Author: Patrick Griffin

Patrick Griffin has been marketing online for 15 years. He's a serial entrepreneur and an avid email and content marketing enthusiast with a background in publishing and journalism, including a UK Press Award.

Making Those 15 Seconds Count

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Making Those 15 Seconds Count

I have previously estimated that when faced with a lot of emails to read, I would spend no more than ten seconds on each one. Making those 15 seconds count can be the difference between your business failing or succeeding.

It would seem that I am a little less patient than the average email reader as it would appear that around 15 seconds is the average time people will spend reading a marketing email.

Given that an average person will read at around 200 words per minute this means that you might have around 50 words to impress them.

From more than 30 years spent reading written letters, faxes and emails in busy newsrooms this really seems to ring true with me.

So the bottom line is this – each time you send out an email you have to impress your audience really early on.

Don’t spent five or six sentences building up to the main event or the reader will never even make it past all the fluff and filler you so needlessly added.

  • Grab the reader’s attention with the headline
  • Keep them captivated with the introduction
  • Retain their attention with a well-written, clear and focused email which is targeted to their needs and
  • tell them what action you expect them to take next.

Finally if you send out email newsletters you should fare a little better…it seems that people are generally prepared to spend an average of 51 seconds reading newsletters.

 

 

Leave Subscribers Alone When They Unsubscribe

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

When people unsubscribe

From time to time the question arises which goes something like:

“What should I do about people who unsubscribe from my list?”.

So let me throw the question back at you…what should you do when people unsubscribe from your list?

Here are some possible things you could do:

  • thank them for being on your list and say goodbye
  • thank them for being on your list and ask them if they are really sure they want to leave
  • point out that they have just unsubscribed and hint that they really must have made some terrible mistake and should come back right now
  • bribe them to come back with some free gift or other
  • plead with them to come back because, well just because
  • ignore them, they have left already.

Personally I would do the last one and that is the recommended response of the entire Rocket Responder team.

Put it like this. They dumped you. Let them go and move on.

 

Five Reasons Your Emails Are Not Working

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Emails Are Not Working

If you are not getting the results from your emails that you think you deserve then, in all likelihood, you are probably doing something wrong. When your emails are not working there is usually something that you can do to put things right.

Remember that your subscribers signed up to your list to receive emails from you…they never promised that they would read them or even open them.

Getting over those two hurdles is your job so do it as best as you can.

Here are five reasons you might not be getting open rates as good as you could:

  1. Your Subject Lines Are Boring – Get this wrong and people won’t open your email. You must capture people’s attention with the subject line and give them an immediate reason to open your email.
  2. Your Content Is Boring – If you are doing ok with subject lines then make sure your content is up to par too.
  3. Your Content is Not Relevant – You can send out the most interesting and useful content in the world but if it is not relevant to your audience then they will never act on it. Always target your emails to the needs of your audience.
  4. Your Call To Action is Missing or Unclear – If you want someone to do something, such as click on a link, then make this obvious; really, really obvious. Preferably just give your recipients one thing to do so they don’t get confused by a whole range or possible options.
  5. You send far too many emails – Let’s just say you get everything right with your emails. They have fantastic subject lines, interesting and relevant content and contain a clear call to action…but still your open rates are declining. It could be because you are sending too many emails. People can get too much of a good thing and that includes your emails. How many is just right will vary from niche to niche and from individual to individual. However if you think you are sending too many emails then cut down things a bit and see what happens.

 

Affiliate Marketing (ii) How Many Affiliate Products Should I Promote?

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Promoting affiliate products

Promoting affiliate products: This is the second of two RocketResponder blog posts addressing the subject of affiliate marketing.

Last time we looked at one way of choosing affiliate products to promote while today we will discuss numbers.

This post actually comes from the following question which was recently asked to me: “How many affiliate products should I promote?”

This is another very sensible question and one that almost every new affiliate marketer must wrestle with when they first start online.

There is no easy answer like 7, 12 or 42 and even the best answer will have rather a large element of “well it depends” when discussing the issue.

The factors on which it could depend might include:

  • the time you have to devote for affiliate marketing
  • your budget (promoting multiple products may being in more money but will have higher costs such as marketing for example) and
  • the availability of suitable products in your chosen niche

However the golden rule should be that you should never, ever, spread yourself too thinly by promoting too many products.

This will dilute your overall effort which could result in you getting average or bad results across multiple products rather than getting good to great results in a small number of products.

Also if you promote “x” on Monday, “y” on Tuesday, “z” on Wednesday and jump back to ‘a” on Thursday then your subscribers will think you are just chasing the money and could not care less about what you promote as long as you get paid.

I cannot emphasize enough how off putting this really is.

Therefore it would be far better to start by promoting only ONE product, preferably something you actually use yourself (an obvious example would be an autoresponder like RocketResponder) and become an expert in it.

Share your expert knowledge of the product with your list, hold online advice classes, encourage your potential customers to come to YOU with their questions rather than the product owner and the commissions will follow.

Only then should you move on and promote a second product – use some of the money you have built up from promoting the first product to begin to promote the second and then move onto a third when the time is right.

It can very often be far better to become a master of a very limited number of products than try to juggle the promotion of several at once – especially if the products are spread over multiple niches or specialist areas.

Become an expert in one small niche and dominate…this is one area where it can really pay to be the big fish in the small pond.