#FPF – Week 4
Hey!
Hope you had a great week. As promised in last week’s message – I am excited to share Webisode 1 of Fist Pump Friday:
Video Transcript:
What’s up everybody? This is Jim Martin from Captivation Media with our very first Fist Pump Friday.
We’re super excited to be delivering this to you guys. We really appreciate all of your help and support over the last month, as we’ve been sending out those emails and you’ve been providing that feedback back to us using the [pump (at) captivationmedia dot com] email address.
We’re really excited to be bringing this to you. Fist Pump Fridays will come at the end of the month, every single month, providing additional questions and answers for you. So just keep sending in those questions for us and with that, let’s get into our first question:
WordPress Vs Free Website Builders
We get a lot of people asking this question lately. You’re thinking about going with the WordPress solution for your website, but then you also see these free website builders that are out there (and there’s a number of them on the market so, I won’t specifically go into anyone in particular). Which one do you choose? Well, there’s a couple of things that we really want you to think about. As an agency owner, our company builds a lot of things in WordPress. We’re very big supporters of the WordPress community.
There’s a lot of infrastructure around WordPress, that allows you to really be flexible in terms of who’s working on your site. So if your current web developer is building you a site in WordPress and you don’t really like how that’s going, or you don’t like where the site is hosted; maybe it’s too slow, you can easily take that WordPress site and transfer it to another host or transfer it to another service provider that’s going to give you a better service.
But with these other drag and drop solutions: you’re really married to that whole universe; whether you like it or not. The idea may seem super convenient and easy (and that’s the whole point: they want to keep your attention on how easy it is for that system to be set up), but then if you ever want to move it someplace else you’re really stuck. Also, think about all of the anonymous data that might be tracking on the back end of the site that those people are getting about you and your visitors that you don’t even have access to. So,some food for thought. From our standpoint WordPress is the way to go. And with that, let’s go into our next question:
Components of an Effective eBlast
As we talk about effective eblasts I think about the days of AOL (and you remember that I’m sure). And aside from that crazy sound that you hear when you’re logging in, what you lived for was to hear that guy say “You’ve got mail”. Back in the day, we didn’t have Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, so your email got a lot more attention and just about all of those emails that you would receive were from people that you wanted to hear from. Nowadays we’ve got so much spam, so much white noise coming to our inbox from so many different places, that in many cases your emails don’t even get opened by the people that you send them to.
There’s a couple of components that we need to be talking about here in terms of effectively sending eblasts. For most of you, you want to make sure that you have confirmed that you have double-opted-in emails. This means that people have signed up on your website or signed up through another landing page (or something of that nature), and then have received some kind of confirmation email to make sure that they have to click something that says “Yes, I’ve entered my information here and I’ve confirmed on this link that I want to hear from you”. This will ultimately help your open rates and your engagements because you’re not just going out and spamming a bunch of people that don’t really want to hear from you.
Secondly, you want to take a look at the subject line of your emails. And that’s something that we could do an entire Fist Pump Friday email about: just writing those effective bylines that are going to be associated with your content.Not all content needs to be really salesy or really in your face that way, but when putting things out there you really have to start defining what your “win” is, what type of person you want to read that email and what they going to respond the most to when it enters their inbox. So, making sure that you have an effective double opted-in list with a really good byline to get people into that eblast is step one.
From here, we want to make sure that we have content that’s engaging and that means something to our audience.If you have a list that you’re able to segment into different verticals, as it’s pertinent to your business, then you want to make sure to do that and make sure that the content, the writing, the imagery, is all going back to the individual that you’re trying to attract and that you’re trying to reach. So that when they do open it they say, “This is pertinent to me—this is something that I can get behind”. You can accomplish this by front loading a lot of your interesting and most useful information at the top. And keep in mind that people are looking at these things on their mobile phone as well (you want to make sure all of those things are optimized by the way so that they show up that way) and you want to make sure that when your audience starts reading your content, it starts off interesting and relevant enough to pull them down through the rest of that content. So, again, we’re defining our “wins”. Whether it’s just a general email that’s providing information, or if it’s meant to entice people to buy your product or learn more about a product or service, you want to target your audience, drive them into that funnel and to that sale.
Keeping a clear and easy to understand call to action for your audience is important. You want your audience to be able to infer exactly where they’re going to be taken as a result of clicking that email.If this subject is something that you guys want to dive into deeper, shoot me an email at [pump (at) captivationmedia dot com] and we’ll be able to go into that a little bit more. As you can see there’s a lot of layers to that onion. Strategy is constantly changing in terms of how to make sure that your emails are opened, that they’re not ending up in spam and that they’re actually driving revenue for your company. These are things that we can continue to talk about over the coming weeks.
So that does it for this month’s Fist Pump Friday.We appreciate you taking a look at this and hopefully this information is helpful to you. These Fist Pump Fridays are all about you and the questions that you have, so it’s super important that you continue to send those emails to [pump (at) captivationmedia dot com]. We’ll continue to respond back, and the more we hear of your questions, the more we’re going to include them in the show.
So, have a great rest of your month and we look forward to talking to you
next month.
Episode 1 – Topics and Time Codes:
- Intro – https://youtu.be/2rjSJX-e5jo?t=8s
- WordPress Vs Free Website Builders – https://youtu.be/2rjSJX-e5jo?t=42s
- Components of Effective Email Marketing – https://youtu.be/2rjSJX-e5jo?t=2m25s
- Closing – https://youtu.be/2rjSJX-e5jo?t=6m46s