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15
Marketing

3 Strategies for Email Marketing and How to Succeed with Each

3 Strategies to Email Marketing

The three strategies to email marketing can all work well, if your copy is good. photo: Glen Edelson

Email marketing has the highest response rate out of any marketing method.

Does that mean spamming works? Well, someone has to buy something from spammers, otherwise they’d become extinct.

But there’s spamming, and then there’s quality direct email marketing.

The latter is one of the best strategies to market B-2-B products and services, but B-2-C businesses can learn a lot from it too.

It might not be right for you. Maybe content email marketing works better for your business, but understanding the principles behind the other two email strategies will make a huge difference to your success.

So, here are the three strategies to email marketing, how to figure out which is best for your business, and how to succeed with each.

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21
Marketing

How to Seduce a Goldfish

Interested Gold Fishes

Capturing attention is the first step in marketing. photo: Kamillo Kluth

Have you ever knocked on a fish tank’s side, and felt betrayed by the goldfishes that don’t pay attention to you?

You can push your face against the side, scream – loudly enough to wake up a fossil – at them, or serve their favorite purple treats that smell like chicken sh**. And still the fishes are more fascinated by the water around them, than about what you have to say.

Ever felt the same in Twitter? Or about the blog post you’re so proud of, but that no one reads? Or about the landing page that sends visitors away?

When you want a person (or a goldfish if that’s your thing) to forget to pick up their mom from the airfield, and instead focus on your message, you have a problem: you have 9 seconds to capture attention before they go back to browsing YouTube (and still forget the mom).

People have the attention span of a goldfish. That means your marketing will fail miserably, unless you know how to create fascination.

Attention and interest are the starting points for marketing. If you don’t get that far, nothing else matters.

How do you capture attention and keep people interested long enough? Here are the 3 things you need to understand, and a way to make it all much easier.

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24
Marketing

101 Headline Formulas that Capture Attention and Get Your Message Read

101 Headline Formulas - The Ultimate Swipe File

"The Only Swipe File You'll Ever Need"

The headline is the most important part of any text.

It will either keep people reading what you have to say, or send them away.

How many headlines do you read during a day? Twitter, Facebook, email, magazines, etc. Altogether 100? Maybe more?

And how many of those make you read more?

An average headline gets around 25% of people to read on. And even fewer read to the end. Even when reading and leaving are the only possibilities (landing pages, magazines, etc.).

What do you think happens to those percentages in Twitter where dozens of headlines fight for attention?

So, what can you do to beat the odds?

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4
MarketingSuccess Principles

Review: Fascinate – Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation

Fascinate by Sally HogsheadFascinate by Sally HogsheadFascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation by Sally Hogshead

Rating: 4.5/5

Ever wondered how to capture people’s attention completely? Or why you sometimes lose track of time?

The answer to both is fascination.

What is it? Fascination is powerful attraction that captures your attention and focus.

Why should you care?

Fascination is the best tool you have to get your message heard.

If you want to be good at copywriting, you need to understand how to fascinate people.

If you want to write captivating headlines, you need to make them fascinating.

If you want to be fascinating in your personal life or at work, you need to understand the seven triggers.

But the one question remains: What is fascinating and how do you write/become more fascinating?

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20
Marketing

Rules of Marketing – Are Your Following the Wrong Rules?

Breaking the Rules of Marketing

Breaking the rules of effective marketing isn't illegal, you just lose your customers. photo: kelsey e.

Every game has its rules and you can’t succeed if you don’t understand them. So, what are the rules of marketing?

The rules of marketing include the laws and regulations, but you’ll never win a game if you only avoid breaking its rules. When it comes to effective marketing, the referee is the consumer and they get to choose the winner.

Marketing is a game where you get points for style and the consumers decide who wins.

How do they choose the winner? How do you style points? And which rules shouldn’t you ever break?

In other words: How do you create effective marketing messages?

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Success Principles

Scared of Outsourcing Your Customer Service?

Setting Up a Call Center

When your company grows, one phone isn't enough anymore... photo: David Long

This guest post is written by Gere Jordan.

When you call a business and reach a courteous, seemingly scripted customer service representative, you generally feel like you’re speaking with a bigger company. For good or ill, these are the companies that have the resources to man such an operation.

Despite the sometimes negative experience associated with calling customer service, deploying one for your small business can have a positive impact on customer satisfaction and, ultimately, your bottom line. You just have to take the time to do things right.

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21
Marketing

Stockmann Syndrome – Don’t Try this (Landing Page) at Home

Landing Page Conversion

You can't always hit the bulls-eye, but you'll always do fine with these three landing page principles. photo: ##Erika**

Landing pages are a cornerstone of online marketing, but sometimes even large companies forget how to build effective landing pages.

Stockmann is the best known and most prestigious department store in Finland. They’ve been around for 125 years and their special sale is an event people wait almost religiously.

Their marketing is usually really good, but the other day I stumbled onto their opt-in email list landing page. All the three basic elements of an effective landing page were wrong.

I could not believe they could go so wrong with their marketing. But so does many other major companies all around the world.

If you follow these three basic guidelines, you’re landing page will get at least an average conversion. But if you forget even one of these basics, your conversion will sink.

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4
Marketing

5 Most Important Design Aspects of a Business Website

The New Blog Theme and the New Website are Finished

My new blog theme and the new website are finally online.

The new blog theme and a website I built from scratch are finally here. It took me about 11 weeks and 100 liters of tea (yes tea, not coffee).

I’m not a developer so I won’t attempt to say much about the coding. I’m a business owner and the goal of my blog is to support my business; that was the starting point for the design.

But why on earth did I decide to do it myself instead of hiring someone to do it for me? Uhmm… Because I wanted to be in full control of every element and I had no idea how much work it would be ;) The depressing part is that I’m nowhere near finished; there’s a lot I’m going to change. But for now, the basics are done.

I did learn a lot and these things apply to every web site, not just blogs, meant to drive business.

So, here’s the five most important design aspects of a website from a business stand point.

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Marketing

New Blog Theme – Coming Soon

If you’ve read Affect Selling for a while, you may have noticed I’ve posted a lot less frequently recently than usual. That’s because I’ve built a new theme for the blog from scratch (it’ll be published next week).

For many people that’s not a huge task. Unfortunately I’m not one of those people; I have no training in coding, I understand nothing about Javascript or complex PHP, and I’m clueless when it comes to databases.

And on top of the new blog theme, I’ve been building another site too. Affect Selling will become the blog part of the new site once it’s up and running.

Fortunately there’s quite a few things I’ve learned in the process, even if you exclude the coding part.

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22
Management

Potatoes – The Great Time Management Teachers

Time Management Lesson by Potatoes

Potatoes can teach you the most important time management lesson. photo: dag endresen

Time management is one of those topics, that you can easily find millions of blog posts about. But it’s also one of those topics that you can read a million blog posts about without actually changing anything.

I recently wrote about what I learned about deadlines (and time management) when we prepared for our wedding. And I do believe the lessons are important and universal.

But I had read those things a hundred times and thought about them and tried to use them, without success. I had to learn them from my mistakes.

In fact there’s only one time management lesson I can think of, that is so simple you can learn it from a blog post. And potatoes have taught it to me.

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