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If You Build It Then What?

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Since baseball is underway and the Chicago Cubs are defending champions of the baseball world, I felt compelled to get all nostalgic and go all Field of Dreams on you! You believe the hype, and you know that if you build it, they will come… but what if they don’t?

You have created a newsletter and website that is beautifully designed utilizing all the elements of color theory, responsive web design, optimized SEO, compressing image sizes that all equate to a very quick loading website… and then nothing! Nothing happens! You wait a few days, weeks… months go by with little to no sales to show for it. The inevitable feeling of doubt creeps in. Questions like the following are quite common.

  • Why isn’t traffic coming to your website?
  • How can you take control to increase response?
  • Did I make a mistake in building a new business or service?

This is not a time to get frightened, these are issues that challenge everyone from time to time! While it is a frustrating concept to wrap your arms around, it all boils down to knowing who your consumers are what interests them! Without that knowledge, you are a baseball team without a captain! (I had to squeeze in one more baseball reference) Once you do find that sweet spot, exploit it and build in Auxiliary Marketing channels to potentially convert those visitors into revenue… and here is how you start!

Let’s break down the term Auxiliary Marketing by defining each of the words individually and then together.
The definition of the word auxiliary is:

  • Giving assistance or support; helping.
  • Acting as a subsidiary; supplementary: the main library and its auxiliary branches.

The definition of the word marketing is:

  • The act or process of buying and selling in a market.
  • The strategic functions involved in identifying and appealing to particular groups of consumers, often including activities such as advertising, branding, pricing, and sales.

Independently they each have a distinct meaning, linking the words together can mean something entirely different. Take steps to lead that engaged customer to a higher probability of closing the opportunity and increasing your sales.

It all starts with content. Content is everything, but learning how to maximize that in a way to get the consumer to open or click on your email is an art. While I have a small sample size of analytics, I have been writing, blogging and offering my perspective to an engaged audience for the last 20 years. This is not a concept that has been pulled out of thin air.

As a result of that knowledge and research, I have an established metric of how I analyze and measure how my newsletter has been received. On every newsletter, I look at three key ingredients of information. I look at opens, clicks and time of day the email was viewed.

Having a high number of opens means that you are catching people attention with a catch subject and leading them to read more. My last newsletter did a 47.69% Open Rate! A 47.69% open rate is an eye opening statistic when the industry average is 16.66%. These numbers are unaltered, directly from the built in reporting in MailChimp.

Identifying that number is the first hurdle. If you have a low entry percentage navigating to your website, you are already fighting an uphill battle. In those cases A/B testing becomes very vital. A/B testing is a mechanism of identifying what titles resonate with your audience. If both titles operate poorly, look at various titles within your industry and try to identify key words that make your audience want to read more.

Next, we focus on the percentage identifying the percentage of people that make it to your website. If that percentage is in the single digits to the teens, Houston you have a problem! To boost those numbers, it takes fine tuning and effot, but all very possible with time. I use a URL shortner like goo.gl as a way to deliver my links and track the amount of times that link is accessed. I tease my audience with a powerful intro and just as I am getting am to the good stuff… there is a link to read more. That is the link that takes them to your website, THAT is the link I want to track. Unless my email is about a specific promotion, I do not mention sales, I am offering value with nothing in return and because I want the visitors to come to my site and explore.

If you feel that I am profiling my consumers, you are right, I am tracking the web trends of my demographic as a whole not individuals. We are tracking users behavior and identify the points we lose them. While that information is valuable, how to harness that information is where the magic happens.
Last bit of information I want to cover is when the email was viewed.

This takes more effort than the other tips I have mentioned but it is necessary to identify when your consumer base views the email. That means tracking time of day access. Using analytics programs like Google Analytics is very helpful, did I mention FREE, but it does not have an out of the box time of day report. You will have to create a custom report, design using the metric group of sessions and then add the dimension drill down of by hour or use the app. The app has a default view that shows time of day metrics.

The goal of the report is to give you the day and time your newsletter generates the most activity. Once you have enough data, you can gear the delivery of your newsletter to those times. Those steps are also valuable when identifying your customer acquisition costs. Generating a lead takes time, effort and resources. Once you start to formulate how much time it took you to acquire that customer, you can start associating costs as to how much it costs to acquire one customer. Time is money!

Everything translates to money! The more you understand the greater value of your time will you start truly making tangible gains.

Now they are at your web page reading your skillfully crafted article…
Now What?

You delivered the vehicle to get the end user to your page, now you need to market to them without it looking like you are selling to them. You gave them something of value for free. Your advice isn’t free and your time isn’t either, use that delivery to your website and market to them in widgets that are on the sides of your  page or highlight links that take them where you want them to go. Majority of the people are curious by nature, let that curiosity work towards your advantage. The infrastructure of auxiliary marketing plan is now launched and chugging along!

The whole basis of this article is to highlight how important it is to understand your consumer base, and what resonates with them and how to use those analytics to track and market to them. When you do, you then have the ability to interject shameless plugs about the earth shattering services you offer like I am about to do. =)

If you want additional help, feel free to contact me. You can also utilize my Sounding Board services or have a custom To-Market strategy developed to jump start your ideas!

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