Table of contents
If you want to convert leads on autopilot, I have good news for you, its easier than you think. All it takes is applying these dozen or so simple tips and ideas.
1) Shift your mindset, “build relationships”
The main mistake that people make in trying to improve their conversion rates? They ask things like “how do I get people to convert”, instead of taking a step back and asking better questions. Those better questions include something like “How do I build trust, and demonstrate value to such a point where a conversion is the next logical step?”
And I think an analogy here might help. Imagine if someone went about the world thinking “how do I get people to marry me”. As opposed to someone thinking “how do I meet high quality people, build relationships and get to know them?”
If you met a person who went around their life thinking “How do I get people into marriage” you would think they are weird, and you would say they are using a very counterproductive strategy. Yet, many marketers do the marketing equivalent which is just as unreasonable. They go around asking “How do I get people to convert”.
So what I am going to suggest here is a mindset shift. You want to see a conversion as a logical next step when certain criteria are met. Those criteria are things such as trust in you, and the value that they will get by going ahead with that conversion.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t to say that there aren’t things you can do to facilitate conversion. You might for example spend some time improving your copy and making your buy button or link more apparent.
But everything that you do to improve conversion will always come back to the first point. Even if you do something like introduce a “better offer” or “implement better copy”, you are still not “making them convert”. You are just demonstrating more value, or building more trust. But that’s about it.
2) Partner with the right conversion platform
Speaking of trust and giving value, that has been one of our main secrets as a business. We love giving a ton of value which builds trust and builds a good working relationship. If any of our competitors are reading, yes, that is the reason we have all those 5-star reviews, it is that simple.
But back to you and getting you more profit by producing more conversions. A big part of this is leveraging a platform that centers around conversion. And oddly enough, a lot of the more famous names in marketing software fail to actually provide you with a “conversion platform”.
And by this, I mean that their main focus isn’t on helping you get more conversions or making more money for yourself. They are primarily focused on building decorative features that appeal to marketing novices. Those are features which look great on a features table, but don’t do much in the real world.
In other words, they are focused on converting you into their customer, and then upselling you on a bunch of stuff that you will never use to improve your own conversion rates.
This is different with Emercury where we are obsessed with your conversion rate. In fact, our philosophy centers on optimizing and building the core features that contribute the most to your bottom-line, and then helping you actually get those conversions.
A big part of our secret is that many of our plans include personalized, hands-on strategy sessions and help. But even generally, our team is very open to helping you get the most out of the platform because we think of you as a partner.
The more sales you make using Emercury to do the conversion, the more you’ll need of our services. So we have a desire to help you grow your business.
If you want to get some sense about what this experience is like, consider booking a free demo, while we still have spots. Alternatively, consider getting a forever-free account while we still have those. As a bonus you’ll get free access to all of our marketing guides.
3) Understand the power of information, and use it
Listen, the secret is that the more information you have on a lead, the easier it will be to convert them. And when we say information, we’re really talking about subscriber data. And data comes in two forms.
The first type of data is all the data we gather for you automatically, this is things such as email opens and clicks. You can then use this data to segment people based on which emails they open, and what kind of things they click on.
Please note that this kind of personalization where you treat people differently using segments is probably the single highest-ROI thing you can do in order to improve conversion rates.
But you don’t have to stop at automatically gathered data. You can go further and define different sets of data that are significant to further personalization.
For example, you might define an “interested in x” tag. And then set up a custom event for when people view product x on your website. Then have an automation that automatically assigns the “interested in x” tag to anyone who triggered that event.
4) Be a student of your own success, and mistakes
Another reason that lots of experienced marketers move to Emercury is our focus on easy and approachable precise reporting. And the best part is that studying your results in email marketing isn’t as complicated as with other channels.
There are only a couple of metrics that you need to pay attention to. These include engagement metrics like open and click rates. But also deliverability metrics like bounces, spam reports and unsubscribes.
The fact is that to get great results in anything, you need a way to measure progress, study your results, and readjust. With a platform like Emercury this is quite easy, as reporting functionality is something that we care about quite a bit.
5) Focus your efforts, not all leads deserve your attention
This ties in somewhat to the previous point about studying the reports section. You will find that there will be clear differences between different segments of your list. And then upon further study, you may proceed to split them up in further segments, and learn even more about each specific type of lead.
The fact is that different types of leads will require a different approach and strategy. And while it would be great if you could become a master expert at converting every type of lead, your time is limited. This is true with any business, and prioritizing your investments based on ROI is important.
As you are trying to improve your conversion rates, you will need to come up with different offers, strategies, automations and campaigns. And you will also need to decide where to invest how much of your effort.
There might be segments where you just have them receive the general automated sequences plus the broadcasts that go out to everyone. They wouldn’t warrant further effort in building things that are more specific to them.
Other segments might warrant more personalized attention and effort. You might build out a slightly different variation of the campaigns or automations, or even build an entirely different system for a given segment. It all depends really…
Now I know I am being vague, and I’d love to be more specific. But in order to do that I would need to know more about your specific business model, how you get your leads and so on. If you want to get a sense for this kind of personalized attention, consider booking a free demo.
6) Prioritize “quality of data”, not “number of leads”
This is another one of those mindset shifts. I want to ask you a question. If you could choose, which would be better… a list with 20000 email addresses and no additional segmentation and personalization data. Or, a list with 10000 finely segmented people where you have a lot of additional data on each subscriber?
I hope you said the latter, because that option is far more profitable. And yes, ideally you could have both. Why not have the 2000 strong list and gather a lot of data for each subscriber?
Well, this is why I say that this tip is primarily a mindset shift. The fact is that you have a limited amount of hours in a day, and your resources are finite. That means you will often have to choose what to prioritize.
For example, your choice might be to focus on adding more raw leads, or spending some time improving your data gathering processes. In most cases, most people will be better served by increasing the effort they put into the latter.
Now obviously, you can take this too far and obsess about “quality of data” to the point where you don’t spend any effort on finding ways to get more people to sign up. But I rarely find that to be an issue. Most people tend to go to the other extreme and just focus on the quantity of leads.
7) Leverage all of our cool features, but take it easy
Look, I love all the cool features we have access to today. I am super excited about the fancy advanced segment builder, I also love all of the tricks you can pull off with the automation builder and our tracking technology.
And don’t get me started on all the cool things you can pull off with defining custom events and actions based on things people do on your web properties. So yes, we’re no longer limited to just what happens inside of the emails themselves.
Speaking of going beyond email, one of the most exciting things we’ve done is to introduce both incoming and outgoing webhooks. With this, you can do almost anything you can imagine as a marketer, gluing disparate tools together and achieving some amazing things.
Basically, you need to take things one step at a time. When you’re just starting out it is easy to get carried away with the cool features and try to do everything all at once. Now, I do absolutely want you to use all these cool features. Just be careful that you don’t sacrifice the basics in doing so. And by basics, I mean trying to implement the other 12 tips on this list.
8) Communicate at just the right amount
What we find most often in email marketing is that most people either over-communicate, or under-communicate. That is to say, most email marketers either send too many emails to everyone on their list, or they build up their lists but “don’t get around to” actually sending emails.
And the absolute worst is when people do a combination of the two. This is when someone does email marketing in spurts. That is, they gather email addresses and don’t send too many at the start… And then, out of nowhere, they get all excited to sell stuff and start bombarding their list with offers.
Then, they go back into hibernation and “lay off of email marketing for a while” and don’t send any emails for a while. Only to come back to email marketing later and start bombarding their subscribers out of nowhere.
The trick is to be consistent and avoid the erratic ups and downs. And the main tip for staying consistent? Plan ahead. It’s hard to stay consistent if you have to, for example, write an email every single Tuesday and Thursday. Sometimes life gets in the way.
It’s much better to use those motivated times to write and prepare content and campaigns for weeks or months ahead. That way, you have content ready and scheduled in advanced, so it goes out even at times when “life gets in the way”.
9) Study storytelling, weave-in success stories
You might or might not have noticed that all the most successful marketers tell stories. That’s actually not some weird coincidence. Stories work as a way of building relationships, communicating value and building trust.
Story-telling is also one of the best ways to weave-in social proof into your emails. And that in itself is one of the most effective ways to boost conversion rates.
10) Think in terms of customer journeys
People often get bogged down in the specifics of a given marketing channel or software. This often means that they fail to study general, universal basic marketing principles.
It is actually surprising how many marketers out there are really people who’ve never studied marketing itself, and by that I mean they have never studied those higher-level universal concepts that are behind all successful marketing.
While there are quite a few things you could study, if we are talking about conversion, I would urge you to to go ahead and study the concept of the customer journey.
A lead conversion is not a singular event, it is a journey that culminates in an event. There are phases that leads go through in order to arrive at that point where they take out their credit card to buy your product.
11) Utilize just-in-time promotions
Trends come and go, and it is common that when there is a fancy new trend, some of the time-proven basics get pushed to the side.
Such is the case when it comes to promotions in modern marketing. Since it is popular to try and do everything with email automation, many people forget that broadcasts are still amazing at raking in the dough.
Now, that isn’t to say you shouldn’t be trying to convert people on autopilot. You should be using those automations that monitor a lead’s journey and take them down a path or a funnel. However, there is no reason not to combine this with good old fashioned “special one-off promotions”.
For example, you can send broadcasts that are based on a special holiday and offer a special discount. You could blast a special campaign that comes just-in-time for the summer. Or, it could be tied with you releasing a new edition of a product.
Notice how I’m mostly giving things that are related to something in terms of timing. People often misunderstand that you only care about timing with automation. For example in automations you might have something like: “when people reach stage X or open a page, send them offer ABC”.
But even with broadcasts, they work best when they’re not randomly coming out of nowhere. They work best when there is something that triggered them. For example your prices will be going up in 2 weeks, and you are sending a campaign to get people to lock-in at your current prices.
Anything is better than a random “Hey I decided to blast my list asking them if they’ll buy my product, just out of nowhere, for no reason”.
12) Focus on deliverability, boost profits
Have you ever seen those articles about people sharing regrets? They are very popular because you get to hear people reveal what they would have done differently if they could do things over again.
The main regret that I see among senior email marketers is that they wish they had learned about email deliverability earlier on. You see, the sad fact is that unless you’re prioritizing and actively working on your deliverability, the odds are that you’re losing out on a ton of conversions.
And this is for a very simple reason. Your emails cannot convert a lead who never even sees your email, as it was never delivered. Now this part surprises a lot of people who think that “sending” emails is the same thing as delivering emails. It is not.
Most email marketing platforms just send your emails, but don’t do much to make sure they are getting delivered. In fact, there is a hidden unspoken contract where deliverability is your problem, and they won’t bring it up. That is, they won’t mention the topic at all, unless it gets so bad that they have to ban you, but by then it is too late.
The main reason that the big marketers are moving their huge lists to Emercury? To get an instant boost in profits from the increased deliverability. But you don’t have to spend years and build huge lists with millions of leads first. You can get started on the right foot by learning about, and focusing on deliverability from day one.
13) Become coachable, save time and effort
Everyone loves a hard worker, and if you’re the kind of person who loves to just get in there and figure it out, much respect. However, what I often find is that people spend too much time on trial & error, way above what is necessary. There is no need to repeat every mistake out there and figure it all out on your own.
This is why it is important to know how to get feedback and advice that can cut years off your progress. The fact is that it takes time to achieve those high conversion rates and master all the skills necessary. Why not let someone speed up that journey for you?
Consider that some of our plans include coaching and strategy calls, so consider those if you want to really super-charge your results. Alternatively, consider booking a demo so you get a sense for that experience.
