Getting people to subscribe to your email list is tough, so be sure that you convert as much of that new audience as possible by sending an attention-grabbing welcome email. A solid welcome email may not convert them on the spot but it may get them to open your next email blast—even if they don’t receive one for a few days.

So, grab their attention and make your first lead-converting effort with one (or more) of these lead-converting welcome emails:

1. Lead-converting content promotion: use your highest converting webpages and content in your welcome email that includes your most-effective call-to-actions. Including a link to your highest-converting subject matter like ebooks, whitepaper or webinair will make it doubly effective if you can drop it casually into your content conversation.

2. Suggest a transaction: the most common reason people don’t initially buy is because they aren’t asked to buy or leaded to it. But shorter sales cycles are often created simply by asking for the business. You can build on an immediate sales suggestions by offering a time-sensitive incentive.

3. Give away an assessment or consultation: people love free stuff. Offering an assessment or consultation will not only offer them a valuable service but will give you valuable lead-gen information to plug into your sales/marketing tool.

4. Propose a survey: people love surveys almost as much as free stuff, simply for the reason that people love to talk about themselves. If you create a survey with user-oriented questions, and pose it as such, you will likely get a large amount of respondents willing to give up critical sales-cycle material. Posing this as a getting-to-know-you-survey will greatly increase your response odds.

5. Offer to personalize their content: the biggest reason for email marketing list unsubscribes is that they don’t offer the kind of content people want to see. So, there is no better time to ask them what kind of information they want, and at what frequency, than in you welcome email.

6. Promote your other marketing efforts: people may have signed up to your email marketing list without knowing that you have social media marketing, direct mail, or newsletter campaigns that offer similar information. Perhaps they have a preferred medium that is likely to convert them. All it takes is offering them multiple venues for them to choose the one that is most likely to convert them.

7. Ask them to follow you socially: while that might sound slightly stalker-esque, asking someone to follow you on their social networking accounts will encourage an immediate boost in the relationship that will catapult you halfway through the email marketing sales cycle.

8. Offer them a tour or free trial: ’nuff said.
   
   

   Fostering participation amongst new email list additions isn’t tough but it does require a concerted and immediate effort. Try one or more of the above tactics and you should see a marked improvement in new email registration participation levels.

    For more email marketing tips, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: 8 Tips for Lead-Converting Welcome Emails

Growing your list is easier than you think, it just takes a concerted effort…of following these 18 proven-effective methods of growing your email marketing list:

1. Create a new offer. Offers get stale just like email addresses, social followers and bread. Creating a new free offer like an ebook, whitepaper or app will appeal to new users, and if you require an email address (with proof/double opt-in) for download your list will quickly grow.
2. Be useful, host an informative online webinair and require email addresses for registration.
3. Create a free, online tool, like a calculator, that requires email registration for use.
4. Use email-registration required QR codes.
5. Host a contest or sweepstakes. Promote it via your website and social networking sites and require email registration for entrance. Offer to your current email list that referrals are worth extra entry tickets. Be real and follow through with the prize because phony contests will lose users quick time.
6. Offer incentive-driven email signups on your social networking pages. If you’ve done this already, do it again because you likely missed somebody.
7. Create an alliance with a partner or affiliate website/company and cross advertise on email and social media blasts. It will give you an entirely new untapped market.
8. Use offline events to collect email addresses, like trade shows, corporate events, charity events, etc.
9. Ask current email subscribers to pass along your emails to friends who might be interested in your products/services. Be sure to add a ‘subscribe’ button to that email.
10. Run a paid ad campaign with email capture or use AdWords to link to one of your website page that gets the highest email subscribe returns.
11. Create another email subscription type that offers different products/information/services to your current one. You might just catch entirely new types of users.
12. Guest post on a popular blog in your vertical and include an email-subscription call-to-action button.
13. Sign up to new social networks like Pinterest and promote your email subscription there, especially to user and interest groups.
14. Put an email-subscription call-to-action button in a YouTube video you create then promote it across social networks and related internet sites.
15. Bring your offline online by encouraging your direct mail and newsletter subscribers to join your email list and social pages (play up the environmental angle by reminding them it saves trees).
16. Host an online or offline charity event and encourage attendees to sign up to your email list. Consider saying for every email added you will donate $X to the charity—it is underhanded but successful.
17. Re-engage old email lists with a new email marketing campaign that focuses on more relevant and fresher content.
18. Host a group event or webinair with like-minded companies (but not direct competitors of course) and share email subscribes.

If you have the time to implement all of the above you will breathe new life into your email marketing list. Be sure not to lose the momentum though and begin exciting new campaigns and blasts immediately. Don’t forget to enter them all into your sales or CRM tool to ensure that leads are followed through on.

For more tips n’ tricks for stealthy email marketers, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: 18 Ninja-like Tips to Grow your Email Marketing List

Email marketing may be a great strategy, but here is the problem: Many webmasters do not know where to put the optin box on their website or how to increase optin rates.

If you aren’t getting any email subcribers, your efforts are futile at best.

Here are some tips to increasing your optin rate:

Prominence

Your optin must be displayed in a prominent place where your visitors can see it. Do not hide it off in the corner and blend it in with the rest of the site. The optin graphics should jump out at the visitor and compel them to join your list.

Locations

There are several locations to place the email optin box.

1. Header – The header is the top section of your website and one of the first elements a visitor sees. Marketers usually add the box to the right side away from the logo or contact information.

Beware of optin boxes cluttering the header. Even though the optin is front and center, the excess clutter can deter eyeballs. A better choice may be right under the header, but above the main content. This is a popular area to feature an optin and garner more subscribers.

2. Sidebar – The sidebar is another valuable location for most websites. It is also high-converting because visitors see the optin on every web page.

3. Below Blog Post – The footer location is perfect for blogs because it is natural for readers to finish the article and wonder what to do next. The only caveat is that you are adding more choices for your reader once they finish your article. They can either post a comment, share the article, or optin to your list. Chances are, they will only complete one item.

4. About Page – This one isn’t as popular, but it may work well for personal brands. If you are branding yourself, you will have a lot of visitors visit your “About” page. Try an optin on this page and measure the conversions. You just may be surprised.

Design

The colors and design of the optin box should stand out from the website background. Add professional graphics and TELL the potential subscriber what they can expect after opting in. Remember that people consider their names and email addresses as private information. You must give them a good reason to opt in and divulge their personal data.

List a privacy statement and assure your potential subscribers their email addresses will never be shared or sold. And do not request more information than a name and email address. Many internet users are not even comfortable offering those details.

Freebie

Incentives are crucial to attract people to sign up for your email list. Give away a free ebook, white paper, interview, or audio to entice your website visitors to subscribe. Consider it an exchange of value. You are offering your visitors a free gift in exchange for their email address which is very valuable to them because they are allowing you to invade their space and time with your email messages.

Test

If you don’t know where to begin, add your optin list to one of the above locations and test it. Change its location and see if you experience an increase or decrease in conversions.

Where is the optin on your website? Are there any other locations you would consider?

The Original Post is Located Here: Tips and Tricks to Optimizing Your Email Optin Box

Here are the important lead-nurturing metrics to keep track of to ensure your sales success record:

List Segmentation Metrics
How well you are segmenting your lists will determine how well you can nurture your sales leads. You can use your analytics tool in two ways to determine your lead-nurturing segmentation success. First, use your analytics tool to determine if any of your list segments are under-performing others. As a safe rule of thumb your unsubscribe rates should be less than 1% across all segments. If one section is higher then another it means you haven’t been nurturing your leads in that specific lead-nurturing sector. The second way to measure your segmentation success is by checking your click-through rates. Your click-through rates should also be reasonably uniform across your various segments.

Action Item: If your click-throughs and unsubscribes are not uniform (or are uniformly poor performing) then you need to reconsider your segmentation strategy.

Time-to-Customer Conversion Metrics
Nothing says good lead-nurturing skills like a quick time-to-customer conversion rates. Use your time-to-customer conversion speed in your metrics tool to see if your conversion rate has increased over time—as it should have—or if you have stagnated and could use a lead-nurturing pick me up. For more lead-nurturing internet marketing tips, click here.

Qualified Lead Generation Metrics
To be successful in lead-nurturing, you need to have a sufficient group of leads to nurture through the sales process—without them you are just chasing your own tail. If you haven’t defined what a ‘qualified’ lead is, do that now. Next, figure out how many of your sales leads are truly qualified. This will help determine your true time-to-customer conversion rate and boost your overall lead-nurturing success.

Also, apply your qualified lead definition and generation techniques to your segmentation metric to ensure that you are nurturing qualified leads across all segmented lead-nurturing campaigns (if you haven’t segmented your lead-nurturing campaigns yet, consider that now). If your qualified leads are unbalanced then you will need to redefine how you earn your leads. This may involve strategizing with others in your marketing or sales departments.

Cost-per-Customer Metrics
In order for your lead-nurturing to be effective you need to have a reasonable cost-per-customer conversion rate. To measure this use closed-loop analytics to see how many leads actually turn into customers. Note: in this step the speed with which they convert matters less than the conversion itself. If the time invested in lead-nurturing costs more (on a wage per hour basis) then your conversions earns, you will need to re-examine your lead-nurturing strategy—especially the quality of leads being worked on. When measuring your cost-per-customer lead-gen ratio you should look at the cost ratio over time because a decreasing cost-per-customer means significantly more success than the current ratio alone.

You should be incorporating lead-nurturing metrics into your weekly or monthly analytics use. Heck, you’re running analytics anyways—might as well keep an eye out for your lead-nurturing success.

The Original Post is Located Here: Lead-Nurturing Metrics You Might Not Know You’re Measuring

Evernote is a fantastic little piece of software that can help you sort emails, use virtual post-its, have a virtual whiteboard, make to-do lists and more. Unfortunately it can be a little intimidating because of its flexibility and magical Gandalf-the-White-Wizard powers, but once you wrap your head around it you will never go back. Once you have yourself organized, and hooked-on, Evernote you will notice a marked improvement in your workflow and you’ll be able to take on an increased workload (or you can sit back with a beer with the extra time…either way).

What YOU Can Do With It:

1. Create Content
Evernote is a bang-up tool for for capturing ideas and turning them into content. Its digital notebook qualities remind me of a real notebook. You know, like pen and paper. You can use it to draft and store articles and blog posts, store ideas for future content and save inspirational articles that you hope to rip-off one day. This may sound a lot like a word processing software, but trust me—Evernote makes the experience much cooler.

2. To-Do Lists
If you’re like me and constantly have ten things on the go, or at least rattling around in your brain somewhere, then you will love Evernote’s to-do list capabilities. It is a great way not only put all your duties down on paper so that they get done but you can also link it to other items in Evernote like content ideas or webpages. Via Evernote smartphone apps you can even take the list with you on the go.

3. Take Notes
With the virtual whiteboard you can jot down notes in meetings or while you are on the go then send the note to yourself later (with a pop-up reminder if your not putting it on your to-do list). It looks cool (especially on an iPad) so pulling up Evernote won’t get you any heckles from onlookers.

4. Inbox Triage
Hopefully your inbox doesn’t look like mine, but if it does then you NEED Evernote’s Inbox Zero tool. Inbox Zero tool will assist you in deleting, delegating, responding to, and acting on your emails. You can even assign tasks to your to-do list within Evernote from your inbox. Sweet.

5. Idea List
You likely have lots of great ideas that flash into you head daily. You also likely rarely write them down and even more rarely act upon them (or remember to). By creating an idea list you will be able to easily access a quick backlog of ideas. Perhaps you could even put down the i’ve-got-too-much-time-on-my-hands beer and get to work putting these into action.

6. Collaboration
Through Evernote you can collaborate with your team and share all your Evernote content, schedules, to-do lists, etc. It doesn’t take all the endless revisions that other collaborative software makes you go through so its a realistic tool for collaborating.

Evernote can really tie all your tasks into one and help get you motivated to be more pro-active in the things that matter and cut down on you reactive time.

For more tips on how to improve your mojo as an internet marketer, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: 6 Ways Marketers Can Use Evernote to Organize Their Lives

All you’ve got to do is follow our not-yet-patented, user-friendly website registration process to begin capturing the 10%+ of lost customers who abandon their shopping carts and email registration forms. This 10-step process will ensure you stop missing out on conversions for the sake of your registration process:

Step 1: Convey Registration Value
Far too many customers are lost simply because they do not understand the value of continuing through the website registration process. So, on a sidebar on the first registration page use concise, bulleted points explaining the features AND benefits of registering.

Step 2: Strongly Consider using Social Sign-On
People LOVE bypassing registrations by using social sign on, aka social authentication. You still get the info you need but they get to bypass the long registration process. You also get the added benefit of gaining more lead-nurturing information from their social profiles. So strongly consider adding social authentication to your registration process.

Step 3: Clear the Clutter
Surveys done of shopping cart and registration abandoners show that the sheer volume of fields is one of the leading causes of abandonment. So get rid of all the unnecessary fields.

Be sure to keep lead-nurturing information fields but take out any superfluous fields like phone number (when is the last time you actually called a customer?), salutations, etc. Also, strongly consider removing the separate billing and shipping address box, and create one that only appears if you click a button that says they have separate addresses.

Step 4: Create a Clear and Logical Order
People are used to a specific field order, most commonly consisting of: name, phone number, email, address and payment details. You mess with that order and people don’t like it. Now that you have already removed the clutter creating a logical order should be simple.

Step 5: Use More Steps
People are scared off by big blocks of impenetrable information. For the same reason I break my articles up into sections with lists, bullets and paragraphs, you should break up your registration process into easy-to-follow, well-labeled steps. Use numbers and headings where possible. At the end of each step include a brief note letting them know what step is next, for example, “Next Step: Email Confirmation”.

Step 6: Address Security and Privacy Concerns
Security and privacy are both hot-button issues these days. So include a highlighted box with links to your security and privacy policies. Strongly consider listing a few bulleted points highlighting your policies. If you use any recognizable security processes like Verisign or a designation from the Better Business Bureau (BBB), include pictorial badges. Be incredibly honest in this process though. Don’t say you won’t email them if you will, and don’t say you have an accreditation that you don’t.

Step 7: Simplify your Password Process
People want password processes to be secure, but not frustrating. A password-strength advisor is always a nice touch, but don’t make the password too difficult or your users might get frustrated and leave. The truth here is that people likely aren’t worried about anyone hacking into their account with you–especially if they aren’t entering sensitive information like credit card numbers, or if they already have security processes built into their credit card like with VISA.

Step 8: Calm Down with the Captcha
We know that you use Captcha to avoid spam, bots and other evil beings. But your customers hate them. They have become utterly unreadable. Keep in mind that this process can infuriate them and offers them no benefit whatsoever. If you MUST use Captcha then be relaxed with it and allow for refreshes of the unintelligible words. Consider an alternative process like the new math-based verification forms, like the ones that say “what is 4+4?”.

Step 9: Please, Please, Please Explain Errors Clearly
There is nothing more frustrating in a registration process then when you get an error and can’t proceed. It is a leading cause of abandonment. Take a second and picture the feeling.
To avoid frustrating your registrants clearly explain each and every possible error and, most importantly, explain to them how to fix the error. For example if they receive an error about an incorrect phone number you need to tell them that a certain format is required, like “555-555-5555”.

Step 10: Use a Guest Checkout
Not everyone wants to go through a registration process. Others don’t want to reveal sensitive information. Understand their hesitation and work with it by offering a guest checkout. You might be hesitating reading that because why would anyone register if they didn’t have to? But the truth is that you can provide a guest checkout option while at the same time reminding them of the benefits of registering. This will please both parties.

If you use all the above tips in your user registration process you should see a signficant jump almost immediately. For more tips n tricks for internet marketing, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: The Should-Be-Patented, 10 Step User-Friendly Registration Process that…

Keeping up with new statistics is probably the easiest way to stay ahead of trends, and your competition. So, without further ado, here are the newest internet marketing stats for 2012, which we have broken down into two categories: Cost and budgeting stats, and lead quality/sales/marketing stats. The former category ensures that your time and money are well spent, and the latter ensures that your sales and profits outpace your time and money invested.

Cost and Budgeting Statistics

• Lead cost varies between inbound and outbound leads, with inbound costing 61% less than their outbound equivalent.
• The average cost per lead for marketers focused on outbound-lead businesses is $346.
• The cost per lead average for inbound marketers is just $135.
• This year 89% of businesses are at the very least sustaining, if not increasing their inbound budget.
• Blogging is not dead, in fact average budgets have increased from 9% in ’09 to 21% in ’12.
• Telemarketing investments are on the decrease, falling from 10% to 5%.
• Small businesses are investing higher budget percentages in inbound marketing than larger businesses, with small businesses spending an average of 43% and large 21%.
• Conversely, large businesses are spending more on outbound marketing, 33% compared to small businesses 14% investment.
• Small businesses are also spending more of their budgets on social media marketing and blogging than their larger counterparts.

Lead Quality and Sales Statistics

• 57% of blogging companies have earned customers from their blog, but that percentage jumps to 92% if they blog more than once a day.
• 62% of companies that are leveraging LinkedIn have earned customers from it.
• B2C companies have reported higher customer gains with Facebook, reported at 77%, while 65% of B2B companies have reported earning customers via their LinkedIn activity.
• Some Additional Facts that Internet Marketers will find Interesting
• Over 60% of companies farming leads have reported that social media has become significantly MORE important as a resource and over 50% of companies using offline sources like direct mail have stated it has become significantly LESS important as a lead source.
• 25% of internet marketers believe that their blog is not only important, but critical, to their business. 81% believe it is useful.
• 40% of internet marketers are reporting that the Google+ social network is useful. Important or critical to their business.

Not surprisingly, marketers are reporting an increased reliance on online marketing methods as opposed to offline. The standard internet marketing platforms, email, social media and blogging are all gaining in importance, with an increased focus on inbound marketing over outbound. Now, go forth and plan your budgets accordingly and search for leads in all the right places.

For more email-marketing strategy planning tips, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: Industry-Defining Social Media Marketing Statistics for 2012

Never fear though, once again—we are here. Here are the critical (and EASY) steps to keeping a clean (and effective) email list:

Be too Legit to Quit
When you build and expand your email list the only proven way to keep it clean and maintain a safe sender reputation is to have opt-in only email addresses. Ill-gotten email addresses will only cause you harm, and if you have ever tried buying lists then you know how crappy the results are anyway. So step 1, keep it clean by obtaining legitimate email addresses via your website, social-media accounts and referral subscribes.

Welcome new Users via a Double Opt-in Process
If you don’t have a welcome email for all new subscribers that serves as a double opt-in then your missing the proverbial boat. A double opt-in welcome email will ensure that you pass their spam detectors while confirming their email address and encouraging participation. Don’t be afraid of this, they just opted in the first time, so they will do it a second time too. Strongly consider addressing email settings in the welcome email to let them customize the info they receive and the frequency with which they receive it.

Don’t Hide your Unsubscribe
Too many email marketers hide the unsubscribe button in hopes of retaining emails on their list. This doesn’t work and it hurts your reputation when recipients send you to the dreaded spam folder or blocks you entirely. Instead make your unsubscribe button clear on every single email. If losing subscribers is an endemic problem for you then consider revamping your content. If you are STILL worried about unsubscribe numbers then after they request an unsubscribe use a double opt-out feature that first asks them if they would like to edit their email settings before unsubscribing. If they still want to unsubscribe then you are required by law, and by conscious, to let them.

Make Editing Email Settings Easy and Commonplace
By now you probably understand our insistence on email settings. They are critical to email marketers and should be much more commonplace than they are. Using detailed settings will allow your users customization that will keep them engaged. It will also help you segment your list like a mofo.

Segment your List like a Mofo
I surely don’t have to explain the importance of list segmentation. You undoubtedly understand how important targeted marketing is to the sales cycle. Without it, pushing your email lists through the sales cycle will be extremely difficult and will be more like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. On the other hand good segmentation is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Segmentation takes time and effort though. It means keeping an up-to-date database of lead intelligence and using it for highly-targeted emails. Your list will thank you with increased business.

Re-Engage like a Pro
Email lists, unfortunately, become stale quicker than day-old bread. You likely have throngs of emails on your list right now that haven’t engaged with you in some time. You need to create a re-engagement email(s) that will warrant their re-engagement and participation. If this doesn’t work then take them off your list because you are likely in their spam bin or are blocked anyways, and, it is only hurting your sender reputation and screwing with your stats as a marketer.

Follow the above—regularly–to maintain a clean, healthy and effective list. Strongly consider putting a marker in your CRM or calendar to remind you to regularly scrub your email list, because you will forget as you become entrenched in other projects.

For more tips n`tricks for email marketers, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: How To to Keep Your Email Marketing List Clean

Integration of these two forms of internet marketing is important, because it will decrease your effort while driving participation. You can also use the metrics from one to help strategize the other. Think about it: integration is critical because social media marketing campaigns are often used to create reoccurring customers and drive customer loyalty, while email marketing is often used at cross-selling/up-selling opportunities and for pushing users through the buying cycle. Integrating the two means you can leverage one purpose for the other platform.

If you are in the large majority of internet marketers that hasn’t yet integrated their marketing campaigns in a meaningful way, now is the time. To help you seize this easy and effective opportunity we have put together a How-To for campaign integration. To simplify the process we have broken it down into three types of integration: content integration, strategic integration and audience and channel integration.

Content Integration
When it comes to integrating the content of SMM and email campaigns you win two-fold. One, you do have less work to do since you can use similar content, and two, you improve both visa-vi the other. So, you have a plethora of options to help with content integration:

• Use A/B testing to test subject lines/status posts, then mingle the two amongst both campaigns (but make them slightly different of course).
• Use similar images and branding.
• Use fan support received from your social media accounts in your email marketing, and vice versa.
• Use Facebook Likes to determine what content and headlines are most effective for your emails.
• Use teasers on social accounts about upcoming email content and deals, and vice versa.

Strategic Integration
Use metrics from each campaign to help reinforce and strategize the other. These soft metrics can include:

• Subscribes and Facebook Likes
• Unsubscribes and UnLikes
• Open rates and social media impressions
• Click-through rates and Shares

Channel and Audience Integration
Using the metrics listed above, try to get the similar activity within each campaign. If someone Likes your Facebook post content then they should also open your emails with similar headlines. By integrating the two you improve the efficacy of both. Integrating both channels and audiences can be done by:

Email registration and social media following thank you messages.

• Invitations to join the other campaign in cases of unsubscribes.
• Linked content between platforms.

By successfully combining channel/audience integration, content integration and the integration of strategies you can leverage your momentum from each campaign for the other.

For more internet marketing tips click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: Why –and HOW– to Integrate Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing

Hopefully I’ve got you salivating at the idea of turning your abandoned carts into sales. You should be because abandoned shopping carts rose to above 70% last year.

Before I get into how to turn those lost opportunities around, first you need to understand why people abandon shopping carts in the first place. There are 8 primary motivations for this:
1. They ran out of time to finish the transaction.
2. They were shocked/scared off by the shipping and handling costs.
3. They were just checking information and weren’t actually ready to make a purchase.
4. They used your shopping cart as a comparison to other companies—and you lost in comparison.
5. Their internet connection dropped off.
6. Their shopping cart expired due to time.
7. The availability of the product wasn’t there.
Hopefully now I’ve got you nodding in agreement, and possibly dropping your head defeatedly. No worries mate, most of these signify that you have an interested buyer—they were just hesitant about something. This is where the email marketing comes in. By following up with an email, automated or not, you can catch most of these shoppers in your net (provided you do it in a timely manner). But of course, we all prefer automated.

Create an Automated Email Marketing Follow-Up Plan
In 3 simple steps you can setup an automated follow-up that will use your email marketing tool to contact these shoppers, eliminate their hesitation and move them through the buying cycle:

First: Setup a Series of Automated “Reminder” Emails
Create a series of automatically-sent reminder emails that will continue to move them through the sales cycle, despite them having abandoned their cart. Setup at least one, if not a few, email(s) that will be automatically sent—within 24 hours of cart abandonment—addressing the main motivations for shopping cart abandonment. You may need to do some testing here though, to find out what YOUR shoppers’ main motivations are for abandoning their carts.

Address your most common motivations in an email by reminding them that they stilll have items saved in their cart (this works for people who ran out of time or lost their connection), tell them the superiority of your product over your competition’s (works for comparison shoppers), offer them a special deal or promotion that you have running at the time (works for comparison shoppers and shipping sticker-shocked shoppers), or add a sense of urgency by informing them of discontinuations or low stock. Be careful with offering them steep discounts though, because they may try to abandon their cart every time in hopes of better deals.

Second: Provide Personalization on their Returning Visit
The next time you send them an email or they return to your site offer them some personalization to remind them about their abandoned items. This can be a short note indicating their items are still in their basket, or it can be an email specifically addressing the products they abandoned previously. A word to the wise though: don’t extend special offers or you will lose the sense of urgency, but, at the same time be consistent in your deals and offers.

Third: Be like Rafiki—“You can run from it, or learn from it”
Remember in the Lion King when Rafiki (the crazy monkey) taught Simba to learn from his experiences by bopping him on the head with his staff? Well be like Rafiki. Learn from all the intel you gather while performing your motivation-based testing. Also, don’t lose the lead just because they didn’t respond to your email marketing—it might just be a long purchase cycle with this customer. Use your analytics tools to determine what tactics, emails and special offers lower shopping cart abandonment rates the most.

Finally…keep up with this plan. You already know how important lead nurturing is, so don’t drop the ball. Email follow-ups are a great way to funnel browsers through the sales cycle, so look at every abandoned cart as a fantastic lead and great sales opportunity.

For more email marketing advice add us to your RSS by clicking here, or by signing up to our email OR subscribe to our email here.

The Original Post is Located Here: How to Use Email Marketing to Turn Abandoned Shopping Carts Into Sales