact. Despite what some people say, there’s no universally ideal day or perfect time to optimize email open rates. For example, different timing is required when you target consumers, than when you target businesses. Different times also work better for different industries; hotels work completely different hours than accountants. They also have totally different peak times, when they’re unavailable to check email and are least likely to see your message. One time doesn’t work for all. Test and measure until you find your email open rate sweet-spot.
  3. The recipient’s email address is on a list you bought, so they have no idea who you are. And the people on these lists get bombarded with tons of marketing emails. This means they’re far more likely to have aggressive mail filters.
  4. Your list is out of date, with lots of addresses that no longer exist or are no longer monitored. Non existent email addresses will register as ‘bounces’, and are easily cleaned with email marketing software. Unmonitored addresses will still be able to receive emails, so they don’t bounce. Depending on the software you use, you can either set things up so addresses are deleted after ‘X’ number go unopened, or remove unresponsive addresses manually.
  5. The content of a previous email didn’t engage the reader, so they were less inclined to open subsequent emails. Remember: You never have ‘a list’. You need to earn and re-earn their permission. So stay useful.
  6. You send marketing emails direct from your desktop software, rather than use a trusted email marketing provider (mailchimp, aweber, constant contact, etc). If you send large numbers of the same email from your own IP address, your address can become blacklisted. When that happens, your emails won’t even reach the recipient’s spam folder.
    Tip: You can check if your IP address is blocked, using Spamhaus. It’s free to use.
  7. The email content (or body) contained certain words, which trigger email filters, so the email is wrongly identified as spam or junk.
  8. The email contained too many links or images. These are also common spam filter triggers.
  9. You included an email attachment. Attachments are major sources of malware, so are often blocked.
  10. The recipient uses Gmail. Gmail has started to dump valid emails into the recieptient’s promotions folder. They get no notification when these emails arrive. As such, open rates plummet. I know from personal experience that my Gmail subscribers can miss up to 50% of my emails. This happens, even though they used gmail to double opt-in to receive my stuff.

Email is a spectacularly powerful marketing tool. And sometimes just a few improvements can lead to massively better results.

What keeps your prospects awake at night?

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marketiing, motivated clients

Do you need to attract more highly-motivated clients or customers? If you do, here’s (part of) a strategy I use with business owners that consistently produces fantastic results.

It starts with a question.

What keeps your prospective clients awake at night?

There are 2 broad answers to that question.

  1. The things they’re worried about. Their fears, apprehensions or concerns.
  2. The things they’re excited about. Their goals, dreams and the opportunities ahead of them.

Here’s the thing

Anything that keeps them awake at night is a super-high priority to them. It’s where their urgent attention is. Make no mistake, these are red-hot, prospective clients.

In order to help them and benefit from this opportunity, your task is twofold.

  1. You need to determine exactly what they’re worried or excited about.
  2. You need to clearly demonstrate how your service will help them in that key area.

Most marketing doesn’t do this. Instead, it focuses on how great the provider is. How happy they are to help. How their clients or customers love them. And it’s totally ineffective.

You need a better strategy. Like the kind I develop for my clients. Their marketing speaks directly to the need of their prospect.

It addresses that thing, which is keeping their prospect awake at night. Only after that, does it position my client as the answer. Get this right and it attracts enquiries from super-motivated people, eager to take action!

Take a look at the various marketing assets you use. Do they focus primarily and directly on the needs of your prospective client or customer? If not, you’re needlessly leaving money on the table and missing out on a massive opportunity.

5 Tips to help you build a huge, valuable newsletter list

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marketing, list building, subscribers

Here are 5 tips, to help you build a huge and valuable newsletter readership or list.

Let’s go.

1. Go easy on the pitches

Make sure it’s a newsletter and not a badly disguised advertisement. Here’s the thing: People avoid advertising. We skip the commercials on TV. We pay developers to remove the ads from the free version of their apps. We see advertisements as unwelcome interruptions.

If your newsletter reads a little too much like a sales pitch, it will be largely ignored. This leads nicely into the next point.

2. Be useful

The more useful your newsletter is, the more your readers will value it and share it. Your ultimate goal is to build a large, targeted reader community, who become either clients, customers or advocates. None of that can be achieved with predictable, pedestrian content.

Useful content is what gives your newsletter wings. It’s what inspires people to subscribe, stay subscribed, share and make purchasing decisions. So, before you hit send on a newsletter, make sure it contains valuable, useful information. Provide answers to your reader’s problems. Share useful tips. Point your readers to helpful resources. You get the idea.

The more value you pack into each newsletter, the more your readers will value it… and the more they will value you. Think about that for a moment.

3. Get the design right

Even if your content is wonderful, people won’t take it seriously if the design looks poor. The first bite is with the eye.

If your newsletter provides valuable information, but the design looks amateurish or outdated, it’s like serving a delicious meal on a dirty plate.

So invest in the best design or newsletter template you can. Because whether your newsletter looks cheap or is presented professionally, it all reflects back on you.

4. Ask readers to share

Even if readers think your newsletter is great, it may not occur to them to share it. People are busy. Really busy. By reminding them, you plant the idea of sharing the newsletter in their mind. Moreover, you do this at the exact point, where they have just read it and enjoyed it. I used to have a section at the bottom of my newsletter, which said:

“If you have found this newsletter interesting, please share it with your friends”.

When I added that short message to my newsletter, the results were immediate and measurable. It’s amazing what a simple reminder can do.

5. Help it spread

Convert people who had your newsletter forwarded to them, into subscribers.

Imagine your friend had just forwarded a great newsletter to you. You’d want to get a regular copy, right? You don’t want to have to rely on your friend, remembering to forward each edition to you. So, I added the following sentence to the above message:

“If you have had this newsletter forwarded to you and would like a regular copy, click here.”

Never underestimate the power of a subtle, non-pushy reminder.

Make no mistake, newsletters can be an extremely powerful marketing asset. It’s why I make my blog available in newsletter format. And it’s why I ask you to take your newsletter seriously and invest in it accordingly. Give it the time and effort it needs.

Because the rewards for getting it right are huge. No. Bigger than that.

How to make your marketing massively more effective

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content marketing, trust

Take a quick look at the following 2 statements. Which of them do you find the most appealing?

  1. I wrote this blog post, now I want you to read it.
  2. Business owners often struggle with this challenge, so I wrote this quick tip to help you.

Unsurprisingly, your marketplace is massively more attracted to the second statement. Despite this, the majority of small and medium sized businesses use the first approach in their marketing.

Rather than focusing on the wants and needs of their marketplace, they focus on what they themselves want. And it’s costing them a fortune in missed sales opportunities or client enquiries.

I received one such email earlier today. It started off with; “We’re delighted to announce our summer 2019 range is in stock and available to order”.

Let’s unpack that headline and see what message it sends to the reader.

  1. The vendor is excited.
  2. The vendor has an announcement.
  3. The vendor has new stock.
  4. They want me to order it.

As you can see, they’ve given me (I’m an existing customer) very little motivation to do anything. Their message is all about them and what they want. By switching the focus to their customers, they could have built a more compelling message. Instead, they’ll be wondering why that email’s response rate is so low.

The lesson here

The lesson is pretty obvious when you see an example broken down, like the one above. But sometimes in our eagerness to market our products or services, we can unintentionally make similar mistakes.

This is why I recommend you deliberately check, to ensure the focus of your future marketing is always about “them”. Also, review your existing marketing and shift the emphasis of any self-focused material, so that it’s them-focused… their wants and needs.

Show them how passionate you are about helping them. Show them you care.

And make solving their problems the cornerstone of your marketing.

Why lists dominate marketing. And why you should use them!

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Marketing content, lists

Ever wondered why so many articles, blog posts, videos and newsletters are based around the idea of a list?

Yes, you’re right. It’s because they’re extremely popular. People love them. And it’s easy to see why.

Lists promise lots of ideas. And fast!

List-based content promises a number of bite-sized ideas or suggestions. And fast! So when we see “10 habits of highly successful business owners“, we’re not expecting an in-depth examination of commercial success.

No.

We’re expecting ideas. And we hope that at least one of those ideas will help us in some way. If it does, it will repay the 3 or 4 minutes we invested in reading it.

This begs the question… Does your marketing mix contain list-based content?

If not, I suggest you give it a try. Lists are perfect for sharing, which makes them ideal if you want to expand your reach on social networks. New readers who discover your work through list content, will then get the chance to see your more detailed work. Others will follow you on the networks, where they see your lists shared. Almost all of my most shared blog posts are lists.

Lists can also be very powerful, when it comes to increasing your email marketing open rates. Email marketing that has a list in the subject line, can result in massively increased open rates.

Here’s why.

Most small business owners are not expert copywriters. As such, the subject lines they use for their email marketing tend to under-perform. And poorly written subject lines result in low open rates. This means no matter how good their marketing message is, very few people will see it.

Using an average list title as the subject line of a marketing email, will always out-perform an average, regular subject line.

So, should I focus exclusively on lists, Jim?

No. No you shouldn’t. Seriously. Don’t!

Allow me to explain.

True, there are YouTubers making a fortune from creating only list-based videos. And yes, there are sites that attract millions of readers, who rely very heavily on list-based content. However, relying exclusively on lists is a bad fit for most small business owners. They should be used sparingly.

For example, I could have written this post as a list.

  • It would have taken me a lot less time to write.
  • It would have been shared a lot more on social networks.
  • And the email version of the post would have been opened by a lot more people.

However, I wanted to dig a little deeper into one thing… the marketing effectiveness of lists. I didn’t want to weaken that focus with “15 Reasons why lists dominate the internet”.

Here’s the thing

Sometimes, you need to offer more substance around one subject. Other times, an issue could be impacting your readers and you need to address it. And there are times when you want to share one really useful idea, which wouldn’t work if you broke it down into a list of sub-ideas.

In other words, that same surface-level approach that makes lists so popular, renders them useless for anything that requires depth.

So mix it up.

If you haven’t already used list-based blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts or newsletters, give it a go. Experiment. Test different types of list. Measure the feedback. Check things (metrics) including; sales, leads, open rates, social shares and new subscribers.

In short, if you’re not embracing list-based content, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.