Monthly Archives: April 2020

Going to share six email marketing tips and best practices for when to send an email and a few more golden nuggets.

We know marketing, can be highly effective or highly ineffective depending on how you execute. So let’s talk about some tips about how you can execute excellently so you can crush it with your campaigns.

1: Delivering value

This is important for anything but always start with value. Make sure you’re delivering value with every email that you send. The recipient should see value in these emails because if they don’t, what’s going to happen is they’re going to unsubscribe or worse yet, they’re going to mark it as spam. So make sure that every email delivers some value to that user and they should also know who you are. If they get an email and they don’t know necessarily who it’s from, they’re probably going to unsubscribe or hit, “Spam.” You want to avoid that. So they should know who you are and they should see value in every email. If you start there, you’re always going to find success.

2: Keep it simple.

A lot of people are looking at their emails on their phones, so make sure the email looks good on the phone. What we recommend is a nice hero banner with your main call to action and then just little blurps in the email with headlines that link to more information, link to your website, link to your landing pages, to your social sites, that kind of thing. But keep it brief in the email. You shouldn’t really have more than probably a hundred words worth of content, so stick to the, “Wow lines,” we call it, throughout the email and start it off with a real nice hero image design that catches your eye and makes sure that’s mobile-friendly so that that can shrink down on the mobile phone and still be readable and look good.

3: Subject line.

The subject line is what people see initially. This is really what’s going to entice them to open the email or not. So make sure that it’s a catchy subject line and also keep it short. You want to keep it from 30 to 50 characters or so, and the reason being is because, on mobile phones where most people are checking their email, that’s about all the real estate that you have. More than that, it truncates the subject lines so they can’t read the rest of it. So put the meat of your subject line in that first 30 to 50 characters and have it catchy so that they’re enticed to actually open the email and see what you got.

4: Best days to send.

The best day studies show is Tuesday, the second-best day is Thursday, and the third-best day is Wednesday. So I think we have a theme going here. It’s the middle of the week. Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday are the best days to send where people open the emails and engage at the highest rate.

5: Better times to send

If you serve a B2B audience, the best time to send is actually 6:00 AM. By sending it at 6:00 AM, it’s the top of their inbox when they show up to work. So that helps your email be a little bit more effective. If you’re sending it to a general consumer audience, you’re going to probably have better effects at 10:00 AM. 10:00 AM is what studies show is most effective. If it’s a younger demographic or a demographic that’s more engaged in the evening times, 8:00 PM is the best time to send it. So sending at those times may show that you have better analysis and better data, better open rates and better engagement. So give it a shot.

6: Analyze the data

Every time you send a campaign, look at the data, what percentage [inaudible 00:03:33] it? How did they interact with it? Were there high rates of unsubscribers? Which time did you send it? Which day did you send it? Test different things. Try different things. After the course of sending many emails, you’ll really dial in really the best day for you, the best time for you and some of the best subject lines and email content that drive the best results. So always look at the data. You can’t make changes unless you know what changes to make and the data tells you that.

In 2018 and beyond, if it isn’t already for you, social media marketing is going to be absolutely essential for every kind of business type you can think of. In this post, I’m going to talk about why. So check it out.

At CloudBooks, we work with thousands of businesses across all kinds of industries and social media marketing we’re seeing is becoming more and more important every single day. In fact, in our opinion, in 2018 and beyond, it’s going to be absolutely vital for every single business to have a strong social presence if they want to be competitive today. So some verticals like e-commerce, you know, social media picked up a while back. It’s been effective, it’s still effective. And it’s going to be more effective. But for other verticals, like let’s say, plumbers, it hadn’t been as effective until now. And we can see now into the future that even for a plumber, social media marketing is going to be absolutely essential.

Let’s talk about some examples of that and some different reasoning why we have this thought process and really break this down. So number one, I kind of talked about how the plumbers are seeing more effectiveness now. Why do I think that? I think that because I’m seeing that. We have customers that are plumbers. In fact, we have one customer that’s been with us for two years, spent a lot of money on Google ads when he first started with us, had great, great results. But the market is shifting, right?

Those results are starting to fall down a little bit now. And so he’s looking for ways to increase the results back up. And he’s really invested in social media marketing. And so you would think an Instagram account for a plumber, does that even make sense? Well, it actually does, and that’s what we’re seeing. Because as he’s posting content on social media, on Instagram, coupons, different information about his businesses, it’s building brand awareness. Here’s the thing, guys, Millennials, and Generation Zs, Generation Alphas, which are the real little kids, they’re not using Google. These people are using Instagram, and Facebook, and Snapchat, and all these other tools like YouTube all day. What this younger audience is going to do, if they’re already on Instagram, they’re not going to go out of Instagram to search on Google. Why would they do that? They’re going to stay on Instagram.

They’re going to search #city plumber, Fort Collins plumber, Denver plumber, whatever it might be. And they’re going to see who’s there. If you’re not there, you don’t exist. Even if you’re ranking at the top of the page on Google, they’re not looking there. So if you want to be successful in the future, you have to be where your consumers are. And the younger audience is all on social media. So it’s vital to build a presence on social media, to be posting content to social media and to be there. That when they look, they find you, and you’re going to get the business. So this plumber is ahead of the curve and they’re seeing great results and you should be too.

The second point I’d like to make is that marketing has come full circle. Before search what did people do? They basically asked for referrals. “Hey, where do you go for a plumber? Hey, who do you get your hair cut with? Hey, what accountant do you use?” We used to ask our friends, ask our family, and they would give us this feedback, right? Because before the internet, that was the easiest way to get those results. But then when Google came out and search became so easy, the referral system kind of went away, right? So we would just go search on Google. That’s why it was so valuable to market there. Well, we’ve come full circle. Now we’re back to the referral business where people are again saying to their friends and family and followers, “Hey, who do you guys use for this? Who do you guys use for that?” And if you don’t have a social presence, you’re not in the mix now, right? Because this communication is occurring like it did in the old days. But now it’s through social media.

They’re direct messaging with each other. They’re sharing this content on social media. And so if you have a social presence that people are seeing you, you’re going to be top of mind. So when somebody asks for a plumber and they’ve seen you around, maybe they didn’t even use you, they’re going to think of you. They’re going to share that post that they saw recently. They’re going to think of your name and direct message you and say, “Hey, check these guys out.” So it’s very important to start building this social presence now because this is where the market is shifting. And if you’re not there, you’re not going to get this referral business anymore.

The third point I’d like to make is about social proof. Social proof is more and more important today. Even if somebody did find you on Google, more and more, they’re doing a spot check on your reputation and your social presence before they call you or fill out a form. What they’re going to do is they’re going to go check on social, check on Facebook, check on Instagram. If you don’t have any followers, if you don’t have a presence there, you’re considered uncool. And so if you want to be cool and be a hip business in a younger generation and a younger demographics mind. You’re going to have to have social proof, which means you have a good amount of followers. You are posting content frequently, you’re engaging with your community, you’re active, you’re a new business, you’re modern, you’re cutting edge. So why wouldn’t I go with you? This is a thought process that people go through during the buying cycle. So make sure you have that in place. Or you’re going to be missing out on sales.

Here’s the deal. What do you look like on social? Do you have more followers than your competitor, or do they have more than you? Right? Are you posting content frequently? Do you have great designs? Does your content add value to your followers? Are they learning from you? Are you cutting edge? Are you doing videos? Video is key today. What things are you doing to build your brand presence on social media? Because this is where the consumers live now, right? The main TV channels at night used to be ESPN, and ABC, and NBC. People would sit down on their couch and they’d watch those TV channels.

That still exists, except for they’re on their couch. They’re looking at Instagram, they’re looking at YouTube, they’re looking at Facebook. And if you’re not there, you’re not a part of the conversation in their mind when they’re thinking about who to do business with.

In this post, we’re going to talk about four reasons why CRM is important in marketing. CRM is hugely important to any business for so many reasons, but it’s especially important when you’re talking about marketing and sales. So let’s talk about four reasons why.

1: CRM helps with sales.

Without good sales, marketing is never effective. So you need a good sales process, you need good sales funnels, and the CRM allows you to do that in a scalable way, capture the information you need, follow the process that you need, that you’ve proven to work through past years to drive the highest closing ratio. You want to make sure all your salespeople are following those processes and a CRM allows you to do that.

2: CRM is important because it allows you to track the lifetime value of your customer.

If you see that customers are coming from X, Y, Z marketing sources, with a CRM, you can track the lifetime value of that customer, how much revenue they’ve driven your business over time, and you can see the true value of your marketing. So in other words, leads that are coming from Facebook may drive this value, whereas leads coming from Google may drive that value. That knowledge will help you optimize your marketing to invest more in what’s working and less on what’s not.

3: CRM allows you to build in marketing automation via email and text message marketing.

With CRM, you can set up automated drip campaigns via email to customers versus leads, different types of content. You can also set up the same thing with text messages. By allowing this sort of email automation, you’re streamlining your business, you’re doing more with less, which is driving more sales.

4: CRM opens up new areas of improvement and opportunity for your business.

You’ll get more sales ideas, you’ll get more product ideas. You’ll be able to optimize your marketing based on that data. Data is important and a way of capturing that data in a streamlined way and using that data to improve your business moving forward is all possible with the CRM if you use it correctly. That’s invaluable to you longterm.

Hopefully, these four reasons help give you better insights into why CRM is so important to your business from a marketing perspective. There are so many more reasons beyond this, but hopefully, these high-level reasons help you see that.