Creative Archives - Retaliate 1st

3 Ways to Convert New Leads Online

Google and Facebook pay per click have offered small businesses a method for competing with much larger competitors by allowing for sane advertising budgets with ads that are immediately trackable.

You can figure out your ROI from PPC ads pretty easily.

But, sometimes those figures can be depressing.

If your website or landing pages are not converting for you, stop wasting time trying to perfect your ads (you’re already getting traffic). Instead, use these three tricks to convert more of your visitors into leads:

Hail Mary Lead Generation

If you’re paying for traffic, you want to convert as many customers as possible. You can help your efforts by putting in some last-ditch, about-to-bounce-away lead conversion tactics.

Do this by:

Offering a Benefit-filled Exit Pop Up – these are annoying, but you can set them to only display one time to no annoy repeat visitors. And, if someone clicked an ad to find you and they’re about to bounce away from your site, you don’t have much to lose. Some companies convert as much as 23% more traffic by using exit pop ups.

Use a P.S. in any web or off-line marketing materials. Some people skip right to the P.S., so make it count. This goes for email and social media marketing as well.

When writing a P.S., or using an exit pop up, lead with benefits and let the customer know why they’ll be losing something if they don’t buy or submit their info.

Back up their fear of loss by giving them something to gain

Utilize Online Chat – These can be effective if you are selling a product or service that will undoubtedly lead to more questions than you can anticipate or answer in your FAQ. Use live agents because customers are frustrated by dealing with computer-based chat “agents.”

Encourage Your Potential Customer to Take a Very Low-Risk

This is key if you’re selling personal services, high-end products, or anything that costs more than a few dollars. Let your customer get something for free (eBook, white paper, tip sheet, samples) in exchange for something low-risk (their first name and email address).

Further Lessen Their Risks by Being Honest

You love your product. You could talk about it all day. You have no idea why everyone in the world wouldn’t want one!

But, let’s be honest, we’re all customers. We know when we’re on fire for a product vs when we’re on the fence, or still in the research phase.

If you’re still in the info-gathering stages, what’s the last thing you want after you’ve put your info into a website’s contact form?

Pushy, shark-type sales people calling your house
Getting spammed with multiple emails

Overcome this fear by being honest in the P.S., or under your call-to-action:

We promise no salesmen will call your house
We respect your confidentiality and never sell your information
You will receive only one email with the information you asked for

March 8, 2017/by chris

Creative, Marketing, Mobile, Website

3 Tips To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Email is still the number one channel for driving sales for e-commerce business. For many years marketers have touted the decline of the channel, but it is still here. It is still getting strong. With new tools such as AppBoy, Marketo and HubSpot, the abilities for customizing and refining campaigns is endless. However, the original principals of email marketing still hold true. Retaliate1st list their guide to increasing your open rates.

How To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Don’t Send Unnecessary Mail

As business owners and growth hackers, we subscribe to a ton of mailing lists. We consume info at an amazing rate. Some of the lists are better than others, and though we love to learn, we all know that there are those businesses that send garbage email blasts. It annoys us, but we stay subscribed. Then they do it again. We unsubscribe.

They lost a warm lead.

Don’t be like them. Keep your mail marketing messages to the most important. Do not simply send out blasts because you think you should.

New product, really exciting news, a big re-cap of the latest info, discounts, sales, or free stuff? Send it.

Short emails pushing half-hearted promotions because you either feel you haven’t emailed enough, or you want to generate a few extra sales? Don’t send it.

Personalize Your mail

Yes, we all know that it’s auto-generated, and most customers realize that at this point.

However, seeing our names in the subject is a powerful attention grabber.

Dear Customer, or Hey Business Pro are horrible ways to start an email. Hi Jennifer or Good Morning Darryl are going to get your email opened, and will get your first few lines read.

You can further increase your open rate by adding “Re:” before the personalization, even if it’s the first email in the chain. This can be used in your personal and intra-office communications as well, though over-doing it will diminish it’s power.

Personalization and Targeting

You should also personalize your “From.” Use your name or Name + Business. Jim at WidgetCo or Domenica from SalesBooster gives your list a warmer feeling than an email from SalesBooster.

Write Powerful Headlines

We’re talking about email marketing. Remember that every word you write for your business is marketing. And, email subject lines are pure copywriting.

Weak subjects don’t get opened.

If you are doing a lot of email, it can be fatiguing to come up with killer headlines consistently. The way around this is to split test subject lines, and parse your list so that you can use variations of the same subject for multiple parts of your audience.

The words Free, Incredible, Sale, Deal, and Discount are always powerful
Name + benefit is still a great lead
Re: Name + benefit is even better (save this for your most important email)

While it can be tempting to write “weird” subjects to get higher open rates, please remember that they have to relate to the content of your email, your product, and your brand. For example, one large personal training and fitness related business was famous for sending out emails with salacious subject lines that had zero to do with their product:

“Weed, whores, and whiskey”

“Re: A duffle bag full of guns”

“Re: Are you in the mafia?”

They’re now out of business.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media

How To Use Instagram For Lead Generation

Instagram is still considered by many in the pay-per-click marketing word, to be the new kid on the block. With newness comes a bit of fear, so many small and medium businesses have been hesitant to stray from using only Google and Facebook PPC.

But, it can be a huge lead booster if utilized properly. Here’s why?

Using Instagram To Create Leads For Your Business

Visual Marketing is a Dominant Force

Content marketing rules, and will continue to be the most useful form of marketing for years to come. As the internet becomes more available in non-PC forms, phones, tablets, watches, etc., the need to turn to non-text content will be essential.

You can do this with visual content, and Instagram is the perfect place to put your best visuals to work.

Simply, visual attractiveness in an ad or in any piece of content that has the goal of increasing conversions, leads to more opt-ins, engagement, leads, and sales.

It will also get you more shares, and that increases each campaign’s reach exponentially at no cost to you.

Using high-quality, bright pictures, you draw the attention of your followers, and can help lead them on the path to purchase.

Instagram Videos

Now with videos in the Instagram feed, you can really skyrocket your leads and sales through the social media site. Video content on Instagram gets more views, shares, and likes. It stops scrollers in their path. Once you become known for putting out good video, you’ll be well on your wall to dominating your market online.

Young, Money-Spending Graphics

In Television, for years the most coveted demographic was 18 – 54 year old males.

Now, it’s men and women 18 – 34 (with 18 – 54 being not far behind). Instagram is custom made, literally, for those in that demographic. Build a strong Instagram following, and you’ll be tapping into the most lucrative market in the world.

Build Brand Awareness

Instagram allows you to use visual content to reach more customers. Facebook is similar in this respect, but Instagram actually gets more shares.

Post a good video or picture, and promote it. Your target audience sees the cool content, wants to show their friends, so they like and share it. Now, for the price to reach your target audience, you’ve reached them plus the friends they’ve shared with. It extends the life of your ads, exposes your products, services, and your brand to a large, warm-audience. This is key for growing your business, especially if you don’t have an unlimited ad-buy budget.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Culture, Marketing, SEM, Website

The Three Reasons Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Landing pages are still the most important pages on your website. They are the funnel that allows you to convert your ad traffic and social media traffic into paying customers. landing pages are the pages that showcase your value proposition, your product and close your leads. These landing pages are the life blood of your business. At Retaliate1st, we specialize in developing landing pages that convert, that achieve their goal. We want to showcase the landing page mistakes we continually see, so that your business can thrive.

Why Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Too Many Options

Barry Schwartz wrote about the paralysis that sets in in many shopping situations in his book the Paradox of Choice. He uses the example of a man shopping for shampoo at a grocery store. He is faced with hundreds of choices – for dry hair, for brittle hair, for oily hair; olive oil base, coconut oil base; flower scented; and just about every color imaginable. This leads to frustration, and often people with either simply leave the store, or buy the closest option and later be unhappy with it.

Now, take a look at your landing pages. Are they leaving your customer in the isle frustrated because there are so many options they’re not sure which to choose?

If so, narrow it down to one choice (two, maximum).

What’s the goal of your landing page?

Email opt-in? Make sure the opt-in form is easily accessible, easy to read, and has a strong, clear call to action.

Do you want phone calls? Make your number big and visible and clickable.

Would you take either a phone call or a web form opt-in? Make it clear that either option gets them the same result: contact, free estimate, discount, services, etc.

Too Many Visual Distractions

It can be tempting to overwhelm your visitor with slick graphics. You may think you’re helping them find their way to your CTA.
But, there is a point where the graphics cause confusion.

When using infographics, pictures, video, or graphics, make sure they are absolutely essential to achieving the page’s goal. If they’re not, cut them. You can use them elsewhere (Thank You page, in email marketing, on blogs or pages).

Customer Centric Landing Pages

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. They’re asking “What am I supposed to look at?”

If your landing page is littered with graphics, it will confuse them. This includes going overboard with exotic background colors, text colors and fonts, and headline sizes. Keep it simple… white background with black text is still the best option because it’s easiest to read.

Entry Pop Ups

Pop up windows upon entry are, unfortunately, overused. Some sites will display the pop-up every time you refresh the page, visit a new page on the site, and every time you vist the landing page, even if you’ve already opted in. IT can be frustrating for your user, especially if they’re viewing your content on mobile.

Your better option is to use an exit pop-up. At this point, on a true landing page that you’ve driven traffic to, if they’re leaving, they’re gone. An exit pop-up is a last-ditch effort to salvage the lead. It can work fairly well, and will increase your leads significantly over time.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Website

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

SEO is the perfect tactic to optimize to drive free traffic to your website. While organic traffic is fantastic and can be created through optimizing web pages, this organic traffic can be amplified by using SEO extensions. Here Retaliate1st list our favorite SEO extensions to boost your organic traffic.

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

Google Tag Assistant

IF you are running your company’s SEO without help from a professional firm, or if you just want to check up on your SEO investment, Tag Assistant can help you verity that Adwords and Analytics are up and running properly. The best part about this extension is that with one click it lays out everything you need to see without digging around in the minuteau of Adwords (and it’s oft-lugubrious interface) or analytics.

Builtwith

Builtwith works with Google Chrome, and Is an excellent way to see what your competitors are up to by letting you know what they’re using to build their site. You can see

PageRank for Firefox

This is a great tool for evaluating other sites when it comes to building links, guest posting, forming joint ventures, etc. The best part is, you don’t have to dig at all – the site’s Page Rank is displayed right in the toolbar at the top of your browser.

Further SEO Extensions

Majestic SEO Backlink Analyizer

If linking building is part of your SEO strategy, you need to make sure those links are not coming from bad neighborhoods. Further, you want the best quality links possible to your site. You can check out anchor text, site reputation, as well as Page Rank and a few other key indicators.

Boomerang

This isn’t so much for SEO as it is a productivity tool. Boomerang for Gmail allows you to schedule emails to be sent later, schedule follow ups. IF you are dealing with multiple clients, and working with people in different time zones, this tool is a life saver. No more worrying that you’re emailing your Japanese clients at 4am Tokyo time… just schedule the emails to hit their offices during work hours. This can cut down on a lot of back and forth.

For any sales pro, follow ups are essential. Boomerang will do all of these for you.

Keywords Everywhere

This Chome extension can cut down on your keyword research time dramatically. When you search something in Google, it will display the volume of searches for this term and gives you the average cost per click for that keyword or phrase. This will help you cut out a lot of groundwork when searching for perfect keywords and phrases, and you’ll get a quick idea of what you’ll need to invest in Adwords to make them work for you.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Creative, Marketing, Social Media

3 Ways to Manage and Profit from Facebook Reviews

Facebook reviews are now driving e-commerce. Customers are always looking for reviews and validation from fellow customers before completing the purchase or the desired action. Any business must be smart enough to manage the Facebook reviews, and shrewd enough to use the positive reviews to amplify business. Here Retaliate1st list their tactics on amplifying your positive Facebook reviews.

3 Ways to Profit from Facebook Reviews

Facebook Comments Can Be Deleted

If you are receiving negative comments, you can either:

Respond to them (positively – fighting in your comments section will harm your reputation)

Delete them

The main advantage to getting a negative comment is that you can remove it and block the user. If it’s a legitimate bad review, you should respond.

If it’s a former employee, competitor, or just a whacko who loves to troll, then delete.

Reviews Can Not Be Deleted

Anything left in the actual review section of your Facebook cannot be deleted. This is done to protect the consumer, as every business would simply delete all non-positive reviews.

But, don’t fret, this is actually a good thing, especially if you have overwhelmingly positive reviews.

If you don’t, then ask your customers to review you on Facebook. Everyone and their mother (literally) has a Facebook account, so getting them to leave a review doesn’t take much action on their part. You should link them to your page to make it as easy as possible. Ethical bribes are ok in this situation, too.

The more positives you have, the less impact the negatives hold.

What do you do when someone drops a 1-star review plus negative text?

Respond to the review. Publicly invite them to contact you. You don’t have to admit mistakes. A simple, “We’re sorry to hear you are having an issue. Please contact us at 888-888-8888 and we’ll help you.”

Why Facebook Reviews Are Critical

It’s simple, direct, doesn’t admit that you’ve done something wrong, and most importantly, it shows other customers that when there’s an issue, you jump on solving it. No matter how web-savvy we become, there is still a pervading fear of being ripped off online by a business that takes our credit card payment and skips town.

Responding with an invitation to contact helps quell these fears.
What about if the negative review keeps on the offensive?

Continue to remain calm and invite them to resolve the issue with you. If they continue to push, they end up looking bad while you show yourself to be a trustworthy business that handles even the harshest of your critics with grace.

Cultivate More Reviews

The best thing you can do is cultivate as many reviews as possible. As discussed above, link your page in email to your customers and ask for a review.

Offer them a gift card, discount, free info, or something they’ll like in exchange for a review. Note: in exchange for a review, not a positive review. This is an important distinction with the FTC.

With most experts predicting that Facebook reviews will soon surpass Yelp as the go-to review site (Yelp’s bizarre strong-arm tactics are becoming well known to consumers, they were even parodied on South Park recently), now is a great time to start the review building process.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, SEM, Social Media, Website

Buying Facebook Ads Directly

Facebook is the great advertising platform of our time. Were once television ads and billboard ads were the go to platforms for advertisers, they have now lost ground to Facebook ads. Retaliate1st discuss the reasons why you should focus on this platform for your advertising.

Customers Can Buy from You Without Leaving Facebook

This is huge for both your business, where can sell directly to a warm audience that you’ve built a strong relationship with, and for Facebook, which can help businesses sell more products, buy more ads, and have the whole thing take place on Facebook’s platform, without having users click away from the social media giant.

It works by giving your customers the option to buy products in Facebook messenger. If they’ve already filled in their Name, address, phone number, etc. for their profile, all they have to do is click “pay.” If not, they can do so at point of purchase.

Payments will go through PayPal or Stripe. At this point, these are the only two usable payment platforms, and you can only sell in the U.S. However, both of these rules will likely change as the program grows.

If you’ve ever fretted about the transition your customers make between Facebook and your landing or sales pages, now you don’t have to worry. If you crafted a great ad or promoted post, your customer can now buy with one click.

How to Sell In Messenger

This will take some finesse. Facebook is allowing click from ads in the newsfeed to be sent directly to messenger now. This is a slow roll-out, but it will take off soon enough. Obviously, some customers will be put off by having their messenger blow up with ads, but it seems Facebook will allow consumers the ability to choose who they receive ad messages from.

Once there, your customer can chat with a “sales bot” or they can buy direct. And, in a further move toward utilizing similar buy-sharing options as Amazon, Facebook will allow your customer to send the ad copy to their friends if they need help deciding between multiple products. So, if your customer can’t decide between the wing-tips and the quarter-brogues, they can now share it with their friends.

This helps them take the plunge and make the purchase, and it exposed your products to an even larger pool of warm prospects.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, Social Media

Boosting Leads Through Twitter Ads

Facebook and Instagram get the most attention when it comes to social media pay per click advertising. But, don’t neglect Twitter; it can be a great source of new leads and sales.

If, you do it the right way…

What’s a Twitter Follower Worth

The first thing to figure out is what is a follower worth to you? “Follower” campaigns are the most popular, and cheapest ads to run on Twitter.

But, don’t blow your budget attracting followers until you run the numbers and figure out what a follower is worth. This can be tricky, as the metrics are not as helpful as they are on Facebook or Google. So, you’ll need to figure out the best method to track sales and legitimate leads that came directly from your followers.

This will look a lot like figuring out the lifetime value of a client, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. Try to plan for the long term when running follower campaigns, and not focusing so much on cost per click and trading clicks for dollars. In this case, the dollars will come later. If you can figure how many, you’ll know how much to invest.

Advantages to Twitter follower campaigns? Like Facebook, Twitter allows you to be very specific in your targeting – age, location, sex, interests, etc.

Disadvantages – if you don’t do the math first, you can end up overspending for followers that don’t buy from you.

Traditional Twitter Ads

You can also use Twitter ads to drive traffic and conversions.

The interface for ads is much like Facebook, so if you’ve used Facebook ads, you’ll have an advantage here. IF not, the program is not difficult to master. It’s a matter of targeting a very specific audience according to the parameters that bring you leads. Usually this is age, location, and interests.

You develop your creative, add a photo, and send users to yoru landing pages.

Alternatively, you can create a Lead Generation Card where users can sign up (opt-in) directly on their Twitter feed. This again comes down to choosing a stellar picture, and strong, benefit-rich headlines. This can be a more simple lead generation effort as well, since this is a one-step process.

Advantages – decent analytics, highly-targeted demographics are available for your ads.

Disadvantages – the main disadvantage is figuring out conversion rates and long-term value of followers, clicks, and leads. This will take tracking, but if you can figure out the sweet spot for your business, Twitter can provide a steady stream of leads and sales.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Content, Creative, Digital, Marketing, Mobile, Website

How To Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

Every page of your business website counts. Don’t waste one of the most important pages, the ‘Thank You’ page. Many businesses do this by leading buyers to a simple, near-blank page with little more than “Thank you for your order, check your email for the receipt.” If developed properly, the Thank You page can help you increase sales. It can also help gain social media followers, and build brand awareness. Wouldn’t you do anything to increase sales, so check out the Retaliate1st guide to increase sales.

5 Ways to Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

Link to Your Strongest Content

Adding links to blogs and articles related to their purchase is a great way to keep your customers on your site while they’re in a buying state of mind.

If your content is informative, but pulls them toward a sale, you will increase your sales just by driving “hot” traffic to these pages.
Plus, the extra views on these pages will help with Google’s rankings, so you win even if your customer doesn’t make a second purchase.

Show Off Your Testimonials

Listing your best reviews and testimonials on your thank you page helps in two ways:

It helps reassure your customer that they’ve made a safe purchase, so it decreases buyer’s remorse
It shows your customer that you’re a great company, and gets them excited to do business with you again

If you link to strong content (as in number 1) under your testimonials, you should see a spike in both page views and sales.

New Product Debut

Debut a New Product

Have something new that’s not on your site yet, or hasn’t been promoted heavily? Are you thinking of coming out with a new product or service? Show it to your customers while they’re still in a buyer’s mindset. If your product or service isn’t ready for sale, this is a great opportunity to encourage customers to sign up for a special mailing list. It’s a basic pre-sell, but it plays well on your Thank You pages because you can demonstrate value to someone who’s already convinced that you’re worthy of buying from.

Make New Friends

Thank you pages are excellent places to add members to your social media tribes. List your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest, and other social media accounts and encourage buyers to follow you. If you can give a discount or something free for following, you’ll dramatically increase engagement.

Discounts

Upselling on a thank you page is increased when you offer a “special” discount for customers. Tie it into your other products, specifically, and you’ll see an increase in sales.

October 8, 2016/by chris

Content, Creative, Digital, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media

3 Tips to Improve Your Instagram Photos

When it comes to marketing on Instagram, you can subscribe to a lot of theories on what works, but the one common thread among all marketers, and the research, is that your Instagram campaigns live and die with the quality of your Instagram photos.

Better Instagram photos = more views, more likes, more engagement and more sales.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at 3 ways to improve your marketing on Instagram, through better Instagram photos:

How To Improve Your Instagram Photos

Use Your Phone’s Native Camera App

Using your phone’s camera is a better option than using Instagram’s camera. This is especially true if you have a newer version of the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, both of which come with powerful cameras.

Why is your phone’s camera better than Instagram’s?

You can take photos without filters
You can edit photos much more easily, and much more quickly, in your phone’s native camera app and editing software
You can set your phone’s cam to take pics that are 640 x 640, making them perfect for Instagram without having to crop
Most phones have more powerful zoom, clearer pictures, and better lighting
The free, or near-free, photo editing apps on smart phones are actually pretty powerful, and can help you enhance lighting, focus, remove red-eye, and make your IG pictures clear and eye-catching

Interesting Instagram Photos Excel

Take Pictures of Interesting Things

This should be obvious, but we’ve all unfollowed a brand (or person) that insists on posting boring photos.
No matter what your product or service, there are opportunities to post photos of really dynamic content that will engage your followers.

Before and after pics work well for weight loss products, home improvements, design, graphics, and clothing stores.
Photos of your product being modeled are always a safe bet. Research shows that including a human face in a picture of a product increase views (and sales). Have great clothes you’re selling? Put it on a model that is a slightly idealized version of your customer and do a photo shoot. One shoot can give you a strong catalogue of content.
Cool places – if you are an adventure traveler, restaurant, or you sell lifestyle, pictures of nature, especially breathtaking views, always perform well on Instagram
Food – we all love to look at pictures of food. If the pictures are bright, clear, and the food is colorful. This should be a no-brainer for restaurants. But, next time you’re on Instagram, check out how many clothing and watch dealers use food in their photo shoots. Elegant coffee displays are the focus of a picture, but the watch on the wrist of the woman with her hand poised on the cup is the real draw.

Instagram Photos Of People Are Most Liked

Use Instagram Photos of People

This can be applied to using models, or taking pictures of your staff having fun, working, or doing interesting things.

Remember, Instagram is simply another marketing channel. No matter where you’re selling, people want to buy from people, not faceless corporations. This is why product images featuring faces do so well. It’s also why any marketer worth a damn will tell you to include pictures of your staff on your website’s About page. Put a face on your Instagram and your brand identification (and sales) will grow.

October 8, 2016/by chris

3 Ways to Convert New Leads Online

3 Tips To Increase Your Email Open Rates

How To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Personalization and Targeting

The Three Reasons Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Why Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

What’s the goal of your landing page?

Customer Centric Landing Pages

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

Further SEO Extensions

How To Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

5 Ways to Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

New Product Debut

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