List Building
Here Are Some Considerations And Questions To Ask Yourself When Building Lists |
1. Where (in your sales funnel) are you going to place a squeeze page to capture names and email addresses?
2. What is your call to action? What are you giving away of value worthy of them giving up their privacy by allowing you to email them? To get people to subscribe you need to give them something of value. Your opt-in page must be dedicated to that call to action – it should be your best sales pitch. Just hiding opt-in boxes on a page with multiple objectives won’t work.
3. How is your page designed? Every page needs to be tested for each type of audience. If thousands of prospects land on your page but don’t sign up, then it needs to be modified until it converts people to customers. (Use Google analytics to track traffic and conversions)
4. Which list can you start with and how will you segregate it? How are you planning on building your lists moving forward? Are you going to have a different list per event that is broken into 3 sub lists of leads, prospects and customers or are you going to have one master database of leads, prospects and customers for your company? Auto responder software will allow you to send broadcast emails to different people, regions but they cannot filter by your events. Here is what I mean by filters: You can have the flexibility to send an email to all of your leads for your August event who signed up in July from an IP address in California. You can also send an email to all clients who signed up sometime last year who live in the USA. But in any case, you cannot filter by event or lead type without building a list for each.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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List Building |
Building lists of customers, prospects, attendees, audiences should be a constant process. Once you have people on your lists make sure you start building a strong relationship with them. These lists are like an asset for every event organizer. They are an invaluable part of launching successful events and should be treated that way.
Building your lists is an ongoing job for event marketers, but it is one of the most important time investments that you can make in your business. Having qualified leads in your list that are at least interested in talking to you, are a hundred times better than blind advertising. Adding a new customer is a onetime cost, and will remain profitable as long as he/she is in your active lists. You can benefit from that single customer throughout your event marketing career by repeatedly engaging and maintaining a relationship with him/her. If you don’t have something of value to offer to a prospect right now, it doesn’t mean that the prospect won’t be useful in your future event marketing endeavors.
Lists are basically people who have asked to participate in your conversation. Be careful not to send people off to the wrong lists, or ones that are not directly specific to what they signed up for. Always segment your lists into leads, prospects and customers, as it improves your individual communication with them.
To get people to subscribe you need to give them something of value. Your opt-in page must be dedicated to that call to action – it should be your best sales pitch. Just hiding opt-in boxes on a page with multiple objectives won’t work.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! If you want to source the best JV partners in your niche, you need a software that sources those selling the most product’s in your niche!
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Traffic Through E-mail Marketing & List Buying |
Email marketing is one of the pillars of our communication with prospects. We have different email campaigns running in parallel for different sets of lists. We’ve already talked in detail about how we’ve gathered followers through our networking strategies on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. All of these followers have been added to their respective lists and into our email campaign categories. We use aweber.com to manager our email lists and content - its a great tool that simplifies the process of managing multiple lists for different audiences going out at different instances of time.
With so much of our focus being on launch implementation, loading and locking the emails ahead of time has saved us from last minute confusion. Our email marketing campaigns slowly guide the readers through different steps of our sales cycles - thus giving them a chance to directly enter the sales funnel. For example, we may direct them to our survey or a specific blog post - which will lead them to our tours - which would lead them to sign-up as a user/member/promoter (depending on the list category). We currently have six list segments that all have separate email campaigns.
Essentially, you can consider every step of the process like a sales call. Every step has to lead to the other to eventually close the deal.
Lists are the key to your success in online marketing. If you have lists, you have contacts and relations and if you have those, you are bound to have money in the bank. We are a member of toplinked.com, a service that provides us with lists of members with open gates on LinkedIn - i.e. LinkedIn people who are open to networking with anyone. They send these lists off for a low price/month, which is almost nothing compared to the value that you get. These lists are like gold to us - as it helps us add a huge number of people to our contacts in one go (without any restrictions or limits). Once you have them on your contact lists, you can communicate with them directly.
Similarly, if you’re interested you can choose between 60,000 lists to rent at http://www.nextmark.com. Make sure you search through the lists and qualify the list source before renting leads per thousand - since irrelevant contacts will only add junk to your lists. Each list has a different price and you can pay between $80 and $125 per 1000 or 8 cents to 12.5 cents per lead…
This post has been included in our “Event Launch Guidelines” training program. Click for more information.
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Eventslisted.com - Autoresponder Strategy |
This plan is in line with the list segmentation that I discussed yesterday. We need to lock down the launch story form every perspective and write each story into an auto responder email campaign that engages the audience of each list into a conversation about the story.
1 - Leads - We need to tell them about what’s coming. These are people who have already shown a level of interest in our application or services and are hence inclined towards listening to us. They have opted-in to know about the products by their own free choice and will.
Since we will be converting people from this list to become regular visitors of the blog, we’ll gradually want to get them interested in our way of thinking, domain knowledge and content. Either they’ll become more involved with our content or drop off from the list - that’s fine with us because we’ll be using this list as an entry level gateway for prospects who will actually find the application useful.
Through this email campaign, we’d want to increase their perceived value of the application by telling them about its features and use-cases and by showing them video screen-shots. Also, we’d let them know about the activities that are taking place around the product in our other social media campaigns, to make them want to be a part of the entire launch. Once they’re excited enough, we’d involve them in the development and production of these videos. We’d also ask them to fill out surveys on their opinions on which way to turn - this will help us gauge the interests of the market.
We’d also tell them about the opportunity to become part of our limited pre-launch list of alpha customers. If they’re hyped up about the product already, they’d want to be on that list.
2- Pre-launch customers - This list of people will be forming the final shape of the application with us and are thus crucial. Having said that, we need to get this list to feel as involved with the entire prelaunch alpha testing process, as possible. We’ll have them fill out a survey for every major decision and make them feel like they helped refine and build the application. Giving them this level of ownership and importance is important in keeping them actively engaged with us…
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Eventslisted.com - Segmenting Our Lists |
We want to build credible lists of prospects and customers that we can work with. These lists are our community members, so we have to make sure we can build lasting relationships with them. There isn’t any point in having a list of 10,000 people if you know nothing about them and they know nothing about you. Quantity doesn’t matter half as much as relationship depth when it comes to the community members.
The auto responder systems will allow us to filter our lists by location and a host of other technically defined filters through IP address & other data collected by the Internet service providers automatically as people sign up. We’re filtering them out by location because the platform will provide location based event planning and promoting opportunities. What we want to do though is plan a natural filtering system that is in sync with our sales funnel to end up with a multi layered segmenting of our list from fickle leads to good customers who will spend money with us.
We will go into detail on how we work these lists into, out of and through each other for cross listing & filtering or segmenting purposes in later posts. For now, here are the main sub-lists that we have:
1. Events Listed Leads list - People who subscribe to our squeeze campaigns asking for early access to our application. These people will be directed to the online squeeze pages based on keyword searches and profile fits. We’d want to drive as much of the targeted market into those pages, and consequently into our leads list, as possible.
2. Event Line list - Through our auto messaging and email campaigns we want to be slowly but surely shifting as many people off from the leads list to our Event Line Blog subscriber list. These people want our content delivered to their inbox daily so are serious about us and will be on par with those who subscribe to our blogs into their feed readers.
3. Pre Launch list - These are people who we deem fit to be early adopters and are prepared to work with us in getting the application right - we’ll get them on-board as early customers. At this stage, they’ll be doing alpha testing of our application for us, so we’d want people who can actively get involved with us in making the app ready for launch. If everything goes well, they can potentially become our evangelists. This list is extremely valuable to making our entire launch campaign successful…
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Landing Pages & Lead Capture |
Capturing leads and directing them to the website is an important element of internet marketing. We have placed multiple landing pages for the sole purpose of lead capturing that target one keyword phrase each. All of these landing pages have search engine optimized content. The landing pages are not too big, to avoid becoming boring. They have a maximum length of 200 words and are relatively easy to read and understand.
Again, the idea is to lead people in a direction, not drive them away.
What sets our landing pages apart is that Miss Abigale is on each landing page talking directly to the visitor.
Her script is derived from the keyword the visitor has searched for that leads him/her to that page. The idea is to get their attention - by hearing a character talking to them about the event related thing they have searched for. Miss Abigale directs them into leaving their names and email addresses by speaking with them directly and calling them to action.
Also, if they are already interested in publishing an event, they can click on a link which is prominently placed on the screen. This big link distraction effectively entices them into clicking the only other link on the page (other than the back button) if deciding to bypass our opt-in form. These pages are optimized in the search engine and targeted destinations in our pay per click advertising campaigns & designed so visitors either opt-in to our email form or they click through to our set up an event wizard as the only two choices other than clicking the back button.
The opt-in will be to receive a world class e-book on promoting events through social media strategies and web 2.0 techniques. These landing pages serve multiple goals for us. We either get a new customer from this or we get a new lead that will now start receiving our email campaign written as a sales funnel to convert them into customers eventually…
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Segmenting Your Lists |
When you are communicating to your lists, its important to send messages that are directly relevant to them. The more they feel that the email is “custom designed” for them, the more likely they will be to buy from you. Since this effects your conversion rates and hence your bottom-lines, it becomes important to divide your list into sub groups or chunks.
List segmenting is a crucial part of email marketing. You should try to tweak your messages to speak to specific chunks of your list directly in terms of what your products offer to those individuals.
This is not as difficult as it sounds, all you have to do is to think about the basic categories that you can divide your list into and use your auto-responder system to build those groups into sublists. You can segment them based on your businesses, your campaigns, your relationship levels with them, your specific niches, etc.
This will enable you to send targeted and focused messages to those groups who will benefit from the email message the best. You will also be able to target your current and potential customers accordingly.
You could start with a lead generation opt-in form on your website that offers a give away, something of value in relation to the event your promoting in return for a new visitors name and email address.
By giving it up the people on this list would receive a series of emails written with the sole purpose of leading them into wanting to know more about the event. Our testing has shown that you get the best conversions by sending an e-mail every day for the first 10 days or so. At ten days we find its best to offer subscribers another document or discount (something of value) that indicates a willingness to attend the event…
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More About Lists |
This is a followup post to never stop building lists.
I felt I hadn’t stressed enough on the importance of building lists in my previous post. I was thinking of writing detailed considerations and methods for building your community lists, but came across a great article that pretty much sums it up for us. You can read the Eugene’s full article here.
Give People a Reason to Sign Up
As soon as your web site goes live, try to get users to willingly volunteer their email. Just because there is a sign up usually isn’t a compelling enough reason for users to sign up. Users are very sensitive to giving their personal information away. Think from the perspective of delivering value. Do you have something unique that you could offer to entice sign ups? In the case of an event it might be an interview with a performer, advance ticket discounts, or highlights from the previous year’s event.
Treat your subscribers like gold and don’t try to sales pitch them too early. Ask yourself, would you be more likely to purchase tickets to an event after 5 or 6 interesting and trustworthy emails? Or send a sales pitch out every time you send an email. Start with building trust and credibility from the beginning. It is important to remember that most people who visit web sites for the first time, never return to the same site. Collecting the user’s email is a good way to reengage your users down the road. It turns a visitor to your website into a lead, someone who is prepared to listen to what you have to offer. The next step is to turn them into a customer…
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Launching events - building a relationship of trust |
As event managers, we have gone through the extensive cycles of launching shows and parties a great number of times in the past. I have to admit I had a lot of inhibitions about it initially, as we turned towards online platforms for marketing. I knew there were areas which would benefit greatly, like automatic RSVPs and ticketing etc - but I had no idea how we would be able to pull the crowd in without spending too much time planning meticulously.
Interestingly enough, online marketing is closer to real-life situations and emotions than offline promotions. I will elaborate on different aspects of this observation in the next few posts.
It’s all about the relationships:
To launch events you have to build relationships with your market or audience first. Just like in real-life every interaction that you have with others is determined by your ability to build relationships - short or long term. Whether you are talking to a passenger sitting next to you in a train or dealing with close relatives, the power of these interactions depend on how well you can build and maintain relationships. This comes naturally to some people and is relatively difficult for introverts. Generally, if you are in the event management or planning field, then you are already a step closer to having these rapport building skills in you. Quite like real life, you have to build trust and credibility with the audiences online as well. These interactions have to be like real-life conversations - show genuine interest in them, find out their pain points, see how you can help them, make their input an important part of shaping the events.
You can’t simply, as an example, put tickets online and expect people to buy them. You have to slowly and gradually build strong relationships based on trust and credibility first. The stronger your relationships, the more it will benefit your events. So schedule special time aside for investing in building meaningful relationships with the people who matter the most: your audience, your customers, your clients, your attendees.
An example of a great relationship:
Just to stress my point, I am going to give you an example of how Tech Crunch leveraged their loyal followings in launching their events. They started a conference called Tech Crunch 20 in which they covered the top 20 tech startups live. Instead of just launching the event as is, they got the audiences involved way before the event. They kept adding information, sharing ideas, asking for direct input and kept everyone on the loop. The excitement led to more and more signing up to buy tickets. Within a year the community drove the event to an even larger scale and changed the name to Tech Crunch 40. This year they will be covering 50 top startups.
The reason I’m sharing this case with you is that these things don’t happen by fluke. Relationships, respect, authority and credibility play a significant role in the success of your events. The Tech Crunch conference would not have been successful if they hadn’t interacted directly with the people before, during and after the event launch. After the success of one, they can now relaunch by going through the entire prelaunch and launch phases every year.
More on relationships & trust from the blogging world around us;
5 Dysfunctions of a Customer Relationship
- When dealing with a “prospect” who has yet to become a “customer”, the biggest foundational barrier to progress is often “trust”. This common thread of trust is what got me thinking about this in the first place. …
High Value Relationships - Trust Points
- Trust Points are the customer interactions where the quality and outcome have greater implications than other points of contact. For example: the processing of someone’s bill is a trust point, whereas the handling of their luggage is a …
Leverage Your Relationships
- Another example of leveraging your relationships in on the internet. People will always want to buy off someone who they trust. If you have a relationship with someone who has a list of people who they email a newsletter to each week …
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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