Lars Lofgren

Building Growth Teams

Lars Lofgren

Why Email Open Rates Tell You Nothing

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Before we dive into this, what’s an open rate? It’s simply the rate at which your email is opened when you send it to your email list. With 100 people on your email list and an open rate of 20%, 20 people clicked and opened your email. Email services like Constant Contact, MailChimp, and AWeber will track your open rates automatically.

Tracking open rates sounds like a great idea. Knowing what percentage of your email list opens your emails would be a great way to measure how well you’re doing. If everyone is opening your emails, your audience loves you. If no one is, something probably needs to change.

There’s just one problem, open rates are incredibly inaccurate.

To track open rates, email services embed an invisible image into the email. If the image displays, tracking information is sent back and recorded as a open. This sounds great in theory but the vast majority of emails will never display the image even if the email is opened.

Since people also figured out how to spread viruses through images, most email clients like Gmail turn images off by default. Now a person has to open the email AND click the “show images” button for the tracking to work. Granted, images show automatically for senders in a person’s contact list. But you’ll have to convince people to manually add you to their contacts for this to happen. People rarely do this so I wouldn’t count on it.

What does this mean? Your open rates are worthless. They’re not even worth the time thinking about.

There is one exception: running headline split tests.

What’s a split test? It’s where you send two versions of an email with a single difference and see which version is most effective. In this case, each email would have different headlines.

Judging effectiveness though open rates still isn’t ideal and you’ll also want to use click through rates and conversion data to choose the best headline.

Keep in mind that split testing headlines is a fairly advanced technique in internet marketing and isn’t nearly as important as other tasks. Don’t worry about it unless you’re email marketing is already driving a significant portion of your revenue.

The Two Types of Blogs and Their Radically Different Business Models

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Before we dive into the first type, we’re going to exclude one type of blog, the diary or personal blog. This is a blog that is for the writer, not the customer. In fact, there is no customer. The writer is simply pushing out content for his or her personal benefit.

The Publishing Model

This is the type of blog we’re most familiar with. You publish content that gains the attention of a target market and then you sell that attention to advertisers. Magazines, TV stations, and newspapers also use this model.

When building a blog like this, your sole concern is visitors and page views. Nothing else matters. If you have low visits, you won’t be able to sell ad space and won’t have income, let along profit.

TechCrunch and Lifehacker are excellent examples of this type of blog.

If you’re building this type of blog, you’ll spend most of your time maximizing traffic and page views. you want visitors to hang around as much as possible.

Essentially, the business IS the blog.

The Business Blog

For this type, the blog is built around another business and used as a marketing strategy.

How do you know if this is you? If you’re selling something, you have a business blog.

The goal of the blog is to bring in people that were unaware of your existence, build trust, and give them a way to stay in touch with you so you can pitch them later.

In other words, you publish content that ranks in Google or spreads through social media to bring potential customers to you.

For a business blog, traffic won’t help you. If you get a huge spike in traffic, your sales probably won’t increase. They will only increase if that traffic is coming from your target market.

When running a business blog, quality of traffic beats quantity every time.

Some of you may be using ads on your business blog. Please get rid of them. They’re only holding you back. I’m willing to bet that you make little, if anything, from Adsense or any other ad network. Replace those ads with ads for your own product.

Your focus is on publishing content that your customers ask for. How do you come up with good content? Answer the questions that receive from your customers. Simple as that. Pay attention to the questions your market has and write a blog post about it.

Looking for an example? Check out KISSmetrics, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and SEOmoz for businesses that use blogs to bring in new customers. Notice that there isn’t a third party ad to be found.

Can You Blend These Models?

Yes, I just don’t recommend it. There is a delicate balance between selling ads and selling your own products. Some people are able to pull it off like Andrew Warner at Mixergy. He sells premium memberships to his site while selling ad space at the beginning of his interviews.

Another great example is Smashing Magazine. They sell a fair amount of ad space but also release their own products such as the Smashing Book.

Unless you are a seasoned marketer and know your audience really well, avoid advertising and stick with your own products. Profits from your products will greatly exceed anything you’ll make from advertising anyway.

What products are you using your blog to sell?

Why New Sales Funnels Can Do You More Harm Than Good

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Especially on the internet, there is a constant pressure to expand into new platforms. Everyone tells you that to build any business, you need business cards, a website, a dozen social media accounts, and press releases. You need a killer content marketing strategy, weekly webinars, and viral YouTube videos.

This is simply not true.

Businesses are built on the quality of their sales funnels, not their quantity. It’s also going to take you time to figure out what works most effectively for each sales funnel. For you to succeed, you’ll need to spend a great deal of time on each platform. You won’t be able to figure this out if you’re doing dozens of things at once.

When in Doubt, Reduce the Number of Sales Funnels You’re Running

Focus on one campaign at a time before you go building another. There are several benefits of doing this:

  • You can figure out what works. When you have multiple ways to promote your business, it gets much more difficult to figure out what is actually working.
  • Each funnel gets the attention it deserves. You are not going to get it right the first time. By focusing on one funnel at a time, you can spend the time necessary to get through the learning curve.
  • You ensure you’re spending your time on high-impact tasks. You only have so much time in a given day and if you want to grow your business, you need to make every minute count.

Everyone will tell you to get a blog, Facebook Page, Twitter account, YouTube account, and whatever social media site happens to be popular at the moment. Ignore these people. You want to focus on making one platform work before expanding into another.

Otherwise, the quality of your work suffers. If you’re trying to manage dozens of social media accounts and publish regular content on your site, it’s going to be less than fantastic. And when content isn’t any good, it dilutes your brand. Pick one, focus on it, then expand when you’re ready.

What’s essential?

This depends completely on what stage your business is in. If you’re just starting and have a limited budget, focus on one platform at a time.

For example, someone starting a service agency does not need to worry about blogging, Facebook, PPC, or anything else. Cold calls or emails will be more than effective enough to get the business off the ground. This is also true for a new product, reach out to people directly before you complicate things. You’ll also get better feedback.

But as the business grows, it will be worth it to explore different funnels to accelerate growth. Definitely experiment with new funnels but do it in a measured and deliberate way so you can figure out whether each new funnel is worth the time or if you should move on to your next idea.

 

What’s your main sales funnel?

7 Reasons to Create a Facebook Page Instead of a Profile for Your Business

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Over the last several years, Facebook has drastically changed what types of accounts they offer. This has produced some confusion on whether a Facebook page or profile is the best option for a business. Here are 7 reasons why you should create a Facebook page:

1. Facebook won’t delete your account.

Facebook actively deletes Facebook profiles that are being used for business. I’ve heard of numerous stories of profiles being deleted without any warning. Avoid this from the start and build a Facebook page instead of a profile.

2. You can have an unlimited number of fans.

Profiles are all limited to only having 5,000 friends. This is a relatively easy limit to hit as a business. Once you hit it, you simply will not be able to connect with more people on Facebook.

Facebook pages allow an unlimited number of fans and will easily scale with you.

3. You can track everything.

All Facebook pages include Facebook Insights which lets you analyze your progress on Facebook. You’ll be able to analyze monthly active users, page interactions, and the effectiveness of individual posts. This means you’ll know when your Facebook campaigns are working and when they’re not.

4. You can integrate your page with your Facebook ads.

There are several types of Facebook ads. One of them allows people to like you right from the ad. This is perfect for building a fan page and increasing the reach of your Facebook posts. You can’t do this with a Facebook profile.

5. You can customize your page.

You’ll be able to build customized pages within Facebook as you grow. Many businesses use these to run contests or build ecommerce functionality right into Facebook. For examples, Delta lets fans purchase tickets right from Facebook. Companies like Wildfire have built easy plugins for you to build out your own Facebook page.

6. It’s much easier to manage a page.

If you have your own profile, you’ll have to constantly log out and log back in whenever you want to switch between your business and your personal profile. With pages, you can easily access everything while logged in on your own profile. Your posts will automatically be posted from your Facebook page, not your personal profile. This will save you a lot of time not having to switch back and forth.

7. Multiple people can easily manage a page.

As you build your business and you either outsource or delegate the management of your Facebook page, simply add another person as an admin of the page. They’ll then have full access and can take over where you left off. With profiles, you’ll have to give them your login information which you should try to avoid whenever possible.

 

For those of you already using Facebook pages, what other advantages have you found?

Stop Selling Your Features, People Only Care About Your Benefits

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Possibly the most important lesson to learn in marketing is the difference between features and benefits.

The simple truth is that people generally do not care about your features, they want to know how their lives will be improved after doing business with you.

Features are the attributes of your product or service. Technical specifications, ingredients, and methods of manufacturing are all features. Benefits are the changes your product or service provide.

Features describe you, benefits describe the results your customers will have.

The typical example of this is how Apple marketed the iPod Nano. There were numerous MP3 players before the Nano came out but none of them were dominated the market. This is because they focused on features like disk space and dimensions. Unless you were familiar with technology, those messages didn’t appeal to you. Apple quickly differentiated itself with the benefit of “1,000 songs in your pocket.” This message clearly tells people how their lives will improve after purchasing an iPod Nano.

Let’s go through another example:

You’re selling a supplement with several ingredients. The purpose of this supplement is to accelerate muscle gain. In this case, the ingredients are the features and the muscle gain is the benefit. Just like features, the ingredients are important to support your claims of muscle gain. But your benefit must come first.

But that example is a little too easy, let’s do a more complicated one:

You operate a mobile dog grooming service. Many business owners would market the “mobile” and leave it at that. The mobile is a feature though. The benefit is that dogs can be groomed in the comfort of their own homes. Or you save people time and make it convenient by coming to them. To get anyone to care about you over a typical grooming business, you need to tell them how there lives are going to be better with you in it.

What if you have multiple benefits?

Most products and services will have several benefits. It’s your job to figure out which benefit is most important to your target market. This can only be resolved with extensive testing and market research. Some markets care a great deal about time, others do not. Get to know your market and figure out what truly resonates with them.

Once you’ve figured out the most important benefit, it needs to be your primary message in everything you do. From product design to social media content, make sure people see the main benefit first. Once your audience knows why they should care, then you can cover the rest of the benefits and a full explanation of your features.

Focus on the main benefit.

Having trouble figuring out if you have a benefit or a feature? Put it in the comments and we’ll work through it together.

 

5 Facebook Post Templates that are Guaranteed to Drive Fan Engagement

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The term “engagement” has become another overused buzzword just like “leverage” and “transparency.” When it comes to Facebook Pages though, engagement is the only thing that matters.

You want your wall posts to pop up in people’s feeds. This doesn’t happen automatically though. Facebook as a super secret algorithm that includes some posts while excluding others. What gets included? Posts from pages and profiles that someone interacts with on a regular basis. Get people to come to your page frequently ad your posts will appear in their news feeds. Get those same people to interact with your posts and you’ll start popping up in the news feeds of their friends.

When you’ve increased your reach within the world of Facebook, then you can start pitching your business to a receptive and interested audience.

1. Provocative statement that your target market will like. (we recommend you like this)

Make a statement and place (we recommend you like this) below it so your post looks like this:

This is just a simple call to action. Make things easy by telling people exactly what you want them to do.

2. Click like if…

Same type of post with the call to action before the statement. This will let you mix things up a bit more.

3. Option A or Option B?

Give people two options and don’t contextualize it. People will want to debate the context and offer their opinions at the same time. The question is also really easy to answer, lowering the barrier to participating. Post the winner the next day.

4. Use a _______.

Seriously, use a _______. It’ll encourage people to fill in the blank with a comment. Pick a topic people get fired up about and you’ll probably get a debate going too. Take the most creative, funniest, or popular answer and post it the next day.

5. Facebook Poll

Facebook has made it super easy to post polls and questions. Not only is engagement super high but they tend to bring in votes long after you’ve posted them. It’s also a perfect opportunity to get to know our target market more and do some customer research. Which magazine do they like more? Night owls or early birds? Which sports? The list is endless.

Won’t people get tired of these templates?

If you use these templates exclusively for years on end then yes, your content is going to a get a little boring. You’ll want to mix things up a bit but these templates should be the core of your Facebook content. Get creative and come up with post cycles that cover 3 or 4 days. Also work in photos any chance you get. Facebook rose to dominance with photos, make good use of it.

Should I focus on likes or comments?

If you have to choose, focus on comments. Compared to likes, comments are included in news feeds far more frequently but they’re also harder to get. Balancing between the two is the best idea.

 

Has one of these post templates worked beautifully for you? Throw me a link in the comments and I’ll personally like your Facebook page.