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You probably don’t call your grandma every Monday to tell her what happened on last night’s Game of Thrones. It’s not that grandmas aren’t cool, it’s just that she’s more of a Walking Dead girl. The point is, you’ve got to know your audience if you want someone to listen when you talk.

The same holds true for trying to reach people via email campaigns. It’s not about changing minds; it’s about finding the minds already open to your message.

Know Your Audience

Image source: https://public-media.interaction-design.org

Talking to someone about something they’re not into is almost always a waste of time. At best it’s an uphill struggle, and adding exercise to battle feels like an unnecessary trial. So before you go hollering through the streets about your latest hot email newsletter, consider a few things about the people you’re hollering at:

Who wants to hear what you’ve got to say?

• What other interests might overlap with your message?
• What similar messages have turned heads before?

Leverage the information you’ve got. If you have access to a pool of leads who’ve all expressed interest in fantasy football, don’t waste time trying to sell them on transcription software. You might consider adjacent interests, though, like sporting gear. A little intuition and commonsense market research can open up brand new avenues from a single data point.

Social media provides a treasure trove of leads. Facebook interests, Twitter subject lists, and many other sources collect huge groups of people passionately into the same things. Such lists and groups range from the hugely broad (country music, sports) to the dazzlingly specific (hand-engraved Japanese chess sets, vintage Western films on Betamax). The hunting grounds are virtually limitless, but once you’ve chosen your quarry, you’ve got to craft your weapon.

Maximum Impact

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An email that never gets opened is like a car that never gets driven. Sure, it’s technically still an email, but its purpose is unfulfilled, the labor that created it wasted. A short, sharp thrust with the subject line is the best way to get a lead’s attention and encourage them to read the body of the email. To that end you’ll need to hit the keywords hard. If the target audience is into politics, make sure your events are as current as your copy is white-hot.

And yes, you’ve got to back that initial impression up with strong, clear copy. There’s no point in hooking someone’s attention if the content behind the hook is immediately shoved into a spam folder and left to moulder like digital loam. For every moment that email is open, it’s a potential pipeline to interest, engagement, sales, and an ocean of other possibilities.

Brevity Is the Soul of Wit

Image source: http://izquotes.com

Not only should you avoid huge, ponderous emails, you should also consider the volume of messages received by any single given lead. Burying someone under a mountain of promotions, newsletters, and announcements is a surefire way to make sure they ignore it all out of frustration.

Hey, if “short and to the point” was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for you.

There’s a crowd pouring in through your store’s front entrance. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of customers browsing shelves and buying stuff has to be a good thing, right? Well it would be, except that the same people keep coming and going, changing outfits between visits, and others are just sleepwalking through the joint with no intention of actually doing anything.

Image credit: wikipedia

Not exactly ideal.

Repeat traffic, spambots, and other online irritants can obscure what’s really going on with a website’s traffic patterns, inflating numbers way beyond reality. In a brick and mortar store you could post a bouncer by the door to check IDs (and maybe knock a few heads), but on the Internet you’ve got to dig into the only resource at your disposal: the data.

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Knowing who’s visiting your website is Business 101 stuff; you can’t operate effectively without that knowledge. It’s trivial to track the number of times a given page is visited or a given link is clicked, but trickier to track how much of that volume is constituted by unique clicks, which is to say by genuine human visitors interacting with your site for the first time. It’s sort of like trying to tell which nuns are blondes just by watching their body language; you’re going to need to get creative.

Image credit: wikipedia

Email registration, reinforced by a unique phone number requirement and a robust captcha test, is a proven way to identify and authenticate discrete users. Even if someone logs in via different platforms — from a tablet, a laptop, and a phone, say — their unique ID will prevent these separate visits from generating redundant information. The time eaten up by authentication can be a mild turnoff for casual visitors, but it’s standard practice for most reputable websites.

The Fly on the Wall

Authenticated user bases not only make traffic trackable and readable, they also open up whole new realms of data for use in generating leads and targeting advertisements and suggestions. A site’s webmasters, or even its automated protocols, become flies on the wall, observing user habits and collecting other useful information.

Amazon’s automated suggestions feature is a great example of what you can do with the information authenticated users generate. The site monitors purchasing and browsing habits and uses keywords attached to viewed pages to generate lists of suggested pages which should, over time, track a user’s interests.

Image credit: picserver

It’s not enough just to know who’s visiting your site. That knowledge in and of itself is of limited use, but by authenticating users you can start the ball rolling on getting users to market to themselves. In addition, packets of authenticated users become valuable in and of themselves as saleable leads.

Raw website traffic stats are like slurry from a mine. You’ve got to sift out the gunk and scrub off the money, but once you get the trick of it there’ll be no stopping you.

Right now, while you’re watching stats roll in from your latest email marketing blitz on fresh leads, you could be throwing money away on bot traffic. Unscrupulous and/or gullible traffic brokers sometimes sell lists packed to the gills not with genuine leads but with accounts registered to and run by bots, software designed to imitate people by signing up for services, viewing pages, and clicking links.

Buying bot traffic is like paying locusts to eat your crops. Bots distort traffic stats, clog up comment boards, and often spam advertisements and links of their own. Worse, you’re spending money to reach people who don’t exist, so all those leads you purchased are a complete financial loss. There’s no return on any of it.

Read on to find out how to flush out bot traffic and stop it in its tracks.

Flushing Out Bot Traffic

If you suspect your lists contain bots or spamtraps, look at the data. Any sign of unusual activity is worth digging into, especially things like floods of foreign IP addresses visiting an American page or visits with tiny engagement periods. If you’re seeing especially low open rates on your email newsletters, 10% or lower, that could also be a sign that you’re wasting time emailing bots.

Other signs of bot traffic include waves of visitors using identical out-of-date versions of browsers, or enormous rushes of visitors arriving in extremely tight timeframes. These aren’t guaranteed signs, but they’re strong enough indicators to merit deeper digging. Once you’ve isolated which lists the bots originated with, you can revisit a few contracts and cut ties with contaminated brokers.

There’s a certain allure to the huge numbers bots can post. That volume of traffic fools some entrepreneurs into thinking that using bots to boost traffic stats is worth a little cash, but even setting aside the dishonesty of such practices, they can easily backfire. Not only could others discover this artificial inflation, but even if they don’t, expectations for performance could exceed a company’s actual capacity and revenues and lead to disappointed investors and analysts.

Blocking Bot Traffic

Blocking bot traffic is easier said than done. Bots sometimes eat up as much as 60% of site traffic, bogging down servers and rendering websites virtually unusable, which of course makes real users head for the hills. Interruptions in service can be a kiss of death to small businesses, or to new ones trying to establish an online presence.

Companies like T4ME use sophisticated anti-fraud software to block many different types of bot traffic and click fraud. Anti-fraud software is a strong first line of defense, but it’s also crucial that you trust and work closely with your traffic vendors. You’ve got to be sure they’re checking their lists and maintaining best practices when it comes to purging bots and spamtraps, or else you might as well throw your money into a tire fire.

With anti-fraud software like that used by T4ME, contaminated traffic and ads are filtered out and clients only pay for the clean traffic that remains. Don’t let robots programmed by disgruntled teenagers ruin your livelihood. Put up some walls, hire a few virtual mercenaries, and ensure that you’re protecting your site’s quality and ease of use.

If you’re concerned about whether you’ve been getting robbed by the companies you buy traffic from, check out our Safe Traffic Checklist and buy more traffic from Trafficforme!

There’s an urban legend among copywriters that somewhere, buried deep inside the dark web, is an email template that achieves a perfect 100% conversion rate.

Supposedly it has such a perfect combination of verbs, adjectives and stacked exclamation marks that no one can read it without instantly being compelled to whip out their credit card!!!

Don’t go looking for it. It doesn’t exist (and you really don’t want to go digging around in the dark web). But I get why marketers and business owners would like to believe it.

Writing great email copy is hard.

Actually… no… scratch that. It’s not hard. It just feels like it is.

Try googling “how to write email copy” and you’ll get a bunch of articles like this:

Do you really fancy absorbing 50+ different email writing tips and trying to mash them together into a plan to write a perfect email?

Nope. Didn’t think so.

What these cookie-cutter cheerleaders fail to grasp is that every market is different. Just because a particular style of email works with one audience, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone.

It’s like trying to find a formula for a movie or a novel that everyone on earth will enjoy.

I was reminded of this by an article by Drift marketer, Dave Gerhardt, called What I Learned About Writing Copy From 146,693 Emails and 50 Blog Posts. It’s a good read if you have an afternoon to spare (Spoiler Alert – Dave didn’t learn brevity), but it riffs on the idea that great email copy isn’t about finding a magic formula.

It’s about writing in clear, understandable language (or as I like to call it: “Writing”).

Some might think it’s a bit of a maverick move to throw out the copywriting rule book and just write something clear and simple, but copywriting has always been, first and foremost, about getting attention.

When email was a relatively new tech and mainly used for forwarding jokes and pictures of cats (Facebook has that covered now), hyped-up sales copy worked great.

But now that everyone is doing that, reverting to simple, conversational, personable emails is a breath of fresh air.

So the next time you write an email, throw out the rule book and try the Earnest Hemingway* approach:

Start with that and then just keep writing.

And if that doesn’t work for you…

Just be a person… writing to another person.

You’ve been doing it your whole life. You know what to do.

Of course, none of this matters if you don’t have any subscribers on your email list. Luckily, TrafficForMe.com has the cleanest traffic on the planet to build your list, make sales, and build long-term relationships with your new customers with. It’s easy to get started – just sign up for an advertiser account above by clicking ‘Create Account‘ and our team will get you going right away.

*Oh, and in case you don’t remember…. Hemingway was the guy who wrote a few famous books about 100 years ago – I think he did other stuff as well but his Wikipedia page is epic, and I got bored after a couple of paragraphs.

This formula is based on decades of being involved in multiple online businesses.

It’s as simple as “1+1=2” and no matter how long you’ve been making money online, it all comes back to this formula.

Keep it top-of-mind at all times

We get a lot of people at T4Me buying traffic for their Business Opportunity Website.

And, of course, since many of them are new… they tend to not know what the best page is to promote.

So, we created a couple of free videos that will guide you in the right direction.

Same basic content – one is 15 minutes long, the other is 30 minutes.

Your Choice:
15 Minute Video on Top
30 Minute Video Below

Your Choice:
15 Minute Video Above
30 Minute Video Below

I recently saw a promotion from Igor Kheifkets talking about the “Death of Solo Ads”.

I thought the same thing over 10 years ago. So, I’ve created this video in response.

The video is about 20 minutes long… but the first 5 minutes or so will give you a good idea

Here are Links from the video in case you want to do your own research:
“The 2015 Email Marketing Landscape” – Pardot.com (SalesForce)
Quick Snippets on Direct Marketing – CMOCouncil.org
“20 Shocking Email Marketing Stats Business Owners Know” – OutboundEngine.com
“Is Email Marketing Still Important? Predictions For 2015 – TowerData.com

Oh, and here’s the screenshot of James N’s testimonial:

Yup – it happened! When I sent that last article, I pissed someone off…

I ‘called it’ – I knew I would piss someone off — just not in THIS WAY!

(Don’t worry, it’s got a happy ending)

Here’s a snippet of that Email I’m referring to:

And then I got this email reply from Rob Fraser!

YIKES! I replied to Rob… but before I could finish my conversation, I got this from Faiser:

Clearly, everyone knows that the originator of that “Broke Person’s Plan”, except me. LOL.

So, listen, I feel bad for giving credit to the wrong person and I would like to OFFICIALLY apologize right now for copying the wrong person’s FB Post into an email to you.

A T4me advertiser gave away the secret to success on his FB page…

And I don’t even know if he realizes how simply life-changing it is!

I hope you can handle the truth, because I’m about to dish out some of it right now. If it hurts your feelings a bit, I may be talking to you.

About 2 month ago, I found this on FB…

I’ve been meaning to share the below screenshot with you all summer. I grabbed it like 3 days before I hopped on an airplane to Spain with my family. We went to Madrid, Granada, Sevilla, Valencia, and my favorite – Barcelona.

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This Weekend, I had 40-50% Proof 4 Different Times!

No no no – it’s not what you think. In fact, this weekend, I spent most of my time with a bunch of 11 year old boys at a waterfall here in Costa Rica.