New Interview: Secrets to Turning Quality B2B Leads into Business Wins

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I was just interviewed on DesignRush. Here’s an excerpt:

His ultimate tip for delivering relevant and tailored messaging is:

“The #1 thing I want to warn B2B marketers against is using spammy pseudo-personalization, for example, sending mass LinkedIn messages where all you’re personalizing is name, company name, etc. via tokens.

These are easy to see through. It’s either a program or a person who did very little work. It makes sense to get and use data, within reason and respecting privacy, but the actual creative for marketing campaigns needs to be unique and inspired.”

Check out the entire interview here.

Here are 4 Flaws in Your Email Marketing Strategy

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Email marketing can be an effective marketing strategy. It is a great way to connect with customers and promote your business, but there are some potential pitfalls if you go about it the wrong way. Here are four common email marketing mistakes to avoid.

Failing to Tailor the Tone to Your Audience

When it comes to email marketing, there’s no tone format that’s set in stone. Instead, just as you would take care with the way you speak to someone in person, it’s important to think about the tone of your email correspondence. 

You wouldn’t want to come across as too formal or too casual depending on the demographic the emails will be addressed to. For instance, if your primary audience is the elderly residents of assisted living facilities, avoid using slang or overly technical language. 

Alternatively, if your target demographic is teenagers, use slang that is informal and relatable.

Failing to Personalize

Another mistake people make when emailing is failing to personalize the email. Just as with the tone of your email, it’s important to remember that you’re emailing another human being. 

Addressing the recipient by name is a small, but important, way to show that you value them as an individual. 

Another way to personalize your email is to include information about the recipient. If you have their purchase history, you can use that to recommend other products they might be interested in. Or, if you know they’re attending an upcoming event, you can mention it in the email.

Failing to Not Spam

This is an especially fatal mistake to avoid. Bombarding your customers with several emails a day is a good way to be assigned to the spam folder very quickly. 

It’s important to find a balance between staying in touch and becoming a nuisance. In general, it’s a good idea to stick to one email per week. 

If you have multiple things you want to promote, consider sending a weekly digest that includes all of the information in one email. This way, your customers can read through everything at their leisure and decide what they’re interested in. 

Failing to Test

Before you hit send on your email marketing campaign, it’s important to test the email. 

This means sending a test email to yourself or a small group of people to make sure the email looks the way you want it to and that all the links work. 

It’s also important to test different subject lines to see what gets the most opens. You can use an A/B testing tool to help with this. 

To illustrate how A/B testing works, let’s say you want to test two subject lines for an email about a new product. You would send one email with Subject Line A to half of your list and another email with Subject Line B to the other half. You would then track which subject line got more opens and use that as your winning subject line.

Email marketing is a top marketing strategy with numerous benefits. Yet, it can be tricky to get it right. So, it’s important to avoid these common mistakes to ensure your campaign is successful.

Digital Marketing Tools For Your Business

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If you’re looking to build a more comprehensive digital marketing campaign, you need to know what tools you have at your disposal.  Understanding what you have to work with will grant you a more versatile ability to market your business online.  

Lucky for you, everything you need to know can be found with the right search inquiry online.  Start by checking out a few digital marketing tools for your business.  Here is a quick look at some of the most influential ways to craft a winning digital marketing campaign.  

Podcast advertising 

Branch your marketing efforts out with podcast advertising to engage your target audience online.  Podcasting keeps people interested with visual engagement and the opportunity to learn something new.  

With a strong podcast marketing effort, your business stands to experience a range of benefits.  Increased sales, hyper targeting abilities, and a small boost in SEO make podcasting a tool to consider.  

Social media management

Social media is a huge part of running a successful marketing campaign online.  You go where the people are, and the people love their social media.  

However, your business needs more than one platform to cast the widest net, and managing all those social media profiles can become quite challenging.  

The good news is that there’s a long list of programs that will help you manage your social media profiles in one place.  Check into what Hootsuite can do for your business.  

Google marketing tools

Google gives business owners a bone with their array of marketing tools.  If you’re not in tune with what Google has to offer your digital marketing efforts, today is a good day to check it out.  

Google offers the ability to analyze the performance of your digital content, keyword assistance, and much more.  The best part about using Google tools is that you can do it all for free.  

Email marketing 

Email marketing is another influential element when carving a path in digital marketing.  Your business can get a lot out of keeping the conversation moving via email.  

Managing a successful email marketing effort is much easier when you have the help of a program like MailChimp.  Send emails out to hundreds of people in a fraction of the time it would take to do the work manually.  

Tools for collaboration

Keeping everyone within your operation on the same page is also an essential part of running a successful digital marketing campaign.  Your business professionals can collaborate on projects and keep track of progress along the way with the help of a capable tool like Trello.  

Overall, if you find the right collection of marketing tools, your business will make a more memorable impression on your digital audience.  Take the time to find the programs that best complement your operation.  

email vs linkedin inmail

LinkedIn InMail vs. Email for Recruiting and Staffing

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Since we’ve been working with email marketing, especially in the recruiting and staffing space, we’ve heard a number of people say they use LinkedInⓇ InMail to find new candidates. And some of those that are recruiting/staffing companies also use LinkedInⓇ InMail to find new clients.

We also hear their complaints about LinkedInⓇ, and their lack of results. Frankly, it makes sense to us that they aren’t getting the results they want on LinkedInⓇ. And I say this as someone LinkedInⓇ has endorsed and who wrote a book on LinkedInⓇ for business development. I’ve tested LinkedInⓇ extensively against other platforms and strategies. More surprising to me are the people who sound happy with LinkedInⓇ, but their results are not that impressive.

What is LinkedIn InMail?

InMail is a service from LinkedInⓇ where you can directly contact other LinkedInⓇ members. If you have a free account, you can only contact those you are connected to. With a premium account, you can use InMail to contact any LinkedInⓇ member, as long as their preferences are set to receive InMail.

LinkedInⓇ InMail has some serious obstacles and deficiencies that make it hard for you to succeed.

The biggest problems with LinkedInⓇ are…

LinkedIn InMail vs email
  1. People don’t read InMail… because it is so spammed up by business development people. Most of the messages are low-quality cold messages with no personalization. If you are in certain job functions or are in leadership, you probably get a ton of this InMail spam. Because of that, your message doesn’t get seen by the people you’re sending to, and they feel no compunction to respond.
  2. People who DO read InMail may not check it for days. And when they do check it, your message is buried in an avalanche of amateur cold spam InMails. So, InMail doesn’t result in quick responses, and possibly no response if people “turn off” to it because of all the spam.
  3. People do read email, many times per day. Spam has less effect here, because it’s usually filtered automatically by the servers. But if you can get into their inbox with your cold email, your message is received and read.
  4. InMail is one at a time, very slow and time-consuming. Email can be sent to thousands of potential clients and candidates at once, or in just a few days.
  5. LinkedIn™ Recruiter Tools can be cheap, but you get what you pay for.
  6. LinkedIn™ Recruiter doesn’t give you emails or phone numbers. You’re stuck in the limited LinkedIn ecosystem.
  7. You need valid up-to-date contacts with emails and phone numbers to have a chance to be seen and get responses from more clients and candidates.

You can see why, done right, outgoing sales emails can have a greater impact on your results than LinkedInⓇ InMail. If you’re not doing it, I highly recommend you look into it!

Cold email, Gmail, email

What We Learned From Cold Emailing 175,000 Sales Prospects during COVID-19

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Cold emailing is exciting to me right now. It works to drive new business. Even during a pandemic. And you can do it above-board (which is certainly easier in the U.S., outside of California).

What’s “cold emailing”? It means emailing new people for the purposes of letting them raise their hands if they’re interested in your offering. It’s a sales email. 

Done right, most people welcome them, or at worst ignore them. Done wrong, and you can create ill will, get your domain blacklisted, or even be subject to federal or state penalties.

Over the last 6 months, we’ve been involved in dozens of outgoing cold emailing campaigns for 8 clients and for ourselves. We’ve sent roughly 175,000 emails in that time. I’ll give you the stats and insights on that in this post.

And yes, we have done it all in legally compliant ways. If you think of sales emails as “spam”, I’d urge you to educate yourself with this sales email Q&A article.

Can You Sell During a Pandemic?

I may have picked the wrong time to get into sales!

Actually, I’ve been selling services since 2005, but most of that time, I didn’t think of myself as a salesperson, I almost never used cold email for sales prospecting until 2018, and, frankly, the economy sucks right now, so it’s tough out there. This was a tough time to start doing 10-20 sales calls a week.

Many small businesses have lost a lot of business due to the pandemic. If you didn’t go out of business, count yourself lucky. If you are still surviving, what can you do to thrive?

You can do more for your existing customers. Sure, you may be worried, and this has been a time when anxiety and depression have risen. But, to me, the best remedy for worry is taking action. Since March, we’ve taken more aggressive sales action than ever before. 

The smart thing about being involved in prospecting and sales during a time like this is that, in the dozens of sales meetings we’ve had since the pandemic started, we’ve had our ears to the ground. We’ve gained constantly updated insights about markets, budgets, operations, and more from real businesses — insights we couldn’t find anywhere else.

That’s one reason I’ve come to really like sales: In a time where we are more isolated than ever, we’ve been able to reach out remotely with Zoom-based sales calls and talk to more people than ever before. Chatting with business people helps with the isolation, and you also get the intel needed to pivot, not to mention… sales!

Friends Pivot!

How Companies are Pivoting During the Pandemic

If you’re like us and some of our clients, “pivot” has been the name of the game in 2020. How are businesses changing to stay afloat or thrive during COVID?

  • The focus of your offering: The market’s needs have changed, which is one reason we’ve promoted ecommerce and sales prospecting services more — businesses need more new ways to find revenue.
  • Sales and marketing targets: Many people have lost jobs, and those still working are wearing more hats; some entire industries have lost so much revenue that they’ve cut many of their normal investments.
  • Clever offers and pricing: People (and many businesses) have less money, so you don’t want to price yourself out of the market, which is possible without even raising your prices. Offers, deals and discounts have always been a great way in B2C to drive purchase decisions. When those deals have an expiration date, that creates urgency, which is often the key to getting new customers. Some businesses, not wanting to undermine the value perception of their offerings, choose instead to add in more freebies or bonuses or service, without lowering their prices.

The Stats on Cold Emailing Results

We’ve done enough of this to have some stats to pass on so that we can answer questions like:

people head comprised of data ones and zeroes
  • How many emails do we need to send?
  • How many get delivered?
  • How many go to spam?
  • What % of people should open a cold email?
  • What % of people reply?
  • What % can we actually get scheduled for a sales call?
  • What % become customers?

Naturally, all of these numbers can vary with a lot of factors, such as:

  • How big is your market?
  • How many customers do you need?
  • How good is your targeting (list sourcing)?
  • How good is your email messaging?
  • Is there a product-market fit?
  • How good are you at follow-up?
  • How effective is your sales pitch?

Have a Look At the Numbers

For one client, initially, we sent 76,000 emails, but in the first phase, we had to test a lot of messaging and the client also was pivoting, trying to figure out product-market fit, and testing out multiple offerings. A number of those campaigns taught us that certain campaigns and offers were not interesting enough to get a response. 

Overall, we got 136 positive leads out of 353 leads, from 76,000 sent emails, and that yielded 26 scheduled meetings. At that rate you have to send 3,000 emails to get one meeting. But that success rate includes all of our early flailing around to find product-market fit. 

When we really found our stride with messaging and a little college trick, we got 24 of those 26 meetings, and 328 of the 353 leads. Using that strategy, we sent 27,000 emails, and that means we only had to send about 1,000 emails to get a scheduled meeting. Some of my newer emails are doing even better than that.

Deliverability and Open Rates

One big consideration in cold emailing success is deliverability. 

Most warm-email providers — like AWeber, Constant Contact and Mailchimp — won’t let you send to cold lists at all.

To send cold emails to purchased lists, you basically have two options:

  1. “Slow-Burn”: You can send slower using platforms like Google and Outlook, and get higher delivery rates. One account might send 1,000 – 3,000 emails in a month. However, your open rates can be 20-60%, so you get, say, 600 email opens from that.
  2. “Fast-Churn”: You can send faster with more mass email-oriented platforms, but you often get lower delivery rates. You might send 30,000 emails in a month, but only get 2-8% open rates, so you get 1,500 opens. In my experience, to get appointments, you have to send about 3x as many emails with fast-churn to get the same number of appointments you get from slow-burn.

Yes, overall, fast-churn gets you more opens; however you’ll deliver to a much lower % of your list, so you end up wasting a lot of contacts. One thing you can do is combine the two methods, and do both.

The Quality of Your Email Lists

You can’t succeed at cold emailing with bad info, outdated info, or incomplete info. Some databases don’t have much info, and some of them are not 100% compliant with state and federal regulations. 

You need things like company name, job title, and more if you want to personalize your emails. And in a world of spammy sales emails, personalization is critical. 

If you do personalization well, you won’t just get responses — you’ll get responses where people thank you for personalizing, and feel bad if they can’t work with you.

But if you don’t have accurate, up-to-date personal info in your contact lists, you can’t do it.

Email and first name are not enough. That’s expected. That won’t make you stand out. You need more, and you need a list provider that has it.

Additionally, you need one that has fresh data. Not data from a year ago. Data from today, yesterday, or at worst a month ago. Keep in mind that 2020 has seen a ton of layoffs, so there are a lot of people who are no longer at the same company. Or may be unemployed.

My recommendation for a list provider is Brothers Data. They have all of that, and very competitive pricing. We do everything with their data.

And Now…

There are many more tips for succeeding with cold emailing, but those are a few to get you started.

If you need help with your lists or email sends, or just can’t keep up with it yourself, reach out and contact us!

Illustration 65968391 © - Dreamstime.com

Why Sending Cold Emails For New Business Actually Works

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Not many things are more controversial in the marketing world than cold email.

"You mean SPAM?!"

“You mean SPAM?!”

4 cans of Spam

No, actually, we have laws like CAN-SPAM, CCPA, CASL and GDPR that are very specific about when and where and how you can email new contacts without it being spam or illegal. In most of the U.S., you can email anyone as long as you include a street address and an unsubscribe option.

"But have they opted in?"

“But have they opted in?”

Right, if it’s an opt-in list, those are people you’ve already done some marketing to (even if they just viewed your website), so that’s not a cold list. Those aren’t net new contacts. And opt-in is not required by law everywhere for every purpose. Including an opt-out method is all you need to do for this in most of the U.S.

"But isn't it just wrong to send email to people who haven't opted in?"

“But isn’t it just wrong to send email to people who haven’t opted in?”

Well, morality is a bigger question… but if it’s not wrong to show ads to people who didn’t ask for ads, then cold emailing isn’t any different. If you do believe advertising is wrong, well, you’re in the minority of business people, and most successful businesses do some kind of advertising somewhere. Some companies rely on door-to-door sales, and you don’t get to opt-in before they knock on your door.

"But don't people just ignore spam anyway?"

“But don’t people just ignore spam anyway?”

Well, again, spam is really just two things: illegal email, and/or email that your email server thinks is spam. Let’s just call it unrequested email. We call a lot of snail mail “junk mail,” but it’s suddenly not junk mail if you decide to use the pizza delivery discount your mailbox got “spammed” with, is it? And this is the most important point:

It’s not spam if it has value to the receiver.

"WHAT?! How can SPAM be valuable?"

“WHAT?! How can SPAM be valuable?”

As in the pizza coupon example, if I send you info about a problem you need solved, and you reply and we get it fixed, then I’ve created value. We’re more likely to call it “spam” if we receive something irrelevant to us. So again, as in much of marketing, relevance is key, and creating value is how we prove relevance.

"How do you write relevant cold emails?"

“How do you write relevant cold emails?”

As with all marketing, you start with the targeting- who fits what you offer, and what are the problems you solve? The more accurately you can target those people, and the more compelling your value message is, the more response you’ll get, and you can do so well that you don’t get ANY spam reports. We have cold email campaigns for ourselves and clients that are getting 44-75% open rates due to high degrees of targeting and deliverability, plus really compelling messaging. Most companies don’t do that well with their warm, opt-in emails.

"But does it really work?"

“But does it really work?”

One company we worked with during COVID-19 got 353 leads (responses to cold emails), setting over 150 sales appointments and capturing 3 new sales. I’m certain we would have had many more sales in normal times, but unfortunately, COVID really slashed most people’s budgets. Point being, this process does work very well, and even in difficult times.

"How do you get it to work so well?"

“How do you get it to work so well?”

I can’t reveal all our strategies and tactics here, because we need to keep a competitive advantage! But the keys are targeting (quality list acquisition), ensuring high levels of deliverability, and staying in the inbox (of course, staying out of the spam box, but also staying out of Gmail’s categories like updates, social, and promotions. Your cold emails are wasted if most people don’t see them.

And then there are the messaging strategies- most people aren’t great at getting a response with their marketing, and cold emails are even more difficult. Not only “why should I open this?” but also, “who the heck are you?” and “why should I care?” If people’s response to your cold email is, “Not opening that- looks like spam!” or “Some rando salesperson with a lame message not relevant to me,” then you’re not going to get any traction with them.

"Don't some salespeople send cold emails all the time?"

“Don’t some salespeople send cold email all the time?”

Ice cubes on a table

Typically, salespeople write bad emails that don’t work. Getting sales appointments is a marketing job and salespeople usually suck at marketing. But salespeople THINK they’re great at marketing. If that’s true why do they have so much trouble getting leads?

Sales and marketing go together like PB&J. We understand sales (because we do it, too), but we’re brilliant at marketing. We’ll get you the leads. You close them. But don’t make us send some salesperson’s crappy emails, because they won’t work.

And most of the decision-makers in sales know about these problems.

"So how do you acquire good emails?"

“So how do you acquire good emails?”

Hopefully, it’s not by scraping or guessing! A lot of services out there do scrape, but not everyone’s email is online, obviously, so that won’t work very well, or in every industry, or for every job title. 

Or they guess people’s emails by knowing what formula a company uses for its email addresses. But this isn’t the best way. 

Having a good email database requires a lot of data input, and it needs to be updated regularly, especially in a time like COVID-19 where many people are changing jobs or being fired or furloughed. So, it’s best to get your emails from a really big source, a company that mainly does that, because it’s a big effort with lots of government compliance issues to consider. We work with a partner, Brothers Data, with a database of over 140 million people just in the U.S. 

“How do you maximize deliverability?”

“How do you maximize deliverability?”

There are some key things to avoid doing, like sending way too many cold emails at once from a new account, sending lots of emails to low quality email lists, not validating emails ahead of time, certain keywords you need to avoid putting in your messaging, and of course, sending boring, long, hard to read, or irrelevant emails that people will get annoyed with and mark as spam. 

There are more than blacklists out there you want to avoid getting put on – there’s also sender reputation on various servers. Big email-sending providers like Gmail and Outlook pool all their info together to prevent spam and phishing. If you do it wrong, your email account will get shut down, or, at best, everything you send will go into spam mailboxes that no one reads.

So you can maximize deliverability with good email lists, good sending practices, and good messaging. Again, we have some campaigns where emails are opened at over 70% open rates, and that’s partly because we maintain great deliverability. Without deliverability, you won’t get opens, because people won’t even see the emails.

“Wow, Brian, how can we hire you to do all this?”

“Wow, Brian, how can we hire you to do all this?”

Just reach out.

10 Reasons You’re Not Getting More Business

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Do you want more new business?

Let’s face it- if you’re not getting new business, you’re at risk. The existing customers could dry up. A recession could hit. Who knows what could happen!

So, if your new business growth is not where you’d like it to be, what’s wrong?

Here are 10 things that could be blocking your organization’s customer growth.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #1: You’re not getting enough attention

If not enough people are giving you money, or buying from you, or inquiring, or coming into your store… do they even know you exist? Do they remember you exist?

You need to get people’s attention, then interest, then desire, and only then will they take action.

How many people’s attention does your business have right now?

  • How many ad impressions do you get a month? How many people do you reach?
  • How many emails from you do people open?
  • How many outbound sales calls does your org make?
  • How many leads do you get?

Even more importantly- how much is enough?

A simple rule is that you need to reach 1,000x as many people as you want customers, and you need to get their attention 5x before you can expect anything from them.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #2: You’re not getting enough traffic

Most businesses rely on website, store or phone activity to get new business.

  • How much website traffic are you getting per day?
  • How many people call a day?
  • How many people are visiting your store daily?

You need 100x as much traffic as however many customers you want.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #3: Your website doesn’t convert people to leads or sales

A lot of people have nice looking but ineffective websites. They don’t even know what their website conversion rate is. That’s like driving without knowing how fast you’re going.

And even worse, if you don’t generate enough traffic, you can’t find out if your website is the problem.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #4: Nobody wants what you offer

For newer businesses, if they’ve never sold at volume, they have an unproven product or service.

The first question to answer is- does anybody want this? Will they pay for it?

Then you can answer WHO will pay for it.

And in order to find out if they want it you have to get in front of them or get people to it.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #5: You’re not aggressive enough about promotion

If you build it, and that’s all, they won’t come.

Marketing and sales are about driving attention, interest and desire.

Some people aren’t aggressive enough- they choose only passive strategies like SEO or content creation.

If you’re not doing something outbound like advertising, networking, or outbound SDR, you’re going nowhere fast.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #6: You’re afraid to spend money

You have to spend money to make money. Why do you think all these new businesses want funding? Making money is expensive.

Attention, traffic and leads cost money. You have to spend it.

That can be hardest at the beginning, but even when times are tight, you have to keep investing. Businesses that pull back on promotion when things are down just end up going down even faster.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #7: You don’t have a creative solution

Content marketing is important for a lot of reasons, but it requires creating that content.

Ads and emails are powerful ways to get attention and traffic, but they require creative copywriting.

Ads, websites and landing pages are compelling ways to get new business, but you need to have an eye for graphic art, and an understanding of how creative affects customer psychology.

Creative skills and resources are critical. And they are often missing from many marketing plans and departments.

As a result, organizations show up in the marketplace looking and sounding mediocre, and fail to impress.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #8: You don’t have a scientific mindset

Business used to be a guessing game. But now we have data, especially online.

We get insights and reports that tell us what works and what doesn’t so that we waste less money and get a bigger response from customers.

If you’re not trying a lot of creative, copy, and new ideas, and learning from what the data says about the customer response, you’re stuck in the old paradigm, you won’t be able to be competitive, and eventually you’ll be replaced by newer companies and people.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #9: You don’t put enough time in

Sometimes we don’t have enough resources to do what needs to be done with sales and marketing.

Sometimes things are going well, so we coast.

The most talented people have drive. The best companies have lots of people who have drive. They are internally motivated to keep doing more and getting better everyday.

BUSINESS BLOCKER #10: You’re not continuously learning

The only constant is change.

Even when digital marketing and sales were young 10 years ago, there was a ton to learn in this space. But it doesn’t stop. Things continue to advance and get more complicated.

What worked 10 years ago may not work now- for example, SEO is much, much harder for new companies as a viable traffic source.

And what wasn’t a good idea 10 years ago might be now- for example, so many companies have gone online with lead gen, that fewer people are cold calling, and sometimes it works better than it did in 2000 or 2010.

You and your marketing and sales people must keep learning- must keep getting training, must keep reading, getting mentored, and going to conferences…

But only if you want to get and stay on top.

Here’s Why Your Sales Emails and LinkedIn Messages Aren’t Working

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Your sales emails and LinkedIn messages suck.

They’re annoying.

They make me want to mark you as spam, not talk to you.

You probably think it’s a numbers game.

And you’re right: as long as you think it’s a numbers game, that gives you an excuse to suck at it, and your numbers will be super low.

And if you treat everyone you email or message the same, and if you don’t get interested in how to get a better response from people:

  • Your numbers will continue to suck.
  • You will give yourself and your company a bad name.
  • You will feel like you’re doing something positive by taking action, but you’re actually having a negative effect.

If you have a PR department or branding people that are trying to give your company a good image, they probably hate that you’re giving your company a bad image with these spammy emails.

If you’re a salesperson, you may think marketing is stupid. That’s just something that lame, introverted, nerdy people do, right?

That attitude shows in spammy emails, because they lack any marketing sense at all.

The first thing a marketer does is give a crap about the audience.

“Hmm, what does the recipient care about?”

This is clearly not your concern when you write spammy emails and InMails.

All you care about is getting a phone call or demo scheduled.

That’s what YOU want.

BUT the prospects you’re writing don’t care what YOU want.

Prospects care about what THEY want.

You aren’t helping them care by writing in a compelling way.

And that’s why they’re marking you as spam and ignoring you.

They’re saying bad things about your company and your entire profession sucking and you don’t even know it.

They wish you cared, because they probably have problems you could solve.

But they aren’t understanding that you could really help, because you aren’t talking to them in a compelling way.

You only care about your numbers and your numbers game, and you’re not communicating well.

You would still do cold calls if they worked. But they don’t work. Do YOU like robocalls? Probably not. They don’t work.

Neither does this spammy, selfish email approach.

Stop bothering people, and start caring about them, and you’ll get a better response.

If this did penetrate your skull at all, then what you need to do next is read 5 or 10 books on copywriting.

Copywriting is the more than 90 year old marketing discipline of figuring out how to write in a way that get people to take action- actions like saying yes to a phone call or demo.

Your emails are copywriting, whether you realize it or not.

It’s just that you are not a trained copywriter, so your emails suck.

Get some training.

You will learn some fundamental mindset shifts.

You will learn to think about your writing from the reader’s perspective.

And people will start responding.

You will get more appointments and sales.

And fewer people will think you suck.

Do it.

Oh, and if you’re not a spammy salesperson, but you agree with this article, share it with those annoying salespeople that bother you. Send it to the next salesperson who spams you via email or LinkedIn. It just might help them out- and prevent the next victim from getting spammed, too!

UPDATE: Some readers asked me, “So which copywriting books do you recommend?”

I first studied copywriting 14 years ago, so I’m sure there are a lot of great new copywriting books beyond what I read… If I were starting now I would go to amazon, search for copywriting, and check out the reviews. The ones I recall liking the most were Scientific Advertising, Confessions of an Advertising Man, Tested Advertising Methods, Words That Sell, Phrases That Sell. Some of those are older (like 1930’s or 1960’s or 1980’s older) so you may need to ignore or update some of their phrases.

But my best source these days for continuing to learn copywriting is applying my own system, plus the feedback I get from the advertising and landing page metrics.

This blog post describes some of the copywriting principles I’ve developed…

and this is a mega blog post of copywriting formulas you might find helpful.

How I Got 9x As Many Email Signups from Hello Bar

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If you’ve read my post The Surprising Way I Tripled My Email Signups, you already know that going for the emotions, and using a little bit of humor can help differentiate you and get you more email subscribers.

I’ve been playing with Hello Bar recently, which is another way to make sure you can contact your website visitors again and again, increasing your pageviews and website visits.

Hello Bar is a little horizontal bar at the top of your website that asks people to opt into your email list. It integrates with a ton of emarketing marketing services- in my case, Aweber.

It’s all about the copywriting. I agree with several people who’ve said learning persuasive copywriting is one of the most valuable skills you can develop to increase how much cash you make over your lifetime. That’s in part because the lessons of copywriting apply everywhere in life- not just in writing.

Copywriting skills are relevant anytime you’re trying to persuade people.

So here are three different types of copy I used:

hello bar 9x

By the way, I lost the original text while accidentally editing the old version instead of duplicating a new one first. But believe me, it was boring.

What’s shocking to me is that I wasn’t implementing some of what I knew. Execution and diligence are critical. Do things the right way- don’t skip over it, or if you do, put it on your to do list!

Lessons (re)learned:

Version #1: Don’t be lazy. Be Diligent.

I let that first Hello Bar run way too long without split-testing other copy. As a result, I missed out on more than 400 subscribers. Coulda woulda shoulda.

Version #2: Be funny.

From other sources, I grew my email list, and claiming 10,000 subscribers PLUS the jokey “I will honestly cry”  text came from what I learned in my Pippity email pop-up tests. That almost doubled my conversion rate, but wasn’t enough.

Version #3: Give something valuable away for free.

Don’t assume people care about your email newsletter. I added in the 3 free ebooks (which is also in my pippity pop-up), and more than quintupled my conversion rate, more than 9x the original text. By the way, an editor may tell you that numbers under 10 should be written out, like “three”. However, I find that numbers break up the text and are easier to process cognitively, so I ignore that rule on purpose.

What’s Next?

I’m a little surprised I got such an increase from just giving them ebooks (without any information about them).

I bet that if I added the benefits of those 3 free ebooks I’d get even higher conversion rate.

And that’ll be my next test!

The Surprising Way I Tripled My Email Signups

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I love Pippity.

Things have changed a lot. Three or four years ago, a pop-up like this was considered too aggressive.

Not anymore.

This is the design I ran for a few months.

pippity1

Only 2.9% of people signed up.

When I relaunched my two sites as the new BrianCarterGroup.com site I also revised the Pippity.

Part of my new branding arc is better integrating my humor and fun-loving personality into business.

To be honest, I edit myself a lot- I know there’s a line where humor is bad for business. But sometimes I let loose. I let the real Brian out. That’s what I did.

Here’s what I wrote, with that in mind:

pippity2

Now 10.2% of my visitors opt in. That’s 3.33 times more emails.

AND part of why they’re opting in is my sense of humor, which means these email subscribers are going to be more particularly tuned in to my brand. My emails won’t have to be as blah as my old signup form was.

They’ve signaled that they like my brand. That’s going to increase conversion rates and lower my cost per sale.

This is the power of hyperbole. Exaggerate things until they are obviously ridiculous, and you give people a little bit of entertainment. They know I’m not really going to cry (although I do, every night)… and the extra W’s make it sound like I’m yelling longer. These things surprise the brain and make people pay more attention.

Deliver value, but have fun with it!