How To Write Email Marketing Copy

Brad Shorr — Wednesday, 16 June 2021

Writing effective email marketing copy is difficult. I know this because I’ve been writing email copy since the inception of email marketing. I’ve also been the recipient of incalculable thousands of email solicitations that I tend to read regardless of my level of interest. They’re very instructive.

How Important Is Quality?

One thing you may have noticed about email copywriting is that results don’t always match up with writing quality. That has certainly been true for me. Sloppy copy I was embarrassed to claim has produced terrific click-throughs and conversions. Near perfect copy has bombed.

Why is this the case? First, many factors beyond copywriting play into an email campaign’s success — the quality of the list, the subject line, the design, the timing and, most important of all, the offer. If the offer is lousy, expect lousy results no matter what. If the offer is superb, you have an excellent chance of achieving superb results even if the email copy is run-of-the-mill.

Get to Know the Customer

Effective email copy comes from understanding its reader. Many copywriters think they understand the reader, but they really don’t. For example, copywriters will often tell you how important originality is. They think this because in the marketing business, creativity is highly regarded. But the average customer doesn’t care about creativity or originality. The average customer cares about whether you can solve his problem or otherwise improve his quality of life.

That being the case, creativity can be a hindrance rather than a help in getting that message across. Why? Because now customers have to slow down and figure out something they’ve never seen before — and they may not have the time or patience to do that. You never want the style of your message to interrupt or interfere with the message.

Good email copy is straightforward and clear. It conveys useful information. It has a valuable offer and a crystal-clear call to action. If the email campaign has a muddled strategy and a mediocre offer, improve them before revising and re-revising the copy; otherwise, you’re just putting punctuation on a pig.

To understand the reader, talk to customers or at least read lots and lots of online reviews of your company, client and companies in the same field. That’s how you find out what customers like, what they don’t like and how they communicate.

Get to Know Yourself

Another excellent way to get your copy on the customer’s wavelength is to reflect on your reaction to email solicitations in your own inbox. As I mentioned earlier, this exercise is very instructive. I have found:

I really dislike emails written as though the sender knows me, or even worse, already has a professional relationship with me.
I really dislike emails that encourage me to act because the sender needs something, such as to fill in an appointment for a given time slot.
I really dislike emails that berate or belittle me for being too stupid to have not taken action on the previous email or five emails.
I really dislike emails that ask for any sort of live, phone, or virtual meeting. These things are too intrusive and too time-consuming.
I can’t remember whether I’ve received previous emails from a sender, or even whether I already know who most senders are.
I much prefer a lack of personalization to phony personalization.

Get to Know the Basics

Once you’ve got a feel for the reader, the substance, style and tone of your copy should strike the right chords. But checking the basics is always important:

Punctuation
Grammar
Spelling
Short sentences and paragraphs
Minimal use of bold, italics and other formatting complications

These basics make your copy readable and maximize your credibility. True, many readers will not notice a spelling error — but how many new customers do you want to let slip through the cracks because you didn’t take the time to edit your copy? Customer acquisition is hard enough as it is without making it harder with poor proofreading.

Test Your Assumptions

Email marketing facilitates effective testing. You think personalization is the way to go? Everybody seems to agree, so why not test that assumption. Perhaps, in a world where everybody is personalizing, an impersonal email just might stand out. Does conventional wisdom in your business say short copy sells? To me, that’s an invitation to go long. When you do a bold test, you’ve got nothing to lose and a big competitive edge to gain.

Why Salespeople Deserve Respect

Brad Shorr — Friday, 14 May 2021

If I were a science-fiction writer, I’d write two stories about salespeople.

In the first story, there would be no salespeople. The world would be primitive, difficult and dreary because innovation and commerce would advance at a snail’s pace.

In the second story, every salesperson in the world would look like Rodney Dangerfield … because they don’t get no respect.

Two groups that consistently undervalue salespeople are salespeople and buyers:

A lot of salespeople run away from their profession, using job titles and job descriptions that make you think they do something other than sell.
A lot of buyers treat salespeople like second-class citizens, if they treat them at all.

This is unfortunate and wrong. In my experience, salespeople who embrace their profession succeed economically and in terms of job satisfaction. Buyers (and organizations) that cultivate relationships with salespeople outperform competitors that isolate and insulate themselves from the sales pitch.

Sales is a noble profession:

Salespeople introduce organizations to new products, new services, new technologies and new techniques. Much more important still, they help organizations understand how these new things will produce more revenue, more profit, more customers, happier customers and happier employees. Salespeople help companies catch up, get ahead and stay ahead.
Salespeople need a wide range of skills. They must be expert communicators, in speech and in writing. They must be great listeners. They must be highly organized and detail-oriented, and yet able to see the big picture with utmost clarity. They need to understand people, from grunts in the trenches to C-level executives. They must have the mental fortitude of a battle commander under siege, since they hear “no” 90% of the time.

Do some salespeople take shortcuts? Yes. Are some salespeople incompetent? Yes. But the same could be said of lawyers, landscapers, politicians, policemen, teachers and toolmakers. The difference is, everybody recognizes the need for these other professions. Good organizations recognize the value of their sales teams, but otherwise they are unsung heroes.

Salespeople are extremely valuable to marketers, too. They help us clarify, prioritize and articulate value propositions and product/service benefits. They help us understand the client’s position in the market and what motivates the client’s customers to buy or buy elsewhere. Without input from sales, marketing campaigns go over like lead balloons.

Don’t sell salespeople short. You need them, whoever you are.

SEO from Scratch: What to Expect and How to Master

Tuesday, 22 December 2020

The SEO industry has matured a lot over the last decade, but there is still a lot of confusion as to what it is (or should be) and how to manage it effectively.

How to start an SEO strategy for a new company site? When to expect results? What is a doable budget?

Let’s try and cover some of the most popular SEO from scratch questions here.

Where to Start?

SEO starts with setting up your site. A lot will rely on which platform (or content management platform) you choose. It also all comes down to your needs.

If your business is going to be in an ecommerce business (enabling people to buy something from your site), you will likely need some ecommerce set up help. In this case, contact an agency that will help you with both set-up and SEO fundamentals.

If your website’s goal is to inform your future customers of your expertise or services, it is a good idea to set up a blog because there are a few powerful blog management platforms that will allow you to easily handle most of your content and SEO needs from home. Plus, you may even be able to set up the site yourself. Starting a blog is pretty easy these days, so you may be able to handle it yourself.

The next step would be creating content for your first landing pages. These should inform the potential customers of what you do and how it can help them solve their problems. These can be services pages, product pages, as well as pages explaining your business terms as well as talking about your team and brand story. These are all important for sending positive signals to both people and search engines.

When figuring out which pages to create first, use Text Optimizer which will analyze your target query and use semantic analysis to identify most popular concepts and questions behind it:

What Does SEO Entail and Is It Doable In-House?

Fundamentally, search engine optimization consists of three major areas:

Fixing (and/or monitoring) technical issues (e.g. making sure there are no broken links, unnecessary redirects, etc.)
Content creation that matches relevant search queries (so this task also includes keyword research)
Link building (which is - sadly - a never-ending, ever-evolving task). Link building in itself can include dozens of tasks involving content creation, graphic design, PR / outreach, influencer marketing, etc. etc.

Depending on the size and needs of your business, you may be able to handle much of this at home. For example, content is something many businesses choose to manage in-house. You are likely to need help for technical SEO and link acquisition.

To sum up:

Search engine optimization...:

Takes a lot of planning
Always changes
Includes diverse tasks
Never really ends…: (Once stopped, you cannot just turn the switch back on. It will take lots of time to recover)

So it is a smart decision to build a management team at home while outsourcing certain tasks to trusted providers

How Long Will SEO Take to Deliver Results?

The best advice I can give here: Be in no hurry.

All long-term SEO issues tend to come from a business being too impatient in chasing those organic search positions.

Start your site as if you didn’t plan to achieve those rankings: Start slow and steady. If you are looking for quick leads, start with Facebook and Google ads (or other ways to grow traffic).

Realistically, it takes anywhere from 3 to 6 months for a brand new site to start receiving a solid amount of traffic, but you really need to start with long-tail search queries that don’t have a high competition.

You can find those using this keyword exercise over and over again.

Do I Need SEO?

Beyond doubt.

To put simply, these days if you are not findable on Google, you don’t exist. According to a study conducted by SparkToro, Google is the single-largest traffic driver to websites. Across various industries, Google accounts for about 57.8% of total clicks the surveyed websites were getting:

Google is the only most effective online traffic source. With more than three and a half billion searches a day globally, a presence on Google isn’t really an option. It’s what your business cannot exist without.

When it comes to SEO vs PPC, SEO delivers 83% of organic search traffic from search engines, while paid search generates only 17%

Google is where most buying journeys start and continue. Unlike social media marketing which is usually interruptive, Google search is able to send free pre-qualified leads (thanks to matching results to the search intent). People use Google when they want to find you (or another brand that does a better SEO job).

How to Measure My SEO Effectiveness

There is no perfect answer to this.

The best way to approach this question is to track a combination of various criteria:

Rankings for relevant search queries
Organic search traffic
Organic search traffic leads

If all of the above is slowly or surely growing, you are on the right path.

You can monitor your rankings using rank monitoring tools. You monitor your search traffic and how those organic clicks convert into conversions using Finteza which allows you to keep an eye on your organic traffic without requiring a tedious set up.

Simply install the script, and then click through to Google to filter all your further reports to Google’s organic traffic. So you can see how your organic traffic is following through your sales funnel, for example:

Conclusion

SEO is truly not rocket science but you need to approach consistently and strategically. Don’t try to trick the algorithm and

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than 10 years, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of the regular Twitter chat #vcbuzz

How To Maintain Customer Relationships

Monday, 16 November 2020

Although the focus of this blog (and of most Internet marketing campaigns) is lead generation, there’s a danger in going too far. As any business owner knows, adding customers is infinitely more desirable than replacing customers. If you neglect your existing customers and take them for granted, you’ll be running on a lead generation treadmill, adding new business — if you’re lucky — at the same rate you’re losing it.

Customers want to feel appreciated, wanted, needed, valued. Some may even want to feel as though they are the center of your universe. Here are 10 ways to keep those feelings stoked and keep your customers in the fold.

Send greeting cards (yes, with stamps and envelopes) on two or three occasions every year.
Send or deliver gifts. Before doing so, make sure you understand the company’s gift policy. Some companies discourage or don’t allow employees to receive gifts from suppliers.
Be careful how you market promotions aimed at new customers only. Current customers feel left out when they can’t take advantage of your deal.
In light of the above, run promotions of which existing customers can take advantage.
Consider implementing a formal rewards program that builds loyalty and encourages customers to buy additional items/services.
Visit customers from time to time to review how things are going. This is crucially important in B2B. How often you do this depends on the size of the customer, as well as the customer’s expectations and location.
Have multiple employees establish relationships with multiple customer contacts. When a customer relationship hinges completely on one relationship, that customer is very vulnerable should personnel or circumstances change!
Run an email campaign geared to customers, one that provides valuable insights and/or offers exclusive buying opportunities. Customer emails tend to have very high open rates and conversion rates, since the mailing list is predisposed to like you. Take advantage of this terrific marketing opportunity.
Entertain customers in appropriate ways. Even a simple lunch here and there can create a long-lasting sense of loyalty. Always try to entertain within the scope of standard practices in your industry.
Be careful not to lavish too much attention on customers. This can make them uncomfortable or even suspicious that they are spending too much.

5 Click Triggers To Empower Your Call To Action

Thursday, 16 July 2020

I have to admit I have never been very good at writing calls to action. Some people seem to have this preternatural skill, getting customers to click effortlessly.

For me, it has always been a major struggle, one that has held me back for a long time, keeping my content from ever reaching the potential I knew it could reach.

One of the tricks I have been thoroughly researching is experimenting with various “click triggers” — i.e., graphics and text that further encourage a CTA click, and how they can improve your CTAs almost instantly.

Click Triggers: What They Are, Why You Need Them

A click trigger is, in essence, a nudge. You are giving a little poke to the reader to direct them to fulfill an action that is best for your brand. Maybe that is pushing them to click on an article to read. Or it might be asking them to sign up for a free or paid service you provide.

A click is at the top of your conversion funnel: If we take a well-known TOFU->MOFU->BOFU concept, a click is right at the TOFU stage:

Having a strong click trigger is important because it is what turns a lead into a conversion. Without it you will see much less success, because the viewer will be left to decide whether to follow through on their own. No matter how good the product, a lot of people just won’t take that leap without prompting.

If you have noticed a lot of people going to your sales page but not following through on a sale, you need to add some click triggers to get things flowing. But how do you do that?

At the heart of it, increasing your CTA power is all about giving the viewer a reason to click through. Here are five ways that will always help you reach that goal.

1. Be compelling enough to eliminate doubt

One of the biggest reasons viewers turn back from that final step is doubt. They doubt that the product will be worth the money, or they need to know the features provided by the service or content will be worth reading. They don’t want to waste cash or time, both of which are precious.

So, your job is to offer a click trigger in the CTA that wipes away that doubt, leaving them free to go through with the initial action. You could do this by providing testimonials, letting them know of a sale, saying what it can do for them, etc.

Here’s a huge downloadable collection of ways you can write calls to action for it to trigger action.

Putting your CTA as an answer to a good question is one of the best ways to intrigue users enough for them to click. Questions have been found to eliminate a human being’s protective mechanism, making them look for an answer.

TextOptimizer is a great way to find popular relevant questions for which your target customers are seeking answers:

Putting my question in the heading action and following immediately with your CTA has worked very well for me.

2. Give them an offer they can’t refuse

Nothing is going to bring on the click-throughs like an offer that really grabs the viewer’s attention. A client of mine who owns a startup found a 125% increase in conversions when he stated the percentage off the original price in the CTA.

The sale had already been going on for months, but it wasn’t until he had shown it right in the call to action that it drove sales. Turns out that he needed to use it as a little push for the viewer.

Adding a content upgrade to your existing sales funnel is a good way to generate more clicks. HubSpot is good at those:

3. Don’t shy away from guarantees

Guaranteeing something to the customer used to be a tried-and-true method of building trust. But misuse by companies that didn’t really mean it has kind of taken it out of vogue.

That’s a shame, because it is still a very effective click trigger. You just have to know how to present it. For example, on a product or paid service, you can do something as simple as say you will give them their money back, no questions asked.

But for a piece of content, you could promise to teach or provide something they definitely want to see. In this case, you would guarantee that they absolutely can’t go without knowing this information, or that others who know it have an edge over them.

4. Tell them what to expect

One thing that can hold people back is the effort it may take to follow through. If you can prepare them for the next steps, showing that it will take minimal commitment on their part, you will find them much more willing to take the plunge.

For example, you could say: “To sign up, click the button and fill out our three-question form!”, specifying that they only have to answer three questions to proceed.

Here’s a good example:

This way they know exactly what will happen on the next page, and will see right away that it won’t take any real time to follow through on their initial interest.

There are a variety of WordPress plug-ins that give you much flexibility as to where to place your CTA and with which context to surround it.

Another idea to drive some engagements and clicks is to put a quick video next to your CTA. Videos have long been proven to be conversion boosters, as they keep users on a page longer and hence promote more action.

No need to invest in an expensive video software or service. I have had a lot of luck creating awesome videos using InVideo online editor that needs no training or software downloads.

Social proof is an effective click trigger in itself, and it may perform even better when in a video format.

5. Simplify what comes next

Do you really want to get people to follow through? Then you should take No. 4 and really utilize the idea of a simplified process. I mentioned the three-question form, but it can be even easier than that. An email address for a subscription takes no time at all, and it gives you the chance to retain interest or gain later sales.

A social media sign-on makes creating an account almost immediate, and will encourage people to try what you are offering. The easier the process, the greater the power of your CTA. Because even if they click on the link, they have to finish the process on the other end. Getting them there is only three-fourths of the battle.

Bonus: Monitor Your CTAs and Adapt!

I am not too tech-savvy. I could handle just the simplest CTA tracking using Google Analytics. I was using this tutorial, which is very concise: A How To Guide: Measuring Calls-To-Action with Google Analytics.

I have also discovered an easier and more robust platform for monitoring my conversion funnel, called Finteza:

Finteza allows users to add events to track using their WordPress plug-in. Once you add events, you can log in to monitor your site users closely and compare your sales funnel performance based on an entry page, mobile device, traffic source, etc.

What I Learned Through Click Triggers

As I said earlier in this post, I was really bad at creating CTAs. Even now I struggle with finding the right words, and really compelling people to follow through on what I want them to do. But learning about click triggers has vastly improved my CTAs — and my results. They provide an easy formula to follow to be more effective in my requests.

These marvels have also taught me the importance of asking. Before, I would have considered a CTA a simple throw-on, last-minute effort. Now, I see it as a powerful tool that can completely change the results you experience.

I know I am not the only person who thinks so. Take a minute to share your experience with click triggers with our other readers and leave a comment below!

Pandemic Pricing: Are You A Giver Or A Gouger?

Brad Shorr — Tuesday, 19 May 2020

Crises bring out the best and worst in people, and the best and worst in companies. During this one, we’re seeing this all the more because of social media and other types of Internet marketing.

We see company after company donating supplies or selling them at below-market prices, and shifting manufacturing to critically needed products, which they sell at below-market pricing. These are great stories.
We also hear people complain bitterly about companies charging what they deem to be excessively high prices, accusing these companies of taking advantage of the crisis to fatten their profits. These stories are fewer and farther between, thankfully.

So, if you are fortunate enough to be in business, what do you do about pricing? Do you adjust prices upward to the market? Do you reduce prices and risk spilling red ink on top of what you’re already wading in? Here are some thoughts that may help you answer these difficult questions.

People have long memories about how companies conduct themselves in a crisis. How much are short-term profits worth if you have to spend the next five years rehabilitating your corporate reputation and slashing prices to regain customers who were itching to leave you?
There’s an old adage that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. While the point above illustrates how this applies to price gouging, it also applies to excessive underpricing. If your corporate generosity, however well intended, causes your business to collapse and your employees to be thrown out of work, are you hurting conditions more than helping them?
Selling at market prices, even if unusually high as they sometimes are in a crisis, is not a bad thing. Selling too low creates shortages in a hurry, and then people who need the product can’t buy it at any price. Companies experience customer resistance whenever they raise prices, and doing so in a crisis just inflames the response. Nevertheless, you have to weigh whether you’d rather incur the wrath of a customer complaining about the price, or the wrath of a customer who can’t get material and is then forced to shut down production.
Many companies have found an excellent middle path, keeping prices more or less in line with market conditions, and rationing sales in one way or another to discourage or prevent hoarding — and to avoid running out of product by taking on too many new customers.

However your pricing strategy evolves, it’s important to explain what you’re doing. Customers may not want to hear it, but there’s no doubt they’d rather hear bad news than no news. Without helping customers understand the situation with regard to pricing and availability, you make it difficult for them to make prudent decisions about critical business issues.

Work out the message with your sales and marketing teams. Use all possible means at your disposal to communicate — phone, web conference, email, social media, the company website, etc. Time stamp your communication. Be consistent in what you say. Make sure your actions with regard to pricing are consistent with what you say.

Do all that and you’ll maintain credibility, retain more customers and get the positive word-of-mouth branding effect for which you’re looking.

Three Higher-Level Issues Hindering Your Lead Generation Efforts

Wednesday, 8 April 2020

Lead generation is one of the toughest topics out there.

This task can never be considered as done, and there are so many factors in play that it is often hard to run isolated tests and identify what may have gone wrong.

Yet, there are common offenders that most sites suffer from. Removing the following obstacles is likely to make your lead generation efforts much more successful.

1. Not Paying Enough Attention to Your Lead Gen Forms

You can optimize and re-optimize each and every aspect of your lead generation page — however, it has been found that the highest conversion boost normally comes from tweaking your actual form.

There’s no single recipe to creating a well-performing lead generation form (that would make our jobs too easy, right?).

However, there’s an abundance of case studies for you to learn from and experiment with:

The fewer required fields in your form, the better. This case study shows that limiting the number of required fields has yielded a 30% conversion boost.
Love them or hate them, pop-ups work very well for lead generation (here’s only one of many case studies claiming that pop-ups have turned out to be the biggest lead drivers). We also know they are incredibly annoying, so the general advice is to serve one pop-up to each user once.
Multi-step lead generation forms may generate up to 300% more conversions. Here’s the case study proving and detailing the point. There may be a few reasons for that (e.g., people getting more curious with each subsequent step), but the major theory behind this is the so-called foot-in-the-door phenomenon — which also makes two-step opt-in such a powerful tactic. Once users go through the first step, they feel more committed to going until they are done.

Obviously, if something has worked for someone, don’t assume it will work for you, too. Every site has unique circumstances helping or hindering their lead generation efforts. So, whatever you do, closely monitor and measure results.

You can do that pretty easily with Google Analytics, which integrates with major lead generation plug-ins, but for better insight you may want to set up an additional engagement monitoring system.

Finteza will help you assess your form performance, and over time, when you have accumulated enough data, you can also use Finteza to serve more personalized results through its retargeting feature.

Step 1: Measure the form performance

Finteza allows you to build funnels visualizing your form performance and engagement losses at every step. You can compare desktop and mobile traffic engagement to assess possible issues and introduce quick fixes:

Step 2: Set up retargeting campaign to re-engage your returning visitors

Once you have enough data, you can identify some events that would help you re-engage your returning users with more personalized ads and forms:

2. Failure to Make Your Landing Pages Accessible

Web accessibility is sadly often ignored by lead generation experts for no good reason. In fact, according to CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) data, a quarter of the U.S. population has some type of disability.

This means 1 in 4 of your site visitors may be disabled.

Is your site catering to these people? Disabilities range from impairments to activity limitations, and every page of your site should accommodate all people with a wide range of needs.

For example, blind people should be able to navigate your site using assistive technology, and users with cognitive limitations should be able to understand your content and locate the solution.

Ignoring a quarter of your audience is not a smart business decision. Plus, inaccessible pages may result in legal actions and/or reputation crises.

When it comes to lead generation, inaccessible forms mean so many people may not even be able to complete them. This is a major conversion optimization mistake, so make sure your forms are accessible:

Set labels to point to each form field and identify it.
Ensure that your forms can be navigated with the keyword.
Build logical and clear forms that are easy to understand.
Make sure your forms are responsive and use large buttons.

Making your forms accessible makes it possible for people with disabilities to join your list or complete your survey:

Users with cognitive disabilities can better understand the form and instructions on how to complete it.
People who speak directions to an assistive technology can use the labels to complete the form via voice commands.
Users suffering dexterity issues are able to complete the forms due to large buttons and clear instructions.
Screen reader users can understand web form controls easily, thanks to descriptive labels and logical order.

If it seems like too much, you can use accessiBe, which automates web accessibility optimization and monitoring. All you need is to install its script and give it some time to crawl and optimize your site.

accessiBe is a multi-feature solution that will automatically find and optimize all your site elements, not just forms. With it you will make the entire site accessible, from images to navigation menus — so your disabled users will find it easier (or even possible) to navigate your site and opt in when they feel like:

3. Organizational Silos

There’s often an organizational disconnect between different teams that are involved in the lead generation process. For example, in many cases, salespeople are not aware of marketing efforts behind those acquired leads, and content marketers have no idea what the sales team is even doing.

If there are remote people involved, things can get absolutely disorganized. Your webinar host may be completely oblivious to your company’s lead generation tactics. Your freelance blogger may not know your company’s main selling point, etc.

The result: Lead generation efforts are scattered, irrelevant and ineffective.

Everyone in the company should be able to contribute their thoughts and participate in the overall marketing strategy process, while organizations should ensure everyone is motivated to chime in.

Collaboration makes marketing more integrated and effective. This includes more informed persona building, competitive analysis and storytelling tactics.

Using marketing collaboration platforms will improve cross-team communication and unite your whole company around one common goal — i.e., lead generation.

ContentCal is one of my favorite marketing collaboration tools, giving everyone in your company access to the brand’s marketing calendar and allowing everyone to create social media posts as well as contribute ideas to upcoming lead generation campaigns.

It also offers monitoring, analysis and content library features allowing you to organize your assets and keep everything under one roof.

There are more calendar apps that integrate into your WordPress dashboard if you want to explore more options.

Conclusion

Lead generation is your company’s ongoing effort. Even if you have all the three steps above under control, your job is not done. However, fixing the three mistakes above is likely to make that job easier and more productive.

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than 10 years, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of the regular Twitter chat #vcbuzz

How To Turn Orders Into Objections

Brad Shorr — Friday, 28 February 2020

In the world of sales, much ink has been spilled on closing techniques. Knowing what to say is an important skill, and listening perhaps an even more important one. But there is one technique more important than speaking or listening.

What I mean is, the issue of closing should be taken literally — closing as in knowing when to keep your mouth closed. The less said the better when an order is on the line.

My uncle was one of the greatest closers I ever saw, and I’ve seen a lot of them. The most interesting thing about his closing technique was that he hardly said anything. He’d ask for the order and then keep his mouth closed. Often there would be a prolonged, awkward silence. Eventually it was the buyer who cracked, usually by saying something like, “I guess I’ll take some.”

Most people can’t stand those awkward silences in a sales conversation. But salespeople should avoid the temptation to speak, because anything they say is liable to put the order further out of reach. For instance:

Talking about your customer-friendly return policy leads the buyer to question the quality of your product. The buyer will infer you honed your return policy thanks to the great volume of products being returned.
Talking about how terrific your price is tempts the buyer to ask for a better deal.
Mentioning your promotional price ends at the end of the week encourages the buyer to wait until the end of the week to order. In the meantime, who knows what could happen.
Blurting out something like, “If you’re not able to order five, I’ll give you three at the same price,” encourages the buyer to ask for one at the same price. (Never negotiate with yourself.)

Don’t mistake silence for reluctance when a buyer is quiet. A well-trained buyer knows what we’ve been discussing here, and may be using silence as a negotiating technique. Or, the buyer may simply be thinking it over, in which case interrupting him or her isn’t going to be helpful.

In short, when an order is on the line, silence speaks louder than words.

What Is Quality Content?

Brad Shorr — Friday, 31 January 2020

In content marketing circles, you hear the phrase “quality content” a lot. SEO advice stresses the importance of quality content.

That being the case, if your work involves buying content, selling content or creating content, it might be helpful to understand what quality content is.

There is no single definition of quality content. Here are a few stabs at defining it. I would love to hear your definitions in comments.

Quality content helps you understand complicated ideas.
Quality content reveals new ways to apply what you already know.
Quality content sheds new light on old problems.
Quality content connects the dots.
Quality content compiles a lot of relevant information in a single work.
Quality content deepens understanding.
Quality content broadens understanding.

Obviously, you can’t incorporate all of these characteristics of quality into a single piece of content — that is, unless you are a really, really talented writer. Speaking of which, here are what some really, really talented writers say about writing.

“Good writing is like a windowpane.” — George Orwell

“I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.” — Leo Tolstoy

“The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn’t mean, because they might be criticized for it.” — Seth Godin

“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.” — David Ogilvy

Over to You

How do you define quality content?

A Look Back At 2019 Marketing Predictions

Brad Shorr — Thursday, 26 December 2019

At the end of the year, it’s always fun to look back and see if those early-year predictions came true. Actually, it’s more than fun. Examining what the experts got right and got wrong helps you plan more soundly for the upcoming year.

I scoured the web for 2019 marketing predictions from major organizations, and found eight worthwhile reads, even at this late date. A lot of what you’ll see here are trends that should pick up even more steam in 2020, and perhaps a few that will fizzle out.

Adobe called out data-driven creativity, experiential commerce, ethical personalization, account-based B2B marketing and CXM (customer experience management).
Gartner mentioned profitability over customer experience, user-level control of data, content creation, drastic cuts in analytics departments and a trend toward shorter video.
HubSpot saw growth in content marketing, video, native ads, SEO, AI and VR. Privacy was also identified as a core issue.
IBM talked about the “martecheter,” AI, “consulgencies,” agile marketing, customer centricity and a few other visionary items.
Martech made mention of 5G as facilitating more integrated and imaginative content marketing, personalization, customer journey and data privacy issues. Fascinating read.
Moz was on the money, talking about answers-driven search, voice search, SERP feature intrusion and video.
Oracle, oracle that it is, foresaw B2B growth in content marketing, retargeting, social media and video, data-driven marketing and ABM (account-based marketing).
Search Engine Land highlighted mobile-first indexing, page speed, brand as ranking signal, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and Amazon search.

There you have it. Anyone ready to proffer a prediction for 2020?