Month: August 2016

You probably already know that email marketing is the most effective way of connecting with your customers.  That said, you don’t want to be a spammer (trust me, you really don’t).  So, how do you persuade people to sign up to receive your pearls of wisdom directly into their inbox? You start using opt-ins.

Using opt-ins is basically like offering some bait.  That sounds awful, but it isn’t.  An opt-in, or lead magnet, offers your potential customers something that they’ll find useful in exchange for their email address.  There’s no obligation for them to buy. They can just get your freebie and walk away if they want to.  Hopefully they won’t.

How do I think up an opt-in?

Think about your customers.  If you’re already working on your marketing, you should be developing a customer avatar anyway, so you’ll have some idea of who you want to work with. If you want to know more about customer avatars, take a look at my recent blog post on the subject here.
What do your customers need or want?  What are you offering that will help them?

Be specific

The beauty of a good opt-in is that it’s specific. It takes a particular need and provides a quick way to make it better.

Your customer avatar should get you thinking about their pain points.  Choose one thing that they find annoying or frustrating and focus your opt-in on that.  For example, say you’re an accountant.  You might have any number of customers who’ve left their tax return to the last minute, and they’re panicking.  An opt-in offering 5 -10 tips on how they can make it less stressful next time is likely to be a winner, as they’ll want to avoid experiencing that feeling again.

Ideally, your opt-in should offer advice that your potential customers can take away and use immediately. Seeing quick results will make them think of you more kindly.

It doesn’t have to be painful

‘Pain points’ is a classic marketing term, but you don’t have to focus on pain.  You might make something beautiful that will enhance their lives. If you offer thoughtful or unique gifts, you could offer a short guide to making your partner feel appreciated, treating your kids or how to find a great present for the person who has everything.

A photographer could offer advice on how to take great photos on holiday.

If you help people to get organised and save time, what tools do you use? Sharing these can be a really simple way of helping your customers achieve a quick win.

Be helpful

Remember, the aim is to offer people good advice that they can get working quickly. Slow and complicated isn’t going to help anyone.

Once you have people signed up to your list, you can carry on offering useful stuff along with a bit of marketing.  It builds your authority and allows your potential customers to think of you as helpful and easy to work with.

I’d love to know if you already have, or are working on, an opt-in. Drop me a comment and let me know!

Do you recognise the girl in the picture?  If not, I’ll enlighten you.  That’s me, with my maiden name, 15 years ago, appearing on ‘University Challenge’. I had always lacked confidence because I was a generally unpopular, bookish child at school. Things improved in my teens, and I had a much better time when I eventually went to university.

I loved pub quizzes, mostly because it was a good night out with my friends, and sometimes we won beer.  So when I spotted an advert asking for people to take part in a quiz show, I applied.  It turned out to be ‘The Weakest Link.’

Lights, camera, action!

When we walked into the ‘Weakest Link’  studio, they got us to sing. I was introduced to eight complete strangers, then we marched into the studio singing ‘Delilah’ at the top of our lungs.  Funnily enough, Sir Tom cropped up on ‘University Challenge’ too.  As a result, I was on a high when I took my place behind the podium.

For the first two rounds, my heart was pounding so loudly I could hardly hear the questions, but I made it through somehow.  I can’t even say that I found Anne Robinson all that frightening.  Between rounds when we took a quick break, she was actually quite friendly.  The difficult bit is trying to answer questions whilst remembering who got them wrong.

Sadly, I didn’t win.  I was voted off fifth even though I wasn’t the worst player.  I know that I was despatched with ‘you are the weakest link – goodbye’ but I have no memory of it.

The next step

Buoyed by the fact that I hadn’t completely disgraced myself, I went back to university to see lots of posters with Jeremy Paxman’s face on them. Not that appealing to everyone, I suppose.  After a few rounds of auditions, I was on the team, and we had a first-round place on the show.

‘The Weakest Link’ was a daytime show on a bit of a budget.  At ‘University Challenge’ you get treated really well.  We travelled up to Manchester where we were going to be staying in a hotel after we’d filmed.  I know – licence payers’ money going towards getting students drunk in Manchester!  By the time we got off the train, we’d already sussed out that both Leicester University and Sheffield were going to be filming on the same day.  We were praying for one of them to be our opponents.

Facing Mr Paxman

Sadly not. We were the only former polytechnic to have qualified and we drew Imperial College in the first round.  They were the reigning champions and they’d even had coaching on how to buzz in first.  We brazened it out anyway.  It’s hard to feel pressured when they’re filming ‘Stars in their Eyes’ next door and you can hear ‘What’s New Pussycat’ coming through the green room wall.

Of course we got thrashed.  But we had a great night out.  One of my teammates saw the Imperial College team at breakfast the next day, and they seemed quite astounded that we’d been out drinking.  That made us feel a lot better.

Confidence for life

Do you know what the best part was?  Knowing that I could be brave.  I tell people the story now, and they tell me they wouldn’t have the confidence.  The thing is, you can.  When you do something brave, it gives you the confidence to try something else.  The way people react to you changes, and you want more.  You feel proud of yourself, and it gets addictive.

 

Visit any writers’ forum and you’ll see a lot of posts about ‘finding your voice’.  Some of the discussion is helpful and some of it deeply pretentious.  But voice isn’t just about creating great literature.  It can really help your business too.

Voice is important because it tells people who you are.  Whether you’re a huge business with a recognisable figurehead or a sole trader, you are the human face of your business.  At the end of the day, that’s who your customers buy from.  The Virgin brand remains a huge success partly because its’ customers feel that they know (and can trust) Richard Branson.

Getting things in writing

I used to think that finding your voice was easy.  It always came naturally to me.  The words appear in my head and I write them down.  It’s not that easy for everyone.  I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me that they’re OK talking but when they write things down they don’t make sense.

I always advise people to speak, record themselves and then write that down.  However, I’ve discovered that this approach doesn’t work for everyone and I started to wonder why.  Then I remembered that non-verbal cues form 90% of our understanding of speech.  Your tone of voice, expression and body language all play a part.

If you listen to people speak you’ll also notice that they very rarely stick to the same topic.  They go off on tangents or get interrupted.  If you do that when you’re writing something down your reader will just get confused.  But when we’re talking we can somehow keep up.  As an Eddie Izzard fan I know this to be true!

Finding your voice

The key to communicating within your business is writing in a way that sounds like you.  This is especially important if your customers are going to meet you at some point.  If you meet customers face to face you’ll probably find that you speak to them in a certain way.  You’ll hopefully still sound like you but your tone and the language you use will be tailored to the work you’re doing.

You probably already understand the importance of brand consistency, having the same logos and images across all of your websites, social media and branded communications.  You can also carry this through in your writing.  If your blog posts, newsletters and social media all use the same type of language, it gives the reader a comforting sense of familiarity.  Then, if they meet you in person and hear you speak in the same way, they feel as if they already know you.

Where to start

I know I said that speaking and writing doesn’t always work, but it’s a good place to start.  Imagine your ideal customer is sitting in front of you with a question.  How do you answer it?  Talk them through the answer and record it.

Then get it down in writing.  If you have a nifty app that can turn speech into type for you, so much the better.  Then read it back and start editing.  What sounds great when you’re talking sometimes looks clunky on the page.  Or you realise that you’ve used jargon which your customer won’t understand if you’re not there to explain it.

Make a plan

Have you gone off topic?  If you’re trying to describe your products or services and there’s a lot of them you might find that you jump between different subjects and back again.  It can be really confusing so try to stick to one subject before you move on to another one.  If you’ve got loads of information to get across you might want to think about writing more than one piece.