The kings of spam fall from the throne: How does email marketing work?

You need to use the right email marketing. Each of us receives a lot of spam in our email inbox from completely known sources. When promoting your business, you shouldn’t.

Buried in the garbage

The situation is similar to flyers and mailboxes. You get up in the morning, go to the store. On the way back, check the mailbox. First, there is a circular motion with your hand to throw out the tons of flyers that are dropped into your inbox every day. Right after you finished the garbage, which you didn’t even need to look at, because in 99% of cases it offers something that you are not interested in, you select the mail that is addressed to your name. In addition to bills, you can find magazines for which you pay a subscription, postcards, which are somewhat less common these days, and notifications about the arrival of shipments. It often happens that you receive a letter addressed to you, which is actually not intended directly for you, but rather a promotion of some kind of pillows, travel agencies with discounts or invitations to free “lunch”. The very fact that the letter is addressed to you, and not really to you, but to thousands of other people with the goal of buying something does not inspire much confidence. The company that offers the service begins communication with you through the lie that the letter is intended for you.

Beans

Enjoy a free lunch while looking at our washable pillows

In the email world, things work the same way. If you have a Gmail or Yahoo account, their spam filters filter out the spam themselves, but there’s always that small percentage that ends up in your inbox. People view their email account as a very private matter and you cannot initiate communication with them by lying to them that the email is for them. Some even go so far as to title the email with “(Private) See…”. Such and similar names can deceive us at the moment and prompt us to open the email, but soon we realize that it is abuse.

Just as you open real letters that you receive from the relevant institution (electricity, water, tax bills), friends or from those legal entities with whom you have directly registered to receive mail, you do the same in your email account. We start from the fact that you will certainly open an email from a friend or from sites whose mailing lists you are signed up for.

How do you get people to sign up for your mailing list?

addtext_com_MDQxNDM3NzYzMjM

The question arises, if you are in business, selling a product or service, how to get people to sign up for your mailing list. There are several ways.

If there is a physical location where you offer products and services, you can create a promotion or sweepstakes that requires your customers or potential customers to leave an email address on the form in order to participate. After that, you can constantly upgrade the email list in a similar way. Of course, you have to convert the emails received in this way into an electronic format.

Another, simpler, way is to get email addresses online using your company’s website, search engines, and social networks. First you need to create some kind of content that will benefit people. It can be a free e-book, a text tutorial, a video tutorial. We have a massage client. We create an electronic exercise book for people who spend a lot of time in front of the computer. People leave their email address to download the book.

On your site, you create a special page that is called a “Squeeze page” in marketing circles. The goal of creating the station is to get contact information or some other information that is important for the company from the visitor. These pages are specially planned, designed, and quality accompanying text is created for them. From a technical point of view, creating a page like this requires some programming knowledge or the use of ready-made, usually commercial plugins for some of the content management systems.

We assume that the visitor came to the page through a Facebook or Google AdWords paid campaign. The page must have such functionality that it instructs the visitor that if he wants to download the book we have prepared, he must first fill out the form. After he fills out the form, he receives an automatic message from the website containing a link to the book. The email address itself and other contact data remain entered in the database provided for that purpose.

To quickly create a mailing list, paid Facebook promotion is usually practiced. By clicking on the post, the visitor comes to the “Squeeze page” that we created. In this way, depending on the quality of the content, that is, the “bait” that we have prepared in order to get an email address, depending on the quality of the Facebook promotion and the appearance of the “Squeeze page”, we will collect a certain number of email addresses.

The number of collected emails also depends on the already mentioned factors, but on how much people need the service or product you offer, i.e. from the market movement in that area.

We created a mailing list and now what?

The first and basic mistake that is made when you have a mailing list is to send subscribers exclusively and only promotions and discounts in unlimited quantities. The site visitor entrusts you with his email address, giving you permission to contact him, thereby accepting that he will occasionally peek into an email you sent him, and you start showering him with promotions and discounts every day. After some time, depending on the tolerance threshold, he either unsubscribes from the list or marks the email address from which the emails you send him receive as spam, i.e. undesirable.

Totally applicable to email marketing

What kind of emails should you send to your subscribers instead of the ones we listed? First you need to understand that with your mailing list, ie. you have to have a special relationship with the people who are signed up for it. You have to nurture her, maintain a constant relationship. The process of communication through the mailing list should take place not only from you to the subscribers but also in the reverse direction. You should encourage communication. It should be clear to the applicants that you really care about their opinion.

When you create a mailing list, you should first imagine the “avatar” for whom you are creating the list (as Jeff Walker puts it nicely).

What is an avatar? Avatar in this case is an imaginary person to whom you want to offer your service or product. You can define it as a male person, over 30 years old, employed in some field, etc. You have defined the type of man, ie. characteristics of the ideal customer for your product or service. At all times, whenever you create content you should think about your avatar and how it will relate to the content you create.

In the emails themselves, give useful and interesting information to the subscribers, so that over time they start following you and start opening the emails you send regularly. Don’t offer promotions and discounts at first, try to build a relationship with your list.

One of the things you need to do when creating a good email is to get rid of the corporate tone. What it means ? Instead of saying:

“Research has shown that 90% of people who used this and that toothpaste had a 70.6% lower chance of developing periodontal disease.” In cooperation with Zubicvil doo, the conditions for importing this paste have been met, so please contact the nearest pharmacy if you are interested in this product.”

You can say:

“Hello, this is Government.” I have an update regarding a new toothpaste that has hit the market. In cooperation with dentists, we let people try the paste here and there for free. I did not expect anything excessive from it, because we have already had similar actions. This time it happened that people were bragging to the dentists about how much whiter their teeth were. I also looked at several studies and saw that the paste contains this and that substance and that even periodontitis occurs much less often. We offer a lot of toothpastes, but this one is really something special, and you can find it in all pharmacies.”

The goal is to remove the corporate tone and give the whole relationship a friendly note. The subscriber should feel like he is talking to a friend. Finally, ask yourself when you most often buy a product. The answer is simple, we buy most often when family and friends recommend it to us, then a few places are empty, then experts through personal contact, and only then do propaganda and advertising messages come. Since the email inbox is a very private thing for each of us and everything that reaches us becomes part of our private world, if we are already sending marketing messages, we should market them through useful and quality content. If we can’t sound like family members, we can still give our content a friendly tone rather than a boring corporate one.

There are special strategies when you want to introduce a new product through a mailing list. These strategies are also based on quality content that is organized in several sequences. There is an exact order in which the different types of content are sent and the time intervals in which the content is sent. Mainly through the content of the email you have to unobtrusively provide people with proof that your product or you are socially accepted, through the content you have to indicate your position of authority as a seller. It’s especially important to sell from a position of authority rather than condescendingly begging people to buy your product.

When you make actions, they must be rare and last for a specific and precisely defined period of time. If you say that the action lasts until a certain moment, it must be so that people would take you seriously and that would make them decide to buy or give up the purchase by that moment.

Through content, you need to show people the transformation they will experience if they buy your product. People are not interested in the form in which they receive the product, but rather in the story of the transformation they will experience by purchasing it. For example, just answer the question, if someone is selling a cure for cancer, does it matter to people whether they received it as a tablet or as an injection, or does it matter to them the transformation from sick to healthy.

cancer girls If you found the text interesting, comment on it. We really care about your opinion.

 

Content marketing ie. content marketing: 100000 ways to destroy the competition!

The content represents the essence, it is you represented by words, recordings, pictures. Sajjaj represents what they will see you as.

What used to be?

Once upon a time, you paid someone to build a website for you and provided content for them to insert. Thus, most sites contained menus: About us, Products, Price list, Contact. You usually had one text for each of the menus. The site served as long as you have it and write its address on the business card. Even today, someone offers this kind of service on the website of a company that sells healthy food.

Hello websites

A section on the website of a company that sells healthy food.

At that time, business in Serbia was conducted exclusively through acquaintances and meetings, advertisements in newspapers, sticking advertising messages on poles, inserting flyers into mailboxes. Some of the ways of advertising have survived to this day, however, it should not be ignored that in Serbia at the moment there are over 2.5 million Internet users and over 3 million open Facebook accounts.

We weren't even good guerrillas.

We weren’t even good guerrillas.

What is searched for on the Internet?

Mainly for cheap entertainment and content. The fact is that domestic websites are not excessively rich in content and that there is an open space for competition in content marketing , because content is something that Internet users always need and that is why they are there. The number of resources available to them in this area of ​​ours is very limited, and new quality content is always welcome.

 

What has changed ?

It is no longer enough to have a website without content. Now, in order to survive in business and to properly present yourself to Internet users, you need to be in the role of a publisher, ie. you should be a source of content and not just any content but quality and useful content. Easier said than done. First you need to define the target group. The way you address someone, as well as the content you will offer, depends on the level of education, socioeconomic status, gender, place of living and other characteristics. Imagine reading the best material in the field of nuclear physics, but you are not a nuclear physicist. Do you believe you would understand anything? That’s the point. You create content for your target group. Write in simple language. You can’t look at visitors solely through their demographic characteristics, but as living and real human beings because that’s what they are. Let the words be drinkable and impressive for the reader. We do not claim that this text is also ideal for you who are reading it, nor that it will represent the ultimate experience and revelation for you, but we believe that you will understand it and that it is useful. What makes it useful is the information it contains. That’s enough for a start.

Adapt the story to the person you are talking to

Adapt the story to its intended audience

 

How can you check the quality of the content?

Every content is an investment. It allows you to present yourself to clients in the right way. Search engines also index the content from your site and thus allow potential clients to find you faster. For example, you want people to find you on Google for the keywords “custom furniture.” You achieve this, among other things, when you often mention that phrase in your texts. Google indexes your texts and since it finds this phrase in several places, it considers that your site is relevant for searches with these keywords and positions you better in its results.

If you have a site rich in content, the chance that someone will find your site also increases. “long tail” keywords, such as “making american bedroom closets”. The more content you have, the greater the chance that someone will find your site and your offer on search engines. Once they land on your site, potential clients need to stay there and take a close look and seriously consider your offer. If the content is not of high quality, they will leave the page very quickly, without reading even half of the article, without looking at the offer.

How can you check if your content is of high quality and if your investment in it has paid off? You can check whether there has been an increase in the sales of those products or services for which quality content has been created compared to those for which this has not been done.

Through Google Analytics, you can monitor the time that users spend on different pages of the site. Based on this, you can determine whether visitors like to read some content or not. What is good, you will keep, what is bad you will change or throw out. In this way, you can permanently monitor the success of the created content and improve it.

Google Analytics

Display of time spent on the site in Google Analytics

What can be the goal of creating quality content?

Maybe you want to increase people’s awareness of your brand, become an authority source of information in your field, increase sales, create a mailing list with active subscribers. An active and involved subscriber is also a potential customer. All this is not at all easy to do. Content creation must be planned. There are even certain techniques that can be used in the process of creation itself. One of the basic techniques is telling stories, ie. “Storytelling”.

Storytelling

We all talk and exchange information, but we are simply programmed to like hearing a good story. Think about whether you liked to listen to the stories and fairy tales of your parents or grandparents when you were little? Do you like to read a good novel or watch a movie today? They are all stories.

grandma

It is known that good speakers are those people who know how to tell a story beautifully. A story breathes life into the driest matter. Therefore, use a storytelling strategy in your content creation because your readers will be enthralled.

Even as a student, I loved doing research. I was very interested in what kind of results I would get when I gave people different types of instruments such as surveys, questionnaires and tests. In short, the whole procedure goes something like this. Come up with a research question, choose a sample, give people e.g. fill in the questionnaires, process the results in a statistical program and finally write a paper in which you answer the research question and present it at a conference.

We’ve been doing some research on dual-tasking. You know how women can do several jobs at the same time, and men can only do one. The presentation of the results at the conference goes something like this: “To compare the mean values ​​of the groups on the Dual Processing Test, we used the T test of independent samples.” We obtained a statistically significant difference between men (AS=13.5) and women (AS=16.8) at the level of p< 0.005″. And so each presenter with his topic until the whole hall falls asleep.

speaker-is-boring1

 

At that time, I was reading something about storytelling and found the strength to try it at that conference. I said:

“Good day. I am glad to be with you here today. Don’t ask anything, my day started terribly, I thought I wouldn’t come. I had a fight with a girl this morning. She came to me and saw that I hadn’t had time to wash the dishes. I told her that I was preparing a presentation for today. Well, at the same time I’m cooking lunch and typing the seminar paper, and you can’t wash the dishes for 3 days. You are very slow, my dear brother.’

At that moment, the whole hall wakes up from the lethargy they fell into a few hours ago due to the enormous amount of dry steam exposure. Everyone is looking at me and I have their full attention. At that moment, many people don’t understand why I’m wasting time describing an argument with a girl. From the description of the dispute, I gently introduce them into the research without excessive presentation of figures and percentages. I conclude that my girlfriend had no right to be angry with me because it’s normal that I can’t do two things at the same time because I’m male and that was confirmed by the results of my research. To this day, people remember my presentation at that conference. They don’t even remember the topic of the research, the title, they remember me and the story of the fight I told them about. The story wasn’t even innovative or overly interesting, but people remember it. This is precisely the transformation that storytelling can make of some content, regardless of its form (text, video, infographic…).

What can happen when you don’t tell your story at all?

P&G logo

Sometime in 2010. In 2010, Procter & Gamble (P&G) wanted to market a new diaper that they internally called the “Baby iPod.” The diapers were 20% thinner and retained much more liquid. People from P&G decided not to change the packaging of the product, but to put a new product in the old packaging and test it on the “test market” without any announcement.

What happened then? The product hit the market and it wasn’t long before news of it spread across the internet. Dozens of groups were created, including a Facebook group, calling for the old product to be returned. An entire network of blogs owned by mothers protested the product. P&G had two options before launching the product. The first was to create their own story related to the product, and the second was exactly what they did. What they didn’t understand is that if they don’t create their own story, their customers will do it for them. That’s exactly what they got. A story without an initiated beginning, without a real conclusion that could have cost them a lot.

Story structure: The writer’s path

It is believed that when creating content that contains storytelling, there is a structure that gives good results. Christopher Vogler , in his book “Writer’s Way” describes this structure, and this book has become indispensable literature in scenography schools around the world and is used in the practice of creating Hollywood films.

When you start your story, you first talk about the ordinary world, in which the main character lives. Then, in the opening part of the story, there is a call for adventure. In marketing terms, you will first describe a current situation or problem, after which you create an invitation to solve it yourself.

Then comes the rejection of the invitation to adventure. This is a very important part where the main character overcomes his fear of going into the unknown. Potential problem and fear of failure are considered. Usually then he meets a mentor or comes across some new knowledge, some new truth that will lead him into the unknown.

When one sets off into the unknown, friends and enemies begin to be recognized and difficulties along the way are resolved.

The protagonist then approaches the center of the unknown. In this part, the hero prepares to meet the center of the unknown. When we talk about storytelling in marketing, it is an approach to problem solving.

Then comes the overcoming of challenges and finally the rewards.

After that comes the return home. This is a crucial moment because the main character returns to the ordinary world which he now sees with different eyes because he has come all the way and finally got the reward. It’s a matter of transformation. Show people through a story how buying your product will transform them.

So, the first thing you need to do is to imagine your “heroes”, ie. ideal users, and then you will structure the content on the site in such a way that you “walk” them through the entire journey. So the invitation to the adventure is giving the basic information that you are there and that you offer some services. Then you have fear of the unknown. In that part, you provide the customer with additional content that aims to educate them. People are afraid of what they don’t know, so introduce them to what you have to offer. Take them in depth, item by item, until they reach the center of the unknown, that is. they don’t try what you offer. However, it does not end there either. We will talk more about this in one of the following posts.

How to get authority?

Achieving authority in an area is a very powerful sales tool. Content marketing is the right choice of strategy. If you get people to trust you, but with good reason, you can always recommend them to buy a quality product or service from a domain for which you are an authority.

Reading Copyblogger we came across an example of what authority can do to the human mind. A survey of clients of a bank was conducted. Namely, on the ATM in front of the bank there was a sign with the text:

“The ATM is not working. Give the deposits to the guard on duty.”

A TV reporter dressed in a guard’s uniform was standing next to him. People approached him and he asked them if they wanted to make a deposit or withdraw money. The whole situation is absurd, but nine out of ten people gave their deposit to the guard.

Why ? Banks never operate in this way, but because of the authority reflected in the sign on the ATM, uniforms and badges, people agree.

Neuroscience has confirmed that people are subject to authority and that it influences their behavior and decisions.

Where does authority come from? Authorities somehow make other people’s lives better. It originates from the audience. The audience consists of those people whom you have helped in some way. You told them how to solve a problem. It doesn’t matter if they contacted you personally or read some of your text in a newspaper or on the Internet or watched a video file. It is important that you helped them to find a solution to a problem. From that day on, you are an authority in that area for them.

Authority also comes from yourself. Take what you know best and share it with others while believing in yourself and being confident. People like it much more when you demonstrate authority than when you claim to have it.

How is authority formed by content marketing on the Internet through content creation? The idea on which Google is based is that not all created pages are worth the same. Some are worth less and some are worth more. The initial idea started from the fact that the more links to your page, the more valuable it is because other pages refer to it and cite it more. Pages that had more value, in this way, Google placed closer to the top of the search, compared to those that had fewer links or no links leading to it. This is the basis. Over time, Google’s algorithms have improved more and more in order to better measure the authority of a page.

Just like in real life, if you have helped many people they will reciprocate by recommending and referring to you.

Observing the initial logic of the Google search engine, some people figured out that if they create a huge amount of content and artificially create links to their pages, a better ranking in Google search is inevitable. Programs have even been developed that automatically create links to a page on other sites. Imagine a program in which you insert a list of web addresses that it should visit. The program is e.g. I am able to create comments on texts on those sites that will contain a link to your site. The result is that within half an hour you have thousands of links leading to a page of your site. After that, Google places your page at the top of the search. In order to prevent this and similar abuses, Google improved its algorithm, and it now evaluates the quality of content to a certain extent. Whenever Google improves the algorithm, the search results also change, so those pages that “cheated” fall in the search results.

In order to build authority with content marketing, you can’t go wrong if you consistently write quality content that is useful to people and shows them how to solve a problem. The quality of the content is more important than the quantity. The difference between quantity and quality of content is the same as between a Dostoyevsky novel and a bunch of old tabloids. Quality content can also have a timeless value.

If you create content marketing content about things that change quickly, refresh it with new information. One of our clients is an accounting agency. In cooperation with them, we published content on how to calculate wages for employees. Whenever the law changes or the calculation method changes, we try to update the article with new information as soon as possible. When the changes are made, the number of organic visits (not through paid promotion, but free) to the site increases over time. The increased number of site visitors who are satisfied with the information they received often become new clients.

Authority is the centerpiece of any content marketing strategy. Content is a key element of authority formation and a key element of sales itself. For this reason, he is the center of our strategy. If you really become an authority in a field through your content, Google will consider you an authority.

Authority is not built by shortcuts and lies. Tweaked titles are currently in effect. Basically there are tons and tons of literature out there on how to change your headline to have a certain effect on the potential visitor and ultimately increase the number of visits through content marketing. What happens in practice? We almost came across a foreign site title that read something like this:

“You can’t miss the delight of little ones in Africa when they drink clean water for the first time”.

I click on the link, play the video. They are talking about a project in Africa in which several millionaires participated who ensured that a certain amount of water arrived every day for children in a certain part of Africa. At no point in the video file do you see children encountering clean water for the first time, nor is a single child seen drinking water. It can only be seen that the water arrived in closed canisters and that’s where the video ends and they explain how the project succeeded and how the daily flow of water is stable.

They lied to me, they made me go to the site, they didn’t give me the promised content. Such an approach does not inspire confidence. You must always give people what you promised, because that’s how you build initial trust. That is the beginning of creating authority. Sometimes it’s good to design headlines with the aim of arousing curiosity or emotions and thus gain sensationalism, but you shouldn’t promise what is impossible to fulfill.

We did not learn this from the article. There was no text, but only two pictures of Karleuša in fur.

We did not learn this from the article. There was no text, but only two pictures of Karleuša in fur.

The whole process of creating content for content marketing needs is a matter of learning, persistence and invested time. We have explained some of the ways and you should try it yourself. If you have any comments on this text, feel free to send them. I always like to hear both negative and positive reviews because it helps us create better quality content. Until you read.