June 2018

If you have been looking for new methods to improve lead generation and don’t know where to turn to, then you have come to the right blog. One of the best tools to improve your digital marketing ROI, landing pages can prove to be exactly what you need to get potential clients into your sales funnel.

Efficient, targeted, and action-oriented, landing pages can prove to be a key component of your overall marketing strategy.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of creating a landing page – or never even heard of one – then trust in the digital marketing consultant, Mauricio Pina, to bring you up-to-date.

The Low Down on Landing Pages

A landing page is a standalone web page for your business. Landing pages can be created for a number of reasons such as for general marketing, advertising a specific campaign, generating leads through info and email acquisition, or advertising a particular ebook, blog, or whitepaper.

Ultimately, landing pages are part of your conversion funnel and should be used to capture email addresses of potential leads.

Once you have these emails, you can begin to nurture a relationship by sending out emails and other content to highlight your business and the services/product you offer. The value of your content can have a huge impact on potential clients before they even speak with a sales representative. Consider that before a potential client even reaches out to your company, 70% of the decision-making process has already happened.

Why You Need a Landing Page

Because landing pages are targeted efforts, they work amazingly in converting website visitors into leads. Now, this is not to be confused with saying you don’t need a website.

But if you are having a special sale on a specific product or service, then this targeted traffic can be driven to a landing page that prompts them to complete an action that you want them to do (i.e. purchasing the product or service). Otherwise, the wrong type of ad might simply send them to your website’s homepage, where they’ll have to navigate to make the purchase, and likely give up before doing so.

Making Your Landing Page Work For You

Landing pages can be relatively easy to make and there are plenty of online tools and resources available to help you create your next one. A Moe Pina favorite is Unbounce.com.

Now, it’s important to remember that landing pages are meant to be efficient, compelling, and action-oriented. This means that the design has to work hard to draw visitors in, inform them about your specific goal, and then make them take action.

Simplicity tends to be key here and there are a number of essential elements that every good landing page has including:

• Limited Navigation – Landing pages are single-paged websites so there’s no reason for them to have tons of navigation options. Get rid of navigation elements or hide them as necessary.
• Bold Headlines – Headlines draw in website visitors and for landing pages, it’s no different. Your main and supporting headlines should be informative, attention-grabbing, and precise.
• A Valuable Offer – Your landing page should be providing a valuable offer in exchange for lead emails and information. If your landing page doesn’t have this value then you need to go back to the drawing boards.
• Concise Content – Landing pages are all about efficiency. Don’t overburden your visitors with heavy content. Keep your content and forms to the point.
• Don’t Forget Images – You’ll want to include an image of your product, service, or simply a related-image to keep the design flowing and not just create a text-heavy page.
• Call-to-Action – A landing page should have a “Call-to-Action” button that helps to capture a visitor’s information. This call-to-action may include a download, a checklist, an ebook, or some other offer.
• A Form – You need a form to capture information (ex. email addresses). Try to keep these as short as possible. Too many input fields and your potential client may lose interest.

Another key element of your landing page is going to be promotion. There’s little value if your landing page isn’t getting in front of the right crowds. Promote it by sharing on social media networks, Google ads, Facebook Ads, and the likes.

Need a landing page? Contact Mauricio Pina today.

Are you ready to improve your lead generation techniques? If you don’t feel like you have enough experience or know-how to properly create a landing page, then reach out to the expert digital consultant, Mauricio Pina, to find out more about how he can help you grow your business.

Sometimes when it comes to digital marketing, you’ve got to stick to the classics.

Sure, a piece of digital marketing is embracing the new in order to compete, but you don’t want to forget where you came from either.

That means when it comes to advertising your product or service, the ever-changing methods that affect search engine optimization (SEO) should still be adhered to. But don’t forget about the tried and true aspect of digital marketing that has been around since the conception of the Internet: email marketing.

While it doesn’t take a qualified and experienced digital marketing consultant like me, Mauricio Pina, to cook up an email, it does take an expert to run an email marketing campaign effectively. When done properly, you can turn your email list into sweet, sweet conversions.

What is email marketing?

In a nutshell, email marketing is essentially what it sounds like. It is a section of digital marketing that uses email to encourage the purchase of whatever goods or services your business offers. While this definition meets the purpose of what email marketing does, what email marketing truly is can be defined as a way to foster business relationships with potential clients or customers by keeping them informed with a tailored marketing message.

That means NO SPAM! It is a delicate balance between personalizing an email to keep customers engaged and selling your product. No one likes spam, and an impersonal email barrage of your goods or services to a large audience will lose you customers faster than you can say “PageRank”.

“Personalize thousands of emails in an email marketing campaign? Sounds impossible, Moe.”

Hear me out real quick. Yes, I would not advise going through each email you have on an email list. But that still doesn’t mean that you can’t personalize them.

While I don’t recommend that you get to know your customers intimately – like their thoughts about the Franco-Thai War of 1940 – you can get an idea of who they are by collecting small amounts of relevant information through, say, a survey.

This will give you the ability to see who your typical customer is and if you collect specific information – like a date of birth – you can personalize not only their email but their whole experience with your business.

A prime example of this is when restaurants send out emails to their customers offering a discount off of a meal on the customer’s birthday. This works for the business two-fold:

1. It helps develop and maintain a relationship with the customer(s).
2. Increases sales by increasing customer loyalty.

But this only works if this is an email list that you have grown, NOT if they are emails you have bought from some third-party vendor. The latter is no better than sending a blind email blast to people that may not be interested in your goods or services, and the more spam they receive, the more they will grow to resent your business.

However, don’t assume that all of your customers want to subscribe to your email list, either. Automatically signing them up without their permission will hurt your business. Permission-based email marketing campaigns where customers are asked to opt-in rather than opt-out are your best bet to grow that email list full of customers that want to hear about specific deals or services that you carry.

Oh, and you’ll also want to optimize it for mobile, as over half of emails are generally opened on mobile devices.

“I’m still not buying it, Moe. Convince me why I should use email marketing.”

Simple. It’s relatively easy, cost-effective, proven, and easily measurable.

Email marketing is easy to set up and manage. It offers more analytics and reporting capabilities, providing crucial insight to click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, and conversions. These make it much more simple to track what is working and what isn’t in your campaign, giving you the ability to modify your strategy for maximum effectiveness.

Email marketing is cost-effective. It is an inexpensive way to get the word out about your products and/or services compared to other mediums.

It can be successful if done right. Emails have the ability to hit their targets in terms of a specific audience or ideal customer. It allows you to target by demographics (e.g. age, income, gender, etc.). Remember, however, while Facebook can do the same, more people have access to email than they do to social media.

Lastly, email marketing allows a wider range of customizable formatting capabilities than you would get through any particular social medium post. Have you ever tried to sell something on Twitter, especially when their character limit was 140? Yeah, it was tough. Of course, you want to keep your message short. No one likes to read a wall of text.

“But you said not too long ago that SEO and technology are always changing. Aren’t Email Marketing’s days numbered?”

Relax, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In a recent report conducted by HostPapa/a>, they found that:

• 94 percent of people who use the Internet use email. Only 61 percent use social media. That means that email marketing has the potential to reach more people than social media like Facebook or Twitter.
• 75 percent of adult online users claim that email marketing is their preferred marketing method.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Email marketing gathers more eyes than a social media post does, as per what is evident from the statistics above. That isn’t even taking into account that your target audience may not even see your social media post within their feed but they sure will see an email in their inbox. There it will stay until read or deleted.

That’s not to say that you should forgo social media for email marketing, however. In truth, the two go together like warm apple pie and vanilla ice cream—or pumpkin pie with whipped cream if that’s your thing.

A properly tailored email sent to an appreciative customer may earn their business, but you could be stopping your own growth if you have no social media icons that direct them to “Like” or “Share”. This small gesture allows customers to connect with your brand, upping brand loyalty.

Don’t forget to sauce up these emails with a testimonial or two from satisfied customers you pulled from your social media platforms, and at the same time, don’t forget to encourage your followers to sign-up for your email newsletters.

Email Marketing Tips Moving Forward

Email marketing can really have a beneficial impact on your business. It opens up the opportunity for people to visit the links to your website or blog that you send along with the email, increasing your sales potential.

The following are a few tips that you can use should you decide to go lone wolf with your email campaign. Tread lightly as email marketing demands balance, lest the spam that your customers may complain about will tear your business apart.

1. Stick to the rules – The CAN-SPAM Act was enacted for a reason, and honestly, it’s just good business. These rules cite that you:
   • Don’t use false or misleading header information.
   • Don’t use a deceptive subject line.
   • Identify the message as an ad.
   • Tell recipients where you are located.
   • Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future emails from you.
   • Honor those opt-out requests promptly.
   • Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

For a little more information on these topics, you can view the compliance guide here.

2. Consistency is key – Stick to a schedule when sending out newsletters and ads. Remember, the key is balance. Don’t send a barrage of emails every day to the people on your email list, but one email every other day shouldn’t hurt.

While you’re at it, refrain from spamming ads at them too. Use email marketing as a way to build rapport with your customer base by sharing your expertise, tips, insights and other things of value within your market. Also, you can use this as an opportunity to showcase how your customers—with their permission, of course—interact with your service or product.

3. The email list – First, don’t purchase email listings. More than likely you’ll get a bunch of people that aren’t interested in what you have to sell and sending them ads anyway will brand you as a spammer. Once that happens, you lose all credibility.

Build it from the ground up:

• Collect information from customer surveys.
• Do a little bit of background information on the types of people that purchase similar products in the industry.
• Use Facebook to make lookalike audiences based on trends in your market.
• Collect data from your website regarding viewed products, abandoned carts, or customer wishlists.
4. Trust – Having an email list requires a lot of trust on the customer’s part. They are entrusting you with personal information, hoping that you will use it only to send them relevant things. Don’t break that trust.

Of course, if you want to start a high-quality email marketing campaign but don’t want to micromanage it, you’re only a phone call away from an expert digital marketing consultant that can help you.