photo credit: Rocpoc

It’s probably the number one rookie mistake in advertising and marketing copy writing.  It can tank an otherwise exceptional sales offer to the exact right audience. It’s guaranteed to bore readers and listeners to death, and it’s a downright sin in direct response.

What is this ill? It is writing or talking about – or to – ourselves rather than our potential and current customers.  In other words, speaking in the language of “me” rather than “you”.

And it’s both so pervasive and toxic that it’s exactly why when it comes to much of what you write online – from your email offers to your social media status updates to your product and sales pages – it’s imperative that you answer the question eternally hovering on the tip of your readers’ tongues: WIIFM? (What’s In It For Me?)

In other words, that you learn to speak the Language of Results.

Okay, What’s In It For Me?

In the spirit of practicing what I preach, what is in it for you to learn the Language of Results and apply it to your marketing? These 5 powerful benefits spring to mind:

1)    More customers

2)    More sales

3)    Improved customer retention and renewal

4)    Continuous revenue/income generation (fewer peaks and valleys)

5)    Greater buyer satisfaction

The Language De-Mystified

Let’s take a look at a few elements you won’t find in the Language of Results:

• Detailed product specs
• Lengthy feature lists
• The back-story or history of the product’s creation
• Your logo
• Extensive terms and conditions
• Rules and regulations

Don’t get me wrong, each of these items have their purpose and specific place in your marketing.  It’s the emphasis you give them that matters.  These items accomplish other necessary tasks in the sales and marketing process, but will fail when relied upon to answer reasons why, create justifications and motivate response.

Now let’s see some of the components that definitely are part of the Language of Results:

• Customer testimonials – the more descriptive of actual results, the better
• Images and photos portraying products or services successfully (or beautifully) in use
• Reasons to buy – simple “benefits” lists will suffice, but you can go positive or negative here (be careful portraying too grim a picture of not buying)
• Outcomes of purchase (guaranteed or not)
• Before and after comparisons, stories or photos than illustrate positive transformation
• Facts and figures from scientific or other quantifiable studies proving results
• Money-back guarantees

The Results, Naturally

The Language of Results achieves two essential parts of the selling process: the creation of promise and the establishment of proof.

The Language of Results is about selling the sizzle, not the steak. It’s about making your value or the value of your product, service or event obvious and apparent.  It’s about the transformational outcome your potential customers will experience when they take you up on your offer and apply what they’ve invested in with you.

Are your opt-in pages speaking the Language of Results? How about your sales and email campaign landing pages? Email messages themselves? E-newsletters? Product launch materials? Direct mail?

Learning to speak the Language of Results is like learning any other language: the more you practice it the better you get. If you’re struggling, a coaching program can help. Click here for more information on coaching by Synchronicity Marketing or to instantly inquire if coaching is right for you.

photo credit: shahsjunkie

With email inboxes more crowded than ever before, simply arriving successfully is half the battle.  Assuming you routinely have good deliverability, the second half of that battle is standing out in a crowd.

The majority of email users (more than 70% by some estimates) view the lineup of email messages in their inboxes via preview panes, so only a snapshot of each message is visible either to the right or on the lower half of their screens.  Mobile environments can be even worse, eliminating preview-ability altogether.

Like it or not that’s today’s reality for email marketers, which is why it’s so essential that your email messages not only pop and get straight to the point, but also know how to make an entrance!

What follows are three tried and true creative tactics that always up your message appeal. Although you may have seen these applied to marketing and advertising in offline channels, because of the short attention span, deliverability and rendering issues of email I think it’s even more important to adhere to them in the inbox, and that they have greater impact online than off:

1) Compelling, Colorful Headlines stand out and are easily readable in preview panes. They immediately draw the reader into the main point of your message.  Don’t rely solely on a graphic header like one that may be topping your blog or site to do the job of a headline; they’re two different things.  While a graphic banner or “masthead” may be fine for e-newsletters, other marketing messages require more punch and relevancy.  Each deserves a unique headline.  Take a look at this example from restaurant group Bonefish Grill (they have a history of great email headlines, by the way).  Notice not only the great headline copywriting, but that each section of the message has a sub-headline to draw the reader in.

Enlightened eMarketing Tip:  Headline font faces, sizes and colors are routinely tested, but you don’t need to go to such lengths if you simply follow the graphic standards of your brand and marketing communications.  So, don’t forget that headline, and try tying it into your message subject line too.

2) Pictures, please!  Eye-tracking lab studies measuring how people visually interact with email has proven that messages with images get higher readability than those without.  While including a picture of a product is an obvious tactic to increasing advertising effectiveness, much email marketing is not product or retail-oriented; it’s service or content-oriented.  Finding relevant photos and images for these types of messages is just as important as it is for clothing and furniture retailers, whose catalog-spread-style emails and sites consist largely of images alone.  See how much more interesting this B-to-B email for phone conference services looks with images vs. text alone.

Enlightened eMarketing Tip: Include at least one image in every promotional email.  Photos are ideal, but even illustrations, cartoons, caricatures, logos and icons are effective.  Experiment with different percentages of copy vs. graphics.  Editorial-style emails are usually longer on copy than graphics, but you might find a highly compelling photo with a strong headline and short intro paragraph working just as well or better as your meatier messages.

3) Less is so much more.  When it comes to effective email creative, simplicity rules. Too many marketing emails err on the side of needing more “white space” in their designs.  Don’t feel compelled to fill every pixel with color or content.  Give your readers’ eyes a rest, and remember that a few bold elements can draw curiosity (and are more visible) than many detailed ones.  Just try this J Crew email on for size to see what I mean.

In summary, harken back a moment to something I mentioned at the start of this article: we approach email with an incredibly short attention span, sizing up whether to open and act on messages in near sub-second timeframes.  So when it comes to your email marketing, let clean, clear, simple and to the point rule your design.  Show as well as tell, and don’t just tell in one way – use subject lines, headlines, subheads and message copy to tell and tell again. Not only will clear, uncluttered email gain the gratitude of your designer, but your customers as well.

Next month:  Three innovations in email marketing creative that will have your messages not merely standing out in a crowd, but gaining celebrity in-box status.

Creative Commons License photo credit: lululemon athletica

In Part 1 of this series you learned about transparency and authenticity. Part 2 explained why creating resonance and cultivating magnetism are essential to generating emotional connections that are real and enduring.

Now in the last of this three-part series, let’s look at the final two ingredients that strengthen the emotional bond your market has with you AND each other: community and consistency.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem impersonal.  It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do.

But there’s good news – the online world also offers an expanded ability to connect with others and develop communities beyond the boundaries of our physical worlds. That’s why community is one of the final essential ingredients to creating emotional connections in your online marketing.

5) Grow Community

We’re always seeking community.  Humans are not meant to exist in isolation.  Deep down, we’re tribal dwellers, not solo wanderers.  We need social connections in order to thrive and grow.  What that means for you as a marketer is when your customers find something they love, or which solved a problem for them; they’re going to talk about it.  They’re going to share it.  And these days, the fastest way to do both is online.  When that solution is yours, there’s nothing so wonderful or effective as this “word of mouse”.

Take a moment to recall that most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small.  Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and each factors into decision making.  More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to make strong, positive emotional connections right from the start.

Many of our emotions are influenced by groups. Enable online sharing by building your own digital community. Recognize the power communities have to no only extend your message, products and services, but sway sentiment.  With email, social media and blogs, it’s easier than ever to cultivate community and “build a fence around your herd”, as one marketing guru likes to put it, to keep them happily in your pasture.

A few of the faster and more recognizable ways to build community online are

1) Create a Facebook group.  Invite current favorite connections to join

2) Tie a blog into your web site and require people to register before they can comment

3) Get on Twitter and start following people you’d like to have in your community

4) Start a group on LinkedIn

5) Develop a free or paid membership club or subscription.  Unlike social media, blogs and membership sites provide a more intimate, private place for community members to share opinions and information.

There is another thing online communities do that helps strengthen emotional connections with your target market.  Communities give people a chance to converse not only with one another, but also with you or your employees on a personal level – like we can on Facebook for example – and that creates trust and credibility.  Now, your marketing communications (and customer-service) can look more like real time conversations with your market rather than simply talking “at your market” (as is done with traditional mass advertising).

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  It’s simple. When people trust you and trust what others are saying about you or your products, they’re more likely to invest with you.  By building a community you create a buying environment that doesn’t seem sales-y, because your people know you’re serving them with information, content, or entertainment that is relevant.  As a result, when you do make an offer they are far more receptive to it than they would be if they weren’t already part of your community.

Cultivating community creates a comfort zone in which you and the people who are already interested in what you offer can intersect.  Within your community you’re marketing in your target zone, not just shooting aimlessly.  I think the community-building power of social media in particular (and online marketing in general) is possibly the greatest asset of the Internet as a marketing channel, and the most underutilized.

Here’s a final compelling reason to invest in building community: the financial payoff.  Ask yourself, what’s the annual value of each additional new subscriber you add to your email list?  For a lot of companies, it’s at least a couple of hundred dollars.  What’s the lifetime value of a new customer?

If you invested in growing your online community through social media and that in turn generated just fifty new email list members who then resulted in ten new customers a year, what would that be worth to you?  $5,000? $10,000? $50,000? And if you’re going to be in business for another twenty or thirty years, what’s it worth then?

6) Stay Constant and Consistent

The final essential for building emotional connections online is consistency.  When it comes to email and social media marketing, it pays to crawl before you walk and walk before you run.  Remember, you don’t have to do it all at once, but once you start, you should be prepared to commit to a schedule.  Strive for consistency, publishing and mailing on a regular if not predictable basis.

That goes double for blogging. Once you begin posting, your readers and customers will begin to look forward to what you have to say next. It’s important to both manage their expectations and balance them with your own resources, so plan to post on a schedule you can keep up with.  Many bloggers post daily, although I don’t recommend this for beginners.  Weekly or even every other week is more reasonable.

Besides frequency there’s another important dimension to consistency:  voice. Remember, the entire point of this is building emotional connections online; to do so successfully you’ll need to communicate with consistent authenticity, personality and transparency. Your unique voice, tone and style should be clear and unchanging, not shifting any which way the wind blows.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Don’t be who you think your market wants you to be.  Don’t infect your blog with multiple personality disorder.  Don’t shift your writing style on your customers to the point where there is a brand disconnect.  Instead, just be yourself.

Now that you know the six essentials to creating emotional connections in your online marketing, tell me in comments below where you’re using them successfully and what the results have been?  Or if you’re struggling, what are your greatest challenges?

Any by all means, let me know how I can help.

photo credit: aechempati

One of my email seminar students recently asked: “I feel like the only emails my company ever sends are sales messages: like we’re always asking people to buy, buy, buy.  Should we supplement these with other types of email and if so, what?”

Don’t feel bad, lack of variety in email marketing is a common dilemma for many marketers.  Businesses newer to email or with fewer resources tend to gravitate first and only to promotional messaging, but there is plenty more you can and should communicate to your list. Here are just a few of the many greetings and message types you should include in your email program:

A Newsletter

Whether it’s weekly, twice a month or monthly (I don’t recommend less than monthly) your e-newsletter is a fantastic email catch-all for many different types of content and messaging.  Include articles, useful tips, recommendations, testimonials, event information and yes, product offers and specials too.  It’s a “news” letter after all, so be sure you’re weaving together not only what’s new with your business, but what’s new in your industry.  If you have an above-average perspective on developing practices, breaking news or trends, legislation or inventions in your market, share helpful information about it in the form of feature articles.

Personal and Holiday Greetings

Are you acknowledging your email subscribers’ birthdays and service anniversaries with a thank you email? You should be.  How about holidays – are you sending Thanksgiving greetings, Happy Holidays messages, and other emails reflecting the seasonal celebrations throughout the year?  These are some of the easiest messages to develop and deploy, and some of the most cherished by subscribers because they’re intimate, appreciative and timely.  Integrating them into your message stream makes you or your brand more personal and welcome in the inbox and as a result, more thought of as a trusted friend than the “friend who only calls when she needs something”.

Triggered Follow-Ups

Did you know triggered email generates ten times the revenue and over twenty times the profit of broadcast campaigns? Yes, it’s incredibly powerful and relevant because it is targeted to individuals based on recent actions, dates or unique characteristics. So remember to include event reminders, bounce backs, purchase thank-you’s, and browse or cart abandonment follow-ups in your mix and you’ll see an incredible boost in email ROI.

Education, Information and Entertainment

You probably know more useful, fun and educational things than you realize – but do you share them? A weekly “hot tip” or “helpful hint” goes a long way toward “selling by way of serving”, which I believe is quickly replacing “selling by way of promotion”.  This kind of content marketing strategy also gives you yet another reason besides selling to keep in touch with your list, especially if your email frequency is low.

Why strive for variety at all? Try these five compelling reasons on for size:

1) When it comes to email, variety literally is the “spice of inbox life”

The average person is a far more sophisticated inbox navigator than ever before and will tune out (read: delete) what looks like repetitive, same-old, same-old messaging.

2) While some marketing thrives on continuity and predictability (like, incidentally, newsletters) a pattern interrupt is a tried and true practice for grabbing attention and engagement.

Increasing the variety of your email messages makes it difficult if not impossible for subscribers to predict when and how you’re showing up in the inbox, which means they’re more likely to notice you when you do.

3) You can only send so many promotional buy messages before you’re likely to alienate list members to the point of unsubscribing.  If that’s all you ever send, you’ll see a steady list attrition pattern. Increasing variety is a fantastic way to increase frequency without redundancy and alienation.  In short, more variety gives you more legitimate reasons to mail your list.

4) Expanding your messages into educational, information and entertainment content improves your inbox mojo.  Content marketing is hot because it positions you as an expert, influencer, or both which correlates with higher trust, credibility and appreciation.  Yes, doing something to actually help, serve or amuse your subscribers is seen by most as relevant and valued – both necessary for long email relationships to thrive.  These types of messages can give you fantastic legitimacy and digital “street cred”. GREAT content even creates loyalty and dependency.  So, yeah, please don’t leave email out of your content marketing strategy!

5) Triggered email pays huge dividends. In addition to doing all four of the above, triggered email accounts for a tiny percentage of overall email volume for most marketers but contributes huge amounts of revenue, engagement and profit.  So you’d be crazy not to work it into the mix.

For help integrating these and more into an annual email message plan, check out our Online Marketing Content Planner.

What other types of messages have you included in your email marketing mix? And what have they done to benefit your business?

Creative Commons License photo credit: mscaprikell

In Part 1 of this series, I explained that marketing is not simply about hawking your wares. Certainly it’s about communicating what you have to offer, but how you do that is what makes the difference between feast and famine.

Whether we know it and like it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small. Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and each factors into decision making.  More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem highly impersonal.  It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do. That contributes to a lack of trust (and unfortunately, fraud) online, so allowing people to get to know you digitally goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need to buy from you in any channel.

Thankfully it’s easier than ever to create emotional connections online due to social media and content publishing platforms that are easier and more accessible than ever before.  Last month I covered the first two steps to doing so; here are steps three and four of six that I recommend:

3) Create Resonance

When you authentically and transparently communicate with your target audience, they resonate with you.  You get reactions like “this is perfect for me!” or “finally someone understands what I’m going through!”

When you resonate you strike a chord with your audience.  You both tune into the same “vibe”, and it results in comfort and trust, allowing you to sell in a non-salesy environment.  Just as in music, you’re singing to the same tune as your audience, harmonizing with them by recognizing their needs, pain, challenges or struggles and meeting them in that space.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Write for your target market, not the world at large.  Not everyone is your potential customer!  The more you have a specific profile of your ideal clients and the more you know about your existing best customers, the better you’ll learn to relate to them.  A great exercise when writing email, blog posts and articles is to imagine you’re speaking to your favorite three customers over dinner – what would you say to them?

When you resonate with your target audience, they perceive you as authentic, real and passionate about what you do and as a result, they will follow you anywhere and – this can be huge – overlook mistakes when you inevitably make them.  Or, if they can’t overlook your missteps, they’ll at least stick with you through tough times.

Either resonance (positive) or dissonance (negative) means people have connected with you.  Like direct response marketing guru Dan Kennedy says, “If you’re not offending someone by noon, you’re doing something wrong!”  Remember: the worst reaction is no reaction.

Ideally you want your marketing to generate more positive than negative reaction.  While pain is a powerful motivator, if you don’t follow it up with promise and hope you’ll be stuck in the sucking quicksand of doom and gloom, and believe me, nobody wants to dwell there.

4) Cultivate Magnetism

What is magnetism?  It is defined as “strong attractive power or charm”.  It means your marketing has a distinct, attractive personality – either positive or negative.  And if you have it, or can cultivate it, it’s the number one way to sell without ever being perceived as “pitching”.

Because the Internet is a crowded space, a magnetic personality is vital these days, and sometimes it requires outrageous, edgy or at least “dare to be different” approaches.  If you don’t have a distinct personality, if you can’t stand out from the crowd, people will gloss over you or your business because they’ll perceive you as a commodity.  And you can’t make an emotional connection with a commodity.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  The secret to standing out from the crowd, even if there are thousands or millions of people doing the same thing as you, is to have a unique, targeted focus.  A unique angle.  It’s not about how you look, it’s about two “P” words: Positioning and Passion.

Positioning first: when you’re willing to put a stake in the ground and claim your space, your unique niche of people you want to serve and your unique system or way of serving them, that gives you magnetism.  You will draw people to you.  That might mean leveraging your unique quirkiness, your edge, or your laser focus, no matter how bizarre.

Second, your passion leads to Attraction Marketing.  Your genuine interest in what you do, and in sharing it, naturally propels you to serve which allows you to effortlessly sell by way of serving.  As a result you attract customers to you rather than having to pursue them.  Draw people to you from your place of service, from your unique offering or gift to them, not from greed or desperation.  You might have heard that before in this saying: “Bring your seed, not your need”.

I’ll bet you can think of several celebrities, authors and personalities who have equally powerful positive or negative magnetic personalities. On the positive side there’s someone like Oprah; on the negative, Rush Limbaugh comes to mind. Both are wildly attractive in different ways, because the truth is you can attract with a wide array of personality types.  What I said about resonance also goes for magnetism: a strong reaction either toward or away from you is at least still a reaction that requires feeling.

By fostering resonance and magnetism you’re creating memorable marketing messages.  Memorable messages are meaningful to us.  We remember those that evoke emotional reactions and that are funny, inspiring, outlandish or provocative.  Are your messages presented in a way that is worth remembering? If not, don’t be afraid to inject more transparency, authenticity, and personality into them. Worry less about if and how people will judge you and instead remember that any feeling is better than none at all.

I’ll conclude this series next month with the two final steps to creating emotional connections online, but in the meantime, tell me what you’ve done in your marketing? What’s working best for you?

photo credit: katerha

This question was recently posed in a private online marketing group I belong to called Only Influencers: “If I can tweet five times a day, why can’t I email five times a day?”

Keep in mind Only Influencers is an invitation-only group of highly experienced and savvy digital marketers (most of the industry’s “big names” in email already belong) from established and well-known brands, so they were not flippantly, but seriously, pondering the messaging norms we’ve come to think of as “acceptable” in different online marketing channels.  The question and the depth of discussion around it made me think, Why can’t we? And if we can’t or don’t or won’t, why not?

Here’s my take on the question. I’d love to hear yours too so please share it in comments below.

I’m all for greater email frequency when it’s relevant and useful to recipients at least as much as to marketers.  However, there are obvious fundamental differences between email and social media: the two that relate most to this question are 1) the differences in how people interact with email vs. social media, and 2) their expectations of messaging in each medium.

When it comes to the average inbox, most people still feel compelled to process every email message that arrives in their inbox. This “processing” can be a quick skim of message subject lines in order to decide what to open and read vs. delete. It might also be to check various folders at different intervals, as many inbox owners auto-route different types of email (or email from different senders) to different folders. Whatever the message triage process, every message is at least glanced at and accounted for in the average inbox, even if it’s for a swift move to the junk bin.

Not so with social media.  Twitter and Facebook are point-in-time communication streams much more than email is. I don’t think most people expect to read every wall post from every single friend in Facebook, or every Tweet from those they follow on Twitter.  (Those that try quickly find their eyes glued to a screen sixteen hours a day). Rather, because our eyes need to be other places, like on the road or watching the kids or, say, closed when sleeping, people logically jump in and out of these networks when they have time or are specifically prompted.

The bottom line: there’s a great sense of spontaneity in social media whereas there is still a sense of obligation centered around email.

All of which means it makes perfect sense to have high frequency and even intentional redundancy in your social media messaging because one can safely assume the average social media friend/follower won’t see all – or even close to all – of your status updates, only a fraction of them.  You want to catch people while they’re in the social network interface, knowing that will be different times for different people and that if you don’t catch them while they’re there they likely will not see your previous or subsequent communications ever.

With email on the other hand, repetition and high frequency is much more noticed and if not relevant, HIGHLY irritating, because once people do get around to checking their inbox ALL of your communications are there waiting for them in one place.  They’ll see the entire chronological stream so if you’re repeating messages without relevancy, they won’t understand why because there’s nothing in it for them.

While I recognize there is value in frequency from a brand impression and recall standpoint (meaning even being in the inbox with substantially the same message multiple times can boost brand recognition), if you’re planning on increasing email frequency, at least consider a creative tactic such as a sequence that tells a story or breaks a topic into shorter more frequent messages and relevantly justifies why you’re sending more often.  People enjoy connecting the dots and will follow a series to its conclusion, but don’t appreciate being beat over the head with boring redundant messages repeatedly.

The real question may not be why you can’t email five times a day, but this: What do you have to email that warrants it?

In other words, how do you justify your email frequency? Have you tested it to the point of diminishing returns in response and an increase in unsubscribes? Do you maintain low frequency in fear of complaints or high frequency in the face of them? Is every email you send useful and relevant, or repetitive and self-serving? These are worthy questions deserving exploration. I encourage you to give them serious thought, or put some solid tests into place to prove or disprove your assumptions.

If you’re a business owner, marketer, agency or consultant interested in joining Only Influencers and posing questions and discussions there, tell me in comments below if you’d like to be nominated and why (but first, it pays to read the qualifications for membership here).  If you’re a social media marketer there is currently a free six month trial membership available. The group is invite-only and the membership investment is (a well worth it) $20 per month or $200 a year.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Torley

You might read that title and wonder what in the world emotional connections have to do with online marketing or any marketing for that matter.  Isn’t marketing simply about telling people what you have to offer and letting them know how to buy or work with you? Certainly it’s that, but much more.  Whether you realize it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small.

Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and both factor into decision making. More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world can be fast, furious, and impersonal.  There is a built-in immediacy in digital communication channels that often undermines or bypasses the opportunity to slow down the sale and deepen the consideration process that older, offline channels delivered.  Plus, there’s a huge lack of trust (and fraud) in the digital world so allowing people to get to know you online goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need before they’re willing to buy.

So, is it easy to create emotional connections online? The good news is “YES!” thanks largely to social media and content publishing platforms that are faster, simpler and more accessible than ever before.

So, how do you do it? Here are the first two of six steps I recommend:

1) Increase Transparency

In the age of Web 2.0 (or 3.0, or whatever iteration we’re in!) transparency has never been greater.  Companies blog about their internal workings and behind-the-scenes processes.  You can Google a person or business name and harvest a cornucopia of information about it in just a few minutes.  Peer reviews, blog comments, complaints and praise round out the 360-degree view of you, your products, or your brand.  Much of what is written or said is not from you, or up to you.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Take charge of the conversation by participating in it and opening the kimono a bit wider than you have in the past.  If you don’t have a blog, start one.  Frequently ask for comments to new posts AND promote your posts on social media.  Include community involvement initiatives and employee profiles or endeavors in your marketing and as blog posts topics to give your company a more human “face”.  Monitor social media mentions and conversations so you can constructively join them, respond to customer service issues, and have actual conversations with your customers.

Remember, people do business with people, not nameless, faceless entities, so give them some names and faces they can clearly relate to. Becoming more transparent doesn’t mean you have to reveal everything, but it does mean coming out of hiding if you’ve been a little too comfortable there.

2) Embrace Authenticity

When you think of American Idol, who’s more interesting  and memorable – Randy Jackson or Simon Cowell? I vote for Cowell.  While he may not be as personable as Jackson, Simon Cowell certainly doesn’t pander to fans or crowds – he’s his own man, like him or not.  In fact, a big part of his staying power as an American Idol judge is that he dared to be brutally honest, even if that meant disagreeing with his fellow judges and the voting audience, or hurting contestants’ feelings.

He’s a perfect example of authenticity – Cowell is not afraid to be himself.  He’s also a great example of how negative vs. positive personality traits can be wildly attractive – you don’t need to be hospitable, warm and fuzzy to get customers, fans and new business, but you do need to be real.  By refusing to pull punches and daring to defy convention Cowell developed a huge following and has grown his business considerably.  He also left Idol on his own terms, when he was ready, unlike other judges who were nudged out.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Take a good look at whether your brand/business personality is what you think it needs to be for your market to accept you, or is what you really want it to be based on the true story behind it.  Don’t copy your competitors or feel you have to mimic them – they have their unique origins, and you have yours, so use your story to your advantage.  The true-life individual personalities of founders, inventors, or practice professionals should permeate their companies and in fact, have defined entire corporate cultures (witness Virgin, Apple, Google and Facebook).

Also, it’s practically impossible to maintain a phony or veneered façade, so don’t try.  Trust that when your genuine values and traits – whether friendly or grumpy, liberal or conservative, soft-spoken or edgy – are visible in your online presence and flow through your digital communications, you’ll resonate with like-minded people who genuinely want to do business with the real you.  And typically, the more they do, the better they’ll want to get to know that real you and the more authentic you’ll become in their eyes.

These are just two beginning steps to creating emotional connections in your marketing, and today’s online channels make it easier than ever to be open and real, then continue to reveal as much as you’re comfortable sharing about yourself and your business.

I’ll continue this next month with two more steps to creating emotional connections in online marketing, but in the meantime, tell me what you’ve done to create emotional connections online? What’s working best for you?

photo credit: webtreats

I’m often asked what I believe to be the number one way to connect email and social media marketing.  Last month I tackled that question from the starting point of email.  This month I’m addressing it from the perspective of social media.

Both connecting email to social and using social to strengthen and grow email matter because linking email and social media both ways is important. So if you have a strong or growing presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or more, what’s the best way to leverage it for expanding your email program?

Well, it rather depends on which social network we’re talking about, but in a nutshell, here’s the answer: Invite and entice your social community members to sign-up for your email program! (Duh, right?) Yet it’s not what you do, but how you do it that matters and determines your success rate. Let’s take a closer look at the how’s of inviting email sign-ups and gathering email addresses from friends and followers on the big three social networks:

1) Facebook – the beauty of Facebook is you have a lot of screen real estate to work with, so be sure to develop a custom business page with a visually attractive email opt-in, e-newsletter sign-up, or other form of registration that gathers an email address.  Logically the first response to ask a new Facebook page visitor for is a “Like”, but as soon as they have liked you, you can display a page that explains the benefits they’ll now receive by being connected to you in social media and also invites them to join your email program.

You invite them into email by offering valuable content accessible only when they sign-up, or just explaining the exclusive notices and treatment your email subscribers routinely receive. The point is, don’t just go for the “like” (remember, you don’t “own” your Facebook page – Facebook does!); gather a digital point of contact that is your gateway into longer, more personal messaging.

2) Twitter – Twitter is a little different. You have some real estate to post links or opt-in invitations on your Twitter profile page, but not as much room or depth as on Facebook. So on Twitter, use your tweets themselves to invite, entice and explain the benefits of opting-in to your email. People need to be gently reminded there are multiple ways to get the best deals, exclusive offers and information from you, but don’t over-hype it.

Rather than tweet an invite to sign-up for your email list, tweet a link to the free report, application, widget, game or services trial sitting behind a registration that requires email address. Promote the benefit – what’s in it for them – of your content and services, not what’s in it for you. And do so at least once a day, but not so much that your promotional tweets vastly outnumber your helpful conversational status updates.

3) LinkedIn –LinkedIn offers some powerful and unique features – like groups, discussions and events — for business people that are also great places to promote your content and embed links to your email sign-up and lead capture pages. Of those three I think the most powerful is events. Keep in mind, an “event” can be a webinar, tele-seminar, tele-summit, or other virtual point-in-time gathering that requires minimal investment but is a fantastic list-builder.

Almost anyone registering for a paid or free webinar, tele-class or other virtual gathering knows they must provide their email address as a condition for receiving access information. So, start routinely planning free or low-cost events and promoting them on LinkedIn (as well as Facebook and Twitter) and watch your email list grow throughout the year.

Of course, we’re rarely limited to just a single way of doing anything, although we may have to tackle one way at a time. Those ready to fully leverage and integrate email, social and content marketing are ready for this. If you’re feeling unsure of where to start, I invite you to request a free Emarketing Strategy Session with me.

What else? How do you use social media to strengthen and grow your email or other marketing channels?

photo credit: lukxde

One of my recent posts made the case for opt-in over opt-out marketing.  I realize that’s all well and good until it becomes time to convince people to say yes, right? So this month I want to share four insights into what psychologically motivates people to say yes when given the opportunity to take action:

Invitation

It’s universally human that we would rather be asked than tricked or forced.  Free will is one of the very cornerstones of human nature.  When it’s all said and done, we’d rather be given the chance to make a conscious decision than cornered into unconscious choices we end up inevitably regretting.  So when it comes to asking someone to join your email or social media sphere, don’t fall back on deception and coercion.  You don’t need to sneak them in under the wire. Simply invite them and trust that they can decide for themselves what is in their own best interests.

Everyone loves an invitation, right? Everyone loves to feel special, included, that they belong.  We have a basic drive for community.  We’re social beings.  Hey, it’s in the Maslow pyramid.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Invitations are good, but a masterful opt-in marketer won’t simply invite without also explaining the value of the invitation and explicitly indicating how to accept it.  The best invitations are clear, honest and compelling. While people love to make up their own minds, once they do they want to be told exactly what to do next and not have to figure it out for themselves.  So once  you’ve invited them to join, subscribe or buy, please don’t forget to explain exactly how!

Reciprocation

As social beings, we mirror one another.  Communication studies have proven we are reciprocal in nature, matching moods, gestures, even facial expressions of the person or entity we’re in communication with.  So if you want someone to say yes, use reciprocity to your advantage: say “yes” to them first by giving.

Most people when shown kindness will reciprocate it.  Most people, when given a gift, feel gratitude and seek a way to express it.  When you give value before you ask for a valuable action, you demonstrate trustworthiness, generosity and commitment.  You give yourself  a “home field advantage”.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  How do you give first? Offer something of value in exchange for an email sign-up, social media follow, purchase or other form of engagement that brings you value.  This “something of value” can be information, entertainment, education, a chance to win a prize, a free gift or premium, exclusivity, or a solution to a problem.  Content marketing, the practice of giving away something valuable in order to sell or obtain something related, works well for almost all organizations because every business or professional is more an expert in their field than their customers, so we all have helpful, relevant, valuable insight we can share.

Emotion

We are intellectual and emotional beings both.  The two hemisphere of our brain work together and separately in remarkable ways – the left driving analytical and critical thinking, the right being the emotional center.  It’s been said people “buy with emotions and justify with reason”, so if you concentrate only on the steak but not the sizzle, or vice versa, you’re leaving out an important component psychologically necessary for most people to say yes and feel good about it.

Start by making an emotional connection by appealing to basic human motivators  – the desire to be safe, to be loved, to be happy, or to be included.  The more magnetism, personality, transparency and authenticity you bring to your marketing, the more successful you’ll be in creating emotional resonance in the first place.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  People love to buy but hate to feel sold to.  When you bypass an emotional connection by going straight to justifications, analytics, facts and figures, there’s a tendency for people to feel like they are being talking into something rather than deciding for themselves.  On the other hand, when you create an emotional connection that transcends the intellect, you empower your audience to convince themselves of what they want. It’s a fact of life: you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink.  We all need to choose – anything and everything we do – for ourselves.  The true opt-in marketer realizes the power of this and uses emotion to elicit conscious choice.

Social Proof

Again, we are social beings, pack animals if you will, so we love to see what the majority is doing and saying.  Whether or not it should be, the fact remains that peer pressure is a powerful motivator.  Peer influence and review holds great credibility. In today’s age of social media, there is endless opportunity (and not excuse not to) gather powerful testimonials, ratings and other “social proof” from your community to increase trust and reliability in your invitations, offers, products and services.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Whenever you’re asking someone to respond, support your call to action with positive and real testimonials, ratings, and statistics (4 out of 5 customers buy again!).  Give life to social proof by including pictures or video of the real people behind the names, and by adding graphics and color to stats or survey results.  Allowing your customers to speak for you is far more powerful than speaking for yourself can ever be, so give your raving fans and loyal advocates an opportunity and a place to openly share – whether on social networks, your own hosted communities, your blog or all three.

There are plenty of other psychological tactics marketers have used since the beginning of time to motivate response and many of them prey upon fear, loss, exclusion and other negative motivators.  Obviously I’m not focusing on those.  I say it’s time to take a higher road in marketing, resting in honesty, trust and community. When we do it right and when we do it with integrity, our prospects and customers say “yes” and feel good in the process, and how they feel about their decision speaks volumes later on, translating into either confidence and repeat business or returns and remorse.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be doing business with people choosing to work with me out of love than out of fear. Ultimately, empowering instead of disempowering people to “yes” is a “win-win”,  the difference between success and failure both for ourselves and those we serve.

photo credit: kirstyhall

With so many ways to integrate email and social media we have almost unlimited options for leveraging connection between these two powerful conversation marketing channels.  Still, for those at the beginning of the process it pays to know where to start.

I’m often asked what the number one way to connect email and social media marketing is, so whether your presence on social media is brand new or you’re an experienced marketer wanting to make sure you don’t overlook the obvious, here’s my answer:

Use email marketing to invite connections on social media

This of course assumes you have a presence on at least one of the big three social networks – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – if not also on others like YouTube, Ning and Meetup.

Why start with something so simple and obvious? Here are three good reasons why and a few ideas how:

1) Leverage Your Broadest and Most Established Online Channel to Build Connections in New Channels Today it’s still true that a greater percentage of your customers use email than social media.  That makes email the broadest online channel you have to invite customers to engage with you in any other channel – online or offline – especially emerging channels like social.  It’s probably also the oldest (and for some, still the only) online communication channel you have with your customers, so chances are, not only are more of your customers reachable via email than social, they’re also more comfortable with and open to hearing from you through email than social media.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip: leverage email marketing messages to entice, invite and remind subscribers that you’re present and interested in engaging with them on social media.  You can use email to do this in a variety of ways: a) through dedicated email invites and announcements to visit and “like” you on social media sites, b) through Facebook-based contests (where a visit and “like” of the page is required for entry), and c) by embedding in email messages social media connection icons that link to your corresponding pages on those networks (now common practice).

2) Hedge against Email List Attrition. Using email to stimulate social media connections is a hedge against losing a customer connection in the email channel.  If and when an email subscriber does want to leave your list, provided they’re connected with you on social media you can still engage and communicate with them there.  And that’s better than not at all.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip: Recognize that as marketing channels continue to proliferate, people have more choice than ever.  Some email subscribers will leave your list and instead prefer to connect with you on social media.  Some social media fans will never subscribe to your email list. Honor preferences and don’t unreasonably expect everyone to connect with you in every channel.

3) Multiple Channels = More Valuable Customers.  It’s a continually proven marketing truth that customers who engage in more than one channel purchase more often and spend more overall than customers who only interact in a single channel.  While email is an ideal broadcast and targeted messaging channel, social media is a highly interactive and more conversational than email.  The two separately are ideal for different types of messages, but when used together can create powerful, deeper engagement with customers that translates into more sales and higher lifetime customer value.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip: Don’t overlook email’s potential to initiate a conversation or process which you then continue on social media.  It’s likely you’ll receive most customer ideas, suggestions, feedback, reviews and ratings through your social media points of presence.  You can even use email to intentionally solicit that sort of input, which you’ll then gather on your social media pages, blog or through surveys.  Since email is your broadest online channel, use it to launch a request for feedback, then transfer that conversation, discussion or interactivity to the context it’s best suited for: the social network.

Of course, we’re rarely limited to just a single way of doing anything, although we may have to tackle one method at a time.  After leveraging your email to invite connections on social media, you’re ready to do just the opposite: use social media to build your email list. I’ll have a bundle of suggestions for why and how to do so in an upcoming article.

In the meantime, those ready to go beyond these beginning steps into creating intentionally and strategically crafted email, social and content marketing are ready for this.

Unsure of where to start or go next? Request a free Enlightened Emarketing Strategy Session.