Generation Z, the cohort of people born after Millennials, was supposedly the kryptonite of every digital marketer. Gen Zers don’t check their email, they have short attention spans, and have grown up in an “always-on” tech environment.
These kinds of pronouncements are always popular in the world — someone is always proclaiming that something “is dead” with each new technology or culture shift, so this talk about Gen Z isn’t a big deal. Marketers are used to adapting and evolving as the world changes around them, and learning how to engage with Gen Z through is no different. The Digital Hyve offering marketing services in Rochester is whom you should check out as their experts guarantee measurable results.
With over 65 percent of marketers looking to increase their spending on marketing to Gen Z, you’ve got to know what channels to send that money to. You might think Gen Z only ever uses social media, and if you do, you’d be missing out on the 95 percent of Gen Zers who say email is essential to their lives. They use it to stay in touch with businesses and retailers, with large portions of them saying email marketing is an essential factor in their buying decisions.
Gen Zers have developed sophisticated content filters that come from being surrounded by mountains of information all the time. They know how to quickly discern if your email is worth their time, so you’ve got to do your best. In indexsy are a few strategies you can use to engage with Gen Z with email marketing.
Gen Z prefers only a few sentences in their emails and a couple of images — otherwise, they’ll delete it quickly. Avoid writing a lengthy email that’s just blocks of text. They won’t read it and will unsubscribe ASAP.
Gen Zers know you have access to a lot of their online data, so don’t be afraid to use it. Send them a coupon the day after they bought a new pair of shoes off your site. If you see that a particular segment always clicks on links about a certain topic, offer them additional resources about it. Look at what your readers do and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
These people get a lot of emails, so make sure to identify your brand. You can also remind them why they’re receiving the email (“You’re receiving this email because you subscribed at…”) to be extra-sure they know who you are.
Your subject line can heavily influence whether Gen Z opens your emails. You may only have a few seconds to catch their eye because of their innate content filters, so make them count.
Have a copywriter write compelling and engaging emails that aren’t the same tired messages Gen Zers are used to seeing. Skip the pushy sales messages, or risk putting them off. Use a Web design wirral professional to create a modern, entertaining email that they’ll look forward to.
Gen Z wants to know about your products, but more importantly, whether your brand is a good fit. That means talking about your company values, the language you use, the way you develop a relationship with them, and the kind of experience you deliver to them.
Most Gen Zers want coupons, promos, and special offers via email, and they will skip the company updates and links to blogs or other resources. They expect you to deliver updates elsewhere online, such as a social media channel, so keep your messages different for each channel.
You may have a lot of preconceived ideas about Gen Z, especially when it comes to email marketing. Unlike some other generations, they still use email every day. They’re used to having access to information all the time, and it’s no different with email.
Instead of shifting your marketing budget to other channels like social media, consider keeping a good portion of it for email. You may be surprised at how well it does for your brand.
How CopyPress Uses Content To Build A Sustainable Lead Flow
Content marketing is one of the most popular tactics for generating a stable flow of traffic and increase organic search results. However, most sites investing in content are doing so for a more purposeful reason than traffic alone.
Typically, content marketing is used to generate more visitors with the goal of increasing leads and sales. If you’re looking for content to increase your lead flow, then you may want to try the strategy below. CopyPress has perfected content marketing over the last six months to increase their lead flow by 300%.
Who is CopyPress and Why Should You Care?
Before I begin, let’s provide a little context if you’re not familiar with CopyPress. CopyPress is a content marketing company that focuses on creating content. Such as blog articles, infographics, white papers, interactive, and videos. They also focus on promoting content (outreach, influencer marketing, links).
We work with brands like Hipmunk, Airbnb, Uber, and Macy’s to create and promote branded content.
We provide a fully-managed offering. We have a creative community of over 300 certified and vetted writers, editors, designers, and developers. Also, an influencer and publisher inventory in the thousands.
The strategy we describe below is possible for any company across any industry. We’ve used our unique position and resources to perfect the approach and are prepared to scale it for any business sector.
CopyPress’s Lead Funnel Content Marketing Approach
This particular content strategy is built to generate email conversions to grow our lead list. We have a steady flow of leads through organic search, referrals, and other methods – but we wanted to build more targeted leads for offerings that we wanted to grow, i.e. our infographic sales.
To help follow the strategy, I’ll be including screenshots and examples based on one of our successful campaigns.
Step 1: Pick a Topic
As mentioned above, our goal for one of our campaigns was to increase infographic leads. Infographics are still an incredible tool for outreach and link earning, as well as social media and onsite engagement. We believe we’re one of the best infographic design companies and want to highlight this offering.
Knowing our objective, we decided to pick the topic “How To Create Amazing Infographics.”
The topic is critical. The entire strategy hinges on what topic you pick. Try to make sure it resonates with your audience and matches one of your core competencies as a business. The more campaigns you run, the more likely you’ll need to branch out to peripheral topics, but for a start – pick something that is highly relevant.
Step 2: Build An Email Drip Campaign
After you pick a topic, the next step is to develop an email drip campaign. An email drip campaign is a series of relevant emails sent to users once they sign up for your email lists. These emails can trigger automatically once they give you their email. It follows that user through the entire sales funnel if necessary.
With regards to our strategy, we create a series of emails on the exact topic we’re covering before we launch the lead form. This means we must know the dates of our webinar and release of the whitepaper. Once these dates are sent, you need to set hard deadlines for the creatives to hit to be ready to launch. You want to match expectations, so it’s critical that the information in the drip emails match up with what they will receive.
These emails will be adjusted once the content is officially released. No longer will it provide an expected date, but it will simply provide the content or a link to it.
It’s important to set up ongoing emails with your drip. Don’t just send them the content and add them to a bulk email list. If they wanted to download the whitepaper on creating infographics, then set a series of infographic-specific emails to follow. We follow ours with discounts and other relevant offers that relate to our infographic creation product.
Below is an example of one of our infographic drip emails.
Step 3: Create an Onsite Lead Form
With your topic selected and drip campaign finished, the next step is to create a lead form on your website to start collecting emails around this specific idea. Our strategy has two gated forms of content (webinar and whitepaper), released one after the other – so you’ll want to create a lead form for both pieces.
The webinar form should discuss when the live webinar will be held and the whitepaper form should discuss when the whitepaper will be released. After both have occurred, the copy on each lead form should be updated to reflect the new information. In the example below, you can see that our webinar page has language saying the “webinar was already held.”
Create the lead form pages as quickly as possible. The longer you have the pages up, the more emails you can generate. We also create between 250-500 unique words on each lead form to describe why the person should sign up. These pages will live on your site indefinitely and will be used for outreach later, so make sure they reflect your brand and are user-friendly.
Step 4: Create a Whitepaper
The next step in the process is to create the white paper. It’s important that you create the whitepaper first because it will be the foundation for the other types of content. White papers should be well researched, thoroughly written, and provide actionable information for your target audience. If you can accomplish these three points, you’ll create a strong content asset that people will want to download, read, and share.
To create a great whitepaper, you need to blend research, writing, and design. Because CopyPress has a community of writers, editors, and designers, we are uniquely positioned to create whitepapers seamlessly.
If you’re trying to execute this strategy on your own, it’s important that you test your whitepaper writer, editor, and designer to make sure they understand the subject matter and can execute the project to your quality standards.
The example above shows you a look at the Amazing Infographics Whitepaper. We try to blend great copy with an eye-catching and easily scannable document. More than anything, it’s critical that the information in the whitepaper be engaging and loaded with data and valuable information.
Note: Even though you finish the whitepaper first, you will not publish it until after the webinar.
Step 5: Create an Infographic
With all the research completed and whitepaper started, you can begin creating an infographic on the same topic. The information, data, and content of the whitepaper provide context and a framework for your infographic. This eliminates a lot of the work that is involved with researching the infographic topic.
You don’t need to finish step 3 before starting step 4. But you should definitely wait until you have the first draft of the white paper copy. To ensure that the two pieces of content are relatively consistent.
Creating an infographic on the same topic of the whitepaper is a great way to recycle subject matter and stretch the ROI. We have a team of designers in our community who specialize in infographic creation, so our ability to create amazing infographics is streamlined. If you don’t have designers on hand that you’ve used in the past, you may want to hire a company like CopyPress or utilize a creative marketplace to find and vet infographic designers.
Infographics are still a valuable asset for content marketers. There are some bad infographics on the internet, but if you’re able to devote the time and resources to create a good one, you can see amazing results with strategic outreach and user engagement. For this strategy, we use the infographic in our outreach to drive links and downloads to our whitepaper.
Below is a small excerpt from our Amazing Infographics Infographic. You can see the entire infographic here.
Step 6: Host a Webinar
Once you have your whitepaper and infographic complete, you can launch your webinar. We launch our webinars the day before we release the whitepaper. This helps us create more buzz and excitement for the whitepaper, which is released directly following a live webinar on the same topic.
The webinar can be live or pre-recorded, whichever works best with your schedule. We typical host ours live because we also allow for an interactive Q&A session at the end of the webinar. This increases the user engagement and helps diversify our content more than with what is covered in the whitepaper.
The subject matter discussed in the webinar follows the whitepaper and infographic directly. We actually slice up the infographic points that we plan to discuss in the webinar and put it into a SlideShare presentation.
Regardless of how you structure the webinar, the important thing to remember is that all the work is done already. You’ve done it already with the research and writing of the whitepaper and infographic. A webinar is simply a different form of the same information.
Step 7: Infographic Outreach and Syndication
By this point in the process, all the content is created, and the only goal now is to generate as many downloads as possible. Great content won’t survive on its own; it requires strategic promotion and outreach to drive meaningful, targeted traffic.
To do this, we focus our promotion on infographic syndication. Since we created the infographic using data from the whitepaper, we strive to get a resource link back to the whitepaper with our syndicated post. Since both assets are high-quality and resourceful, most publishers are completely open to this. Backlinks to our whitepaper signup page will increase downloads and also help to improve our organic search ranking for that topic.
Even if they don’t allow us to include a link, simply getting our infographic on the site with our brand mention is an excellent way to increase awareness of our offering and company.
We have a very methodical approach to outreach and syndication. We first look for publishers who have written or published content similar to our topic. Buzzsumo or Ahrefs are great resources to find what sites have published on a topic before.
Once we have a list of sites that fit our topic, we find the best contact from that site to reach out to. Usually, you can find contact information via their website, LinkedIn, or a quick Google search. We always try to find a person and not a generic email. We then add the person’s name and email to the site list we created.
We then reach out to the contact with a templated email that says something along the lines of:
“Hi [name],
CopyPress just launched a whitepaper “How to Create Amazing Infographics, ” and we’re reaching out to publishers like [Website Name] to help raise awareness.
We are offering publishers a free infographic (view here) and custom introduction (which we’ll write for you) in the hopes that we can increase the downloads of our whitepaper.
Are you interested?”
This outreach strategy is transparent about our intentions – we want to give you an infographic to publish in exchange for promotion of our whitepaper.
We average about a 20% response rate on our pitches and an 85% acceptance rate on submitted infographics.
When working with our syndicated posts, we offer to write a custom introduction. This gives us the opportunity to include our whitepaper link in the text naturally while dictating the quality of the intro on their website. We find this tactic helpful because it adds more value to the publisher and gives us a certain level of control to the context.
As we develop these publisher relationships, we always consider the long-term value. Many of the publishers we worked with on our first syndication project are still syndicating infographics today. That’s because we’re able to provide them with unique and valuable content on a consistent basis. These relationships help increase downloads and help our organic search rankings.
Step 8: Rinse and Repeat
This strategy has helped CopyPress grow our lead funnel and convert some amazing new clients. But, it’s not perfect and will continue to change as we move forward. We’ve iterated steps and processes many times, and as you start to do it yourself, you’ll find ways to tweak it based on your needs.
Use the guideline above as a blueprint for leveraging content to increase lead flow. You can find examples of our webinars, whitepapers, and infographics via our resources page and if you want to talk to the CopyPress team about customizing this strategy for your business, feel free to reach out to us directly.
Never fails. Every month I get a question from someone and they ask should I be building my email list or my social media profiles? And you know what? Here’s the answer if you’re not building your email list you are an idiot. If you are not using an email address checker tool, well you should consider it now! This is according to Derek Halpern, the founder of Social Triggers, and he stills want to hit his head against the wall for not building his email list sooner on every single one of his websites. So let’s get into it. I got two numbers for you three hundred and forty-two hundred.
So let’s get into it. I got two numbers for you three hundred and forty-two hundred. OK, a few months ago when I updated my Twitter account and I sent the link to my Twitter followers I sent about three hundred clicks to my website, but when I shared that same link to a similar amount of email subscribers I sent forty-two hundred clicks to my website. Now I know you can’t spend clicks but those clicks are people the more people you get to your website the more money you can make.
More people more clicks more money. Why does email outperform twitter by such a large margin, even though you are sending links to the same amount of people? Look at it like this. How many e-mails the do people get per day? A hundred? How many Twitter updates do they get per day? Thousands? What’s more likely to be seen? One in a hundred or one in a thousand? Obviously one in a hundred.
That said I know I’m talking about Twitter right but I’ve seen the same exact thing with Facebook and Google plus. If I send an update to my Facebook or Google+ following I find that it drastically under performs email as well. Now since email performs so much better than social media you would think building an email list is harder but in my experience, that’s not the case. As a matter of fact, I think building a social media following is harder than building an email list. I’ll explain When I sent about a thousand clicks to an opt-in page about fifty percent of those people then went ahead and opted into my email.
So a thousand people fifty percent five hundred people became email subscribers. On a whole other twist of fate when I sent a thousand clicks to my Twitter page I didn’t even gain five hundred new followers. The Twitter page actually underperformed an email opt-in page people were seemingly less likely to follow me on Twitter than they were to subscribe to my email. Now, this is strange because e-mail crushes social media. The question is how can you begin growing your email list? It turns out that people can start growing their lists today with these two simple strategies. Number one
Number one, add opt-in forms to the right places on your website. Alright, that’s it seriously just add opt-in forms to the right places. one of my readers Laura of momables.com followed my advice and where to place opt-in forms and here’s what happened she went from getting between five and eight email subscribers per day new email subscribers between five and eight email subscribers to twenty-five to thirty-eight email subscribers per day.
That’s a huge increase. All by adding the email forms to the right places on her website. So where are the right places to add the email sign up forms? I’d add one to the top of your sidebar, one to the top of your pages and one in your about page and I’d even consider using a pop-up.
Number two I’d eliminate clutter from your web design because I believe clutter is the Number one conversion killer on web designs.
Alright, and I talked about this study before but to really drive this point home Sheena Iyengar did this famous jams study where she discovered that people when confronted with too many different decisions to make too many options they tend to walk away from that decision process and choose no options. So when you have a cluttered website and there are too many things for people to click on, people often decide to click on nothing and leave your site never to return. And check it, the same goes for email sign up forms. If there’s too much clutter on your website people are not going to sign up for your mailing list because they’re going to be overwhelmed with too many options.
So are you building your email list as your main priority? If yes congratulations go ahead and leave a comment below this video letting me know how it’s working for you. If no I want to hear about that too but I have a fair warning I might make fun of you. That said do you know anyone who is not building their email list as their main priority? Go ahead and send them a link to this post to help change their mind. They’ll probably thank you and me later.
And here’s my blatant self-promotion telling you to go to WPOptinBoxes to get on my email list because building your email list should be priority number one.
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You’ll get premium training material that I only make available for email list subscribers and now want to make it rain subscribe boxes.
Use Video To Increase Click-Through Rates and more…
More and more video is appearing online – both personal videos people share with friends and videos marketers are using to sell their products, build traffic to their websites, as products themselves, and to build their lists.
The infographic below tells the story…
When you talk about using video for list-building, most people immediately think of offering downloadable videos as bait to get people to opt-in – and that’s a very good use of video. But there’s an even better way to use video for building your list – Video Squeeze Pages!
Watch This An Example Of An AWESOME Opt-In Video
The results from video opt-in pages are extremely encouraging – marketers are reporting much higher opt-in rates with video squeeze pages than the standard HTML pages that were there before. And that’s not really surprising if you think about life in the offline world.
It’s human nature that we prefer doing business with people we know, as opposed to big, faceless corporations. You like dealing with Bob the grocer, Mary the hairdresser, Donna the newspaper girl and Billy the pool boy. But what emotion is called up by thinking about the government, the banks, the telephone and cable companies or an oil company? Which of those two groups would you rather your money was going to?
The same will most likely prove to be the case online, based on the results being achieved from video. When you do a quick video inviting people to sign up and telling them about your offer or your incentive, they’re doing business with YOU – a real, live human being they can probably relate to, as opposed to a big faceless website.
You’ve been to a number of the huge websites – from corporate sites to the search engines. Feel any emotional attachments to them? Would you care if they disappeared tomorrow and were replaced by another? Would you even notice?
But if you frequent a marketer’s site, one that presents themselves in videos for you, the connection is stronger. Not as strong as if you’d met them in person, perhaps, but MUCH more so than a corporate site.
And THAT’S the reason emerging for the fact that video squeeze pages get better results. And like anything in the realm of marketing, better results means more profit – and that more and more people will be following suit until the market is saturated – if that level CAN be reached online.
9 ways you can use video to build your opt-in lists.
Add annotations to YouTube videos.
Include a pitch to join your list at the end of every video
Of course, you’ll never realize the benefits of using video to build you list unless you take action. The truth is, it’s easier than ever to create video content thanks to Smartphones. With technology that you use every day, you can create a video for an opt-in page in minutes.
In a future post, I’ll be showing you step-by-step how I create simple videos for opt-in pages using my cell phone.
So, let me know what you think in the comments below. If you’re using video to build your list, how? If not, what’s stopping you from getting started?
If you have been an Internet Marketer for more than a few days, you have without a doubt already seen a ton of articles telling you about the value of building your opt-in list. What most of the ‘experts’ don’t tell you is that building an EFFECTIVE and profitable opt-in list takes time and effort.
You can have a very long opt-in list with hundreds of names and email addresses and still not be making any sales. There are opt-in lists and then there are EFFECTIVE opt-in lists.
Now don’t misunderstand what is being said here. You will never sell your front-end product or service to every single person that is on your opt-in list. That would be an Internet marketer’s dream come true but it just isn’t going to happen.
The first trick is, of course, getting an opt-in list. Turning it into an effective opt-in list comes second.
In order to get your website visitors to join your opt-in list, you will need to make it worth their while to do so. You will need to give them something that is related to the topic of your website and to the product or service that you are selling. It needs to have value to a potential customer – something that truly helps them.
In recent years this has come to known as a “Lead Magnet”. There are various other terms to describe your “free” offer such as “ethical bribe”, “freebie”, etc.
For example; if you are selling accounting software, you might give them free access to an e-book that gives them information about little-known business tax deductions in exchange for their name and e-mail address. You will capture names and email addresses of those who are the most likely to be interested in buying what you are selling and you are starting to build more than just an opt-in list – you are starting to build an effective opt-in list.
That brings me to the next area of debate which surrounds whether it is prudent to request your subscribers confirm their subscription to your list or not. For many years the standard practice was to utilize what is commonly referred to as a “double-optin”.
When a visitor joined your list, they would receive a message stating that they needed to click a link to confirm their joining your list. The benefit of the added step protected the list owner from potential “CAN-SPAM-ACT” violations if at some point in the future the subscriber made a claim that they were added to your list without their permission.
Nowadays, more and more marketers are not requiring this step. And probably for good reason as more of the public is aware to list building tactics and any kind of friction in the process tends to reduce optin rates.
Also, you will probably notice that fewer optin forms require a subscribers name and only ask for their email address.
Your own results may vary and only through testing (A/B Split Testing) will you determine the best course of action for you as you build your list.
In my own experience, I’ve come to rely more and more on testing as market conditions change. What worked a few months ago may not be as effective today.
Building a an effective opt-in list requires more than just great squeeze pages and an auto-responder service. You will need to learn what works with your target audience and then how to communicate with your subscribers to build trust and authority.
You turn that opt-in list into an effective opt-in list by regular communication. You stay in contact with those who did opt-in and you continue to provide them with related information and incentives to buy your front-end product or service or one or more of your back-end products. To keep them interested and keep your name in the front of their mind, be sure you keep in touch with your list at least weekly, if not more often.
There are those who will tell you that building an opt-in list is quick, easy and absolutely painless. Don’t you believe one word of it! Building opt-in lists that will actually produce sales take a lot of time, effort and energy. If you don’t believe me, go ask one of the top marketers how long it took them to build their massive lists. Every one of them will tell you that they spent years building up those opt-in lists.
Below you can download my guide that walks you step by step through the process. It’s free, just follow the instructions below.
[wpsharely id=”2576″]Click here to download your free guide! [/wpsharely]
Download Free How To Build Effective Sales Funnels
Fundamental to the success of most online businesses (particularly information product based companies), is the idea of the sales funnel. Many of the most successful Online Marketers made their name in a particular market segment and took over by developing a very specific sales funnel procedure; guiding prospects via an optimized and tested channel of sales and marketing.
The sales funnel begins by capturing the interest of prospects. A certain percentage of prospects get persuaded to buy and purchase a basic level product, demonstrating they need to have what’s available and are prepared to invest money to resolve their problem.
A sales funnel will then continue to engage with the very best clients, eliminating mismatches and zoning in on the particular target client, offering them more specific services and products, usually at higher prices.
By the finish of this process, the funnel has identified the ultra-responsive clients who buy everything available and obtain the most value and satisfaction out of every purchase made. It’s from these super-responsive customers that almost all profits are created.
In this free eBook, I will introduce you to the sales funnel using simple language. You will learn, exactly, to develop sales funnels, including an assessment of the front end and the back end, and explain why you have to continually trial your funnel procedure thoroughly to make sure of long-term success. I will also examine the various online marketing methods often utilized as a part of a sales funnel’s operation.
