The 143 Day History of Link Whisper + Black Friday Special!

I launched Link Whisper to the world on July 8th, 2019, 143 days ago. Over the past 4 and a half months, a lot has happened with my new software business, and even more is planned for the future.  However,…

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How to Add Facebook Pixel to Your WordPress Website

New users often find it difficult to add a Facebook pixel to their WordPress website mainly because they don’t know where to start. Facebook pixel helps you optimize your Facebook ad campaigns by gathering information about your visitors and then generating an audience that is more relevant to your business.

In simpler words, Facebook Pixel helps you target your ads better and get better click-through rates and conversion rates.

There are two ways you can add Facebook Pixel to your WordPress website, manually and through a Facebook pixel plugin.

In this article, I will take you through both the methods and show you how you can add a Facebook pixel to your WordPress website.

How to Add Facebook Plugin Manually

When you add a Facebook Pixel manually, you just copy the pixel code and paste it on the header of your WordPress website.

To get started with this method, you need to create a Facebook Pixel ID first. If you haven’t created one, you can do that from here.

Once you’re on this page, click on the Get Started button.

You will be asked to enter your name and website.

Click Continue and then click Manually add pixel code to your website 

Once you move forward, you will see the Pixel code that you will have to copy and paste on your WordPress website’s header.

If you scroll down this page, you will see some more options to help you collect more information about your visitors.

There is also an option to test your code to see if it’s working properly or not.

Adding Facebook Pixel Plugin to Your WordPress Website Via a Plugin

Facebook pixel plugins give you more than just the ability to add the pixel code to your website; they also let you create custom audiences.

For this tutorial we will be using Pixel Caffeine, a popular Facebook pixel plugin, to add a pixel to your WordPress website.

Start by installing the plugin on your WordPress website.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you will see this page.

You can either start by entering your pixel ID or you can connect your Facebook account, in which case it will be easier to install the Pixel and you will get all the advanced features as well.

For this tutorial, we will use Facebook Connect. Once you allow the plugin to connect with your Facebook account, you will have to choose the ad account that you want to connect to.

Once you have selected the ad account, click on Apply to set up your Pixel.

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Now that you have installed the pixel, click on the Dashboard tab to track the activity on your Pixel.

You can also set up Custom Audiences and Conversion Events directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Final Words

Now that you know how to set up Facebook Pixel to your WordPress website, you will be able to filter out your audiences and better optimize your Facebook ads. Your ads will now be more targeted and will reach the right people which will improve their click-through and conversion rates.

If you think the plugin I used in this article is not the right one for you, you can also check out this list of the best WordPress Facebook pixel plugins to choose from.

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WordPress Helpdesk and Support Ticketing Plugins to Enhance Customer Experience

Setting up an efficient helpdesk system is a crucial aspect to success when running an eCommerce business. If you have a WordPress-WooCommerce online store, there are several options to help you integrate a helpdesk. When it comes to a helpdesk or support ticket plugin, the choice that you make is dependent on a lot of specific business requirements. In this article, we will discuss some of the important features to look for in WordPress helpdesk and support ticket plugins that will help improve customer experience. We will also explore the features of some of the best solutions.

Characteristics of a good WordPress Helpdesk solution

A good helpdesk solution should essentially help in better customer experience. You need to ensure that it offers a comprehensive set of features to help you provide exceptional customer experience. First, let us try and understand some of the advanced features of a superior WordPress helpdesk solution:

No restrictions in number of agents and tickets

When you check out some of the popular helpdesk solutions, you may see many of them have restrictions when it comes to the number of agents who can use it. This may not be a great feature when your business is going through a rapid  growth phase. Paying additional charges every time a new agent is added to the team may not be a great outcome for a small business. So, look for WordPress helpdesk and support solutions with no restrictions in terms of number of agents and tickets that can be handled at a time.

Simple interface to manage tickets

The support agents will be mostly accessing the helpdesk system through the admin backend. This interface needs to be smooth and user friendly for agents to help them respond quickly to customer queries. An Ajax-based interface will quickly load tickets without reloading the page. Agents should also be able to view tickets in custom order and to sort them quickly using varied filters. Basically, if support agents are able to handle the ticket dashboard smoothly, they will be able to respond to customers quicker as well.

eCommerce integration

If you are running an eCommerce store, you have to integrate the helpdesk system to your store to make the customer support process streamlined. With the help of a support system integrated with eCommerce, your customers will be able to raise queries by associating them with specific products. Similarly, the agents will be able to see the purchase history and other details of the customers they are interacting with. The customer experience on your web store will be much superior if you have a helpdesk system that smoothly integrates with the eCommerce platform.

Workflow automation

If you have a big store and a considerably large number of products, your customer support process too will be complex. There will be a set of actions that happens before a customer query is replied to and resolved. A good helpdesk system will help you automate such routine actions in your customer support workflow to make the process faster. Sending notifications, assigning to an agent or department, adding priority tags, etc.can be easily automated.

Self service and canned responses

Not all customers will have the patience and time to wait for a support agent to answer to their queries. A lot of your customers will be willing to find answers on their own. By integrating with a knowledge base, you will be able to provide a good self service option through your helpdesk. In fact, this will help reduce the number of queries and make the system more efficient. Similarly, predefined answer templates or canned responses can help agents respond faster to repetitive queries. You may have to look for knowledge base integration and canned responses feature before zeroing in on a WordPress helpdesk solution.

Analytics tools

Good analytics insights are key to improving any digital solution. Obviously a good analytics dashboard can help your customer support system be much more efficient. On the analytics dashboard, you should get a good view on the resolution rate, response times, individual agent performance, queries related to a specific product, etc. The WordPress helpdesk solution that you choose should have a good analytics dashboard to help you measure performance without hassles.

Best WordPress Helpdesk and Support Ticket plugins

Now, let us explore the features of some of the popular WordPress helpdesk and support ticket plugins.

WSDesk

WSDesk is one of the most popular WordPress helpdesk and support solutions that you can choose to enhance customer experience. It integrates well with eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. Even the basic version of WSDesk is feature rich with options to convert emails to tickets and unlimited agent profiles. Compared to other Saas-based solutions, WSDesk gives better control to store owners as it does not data in the cloud. The data related to your store and customers will be saved on your server itself and you need not depend on the service provider to access it.

Feature highlights

Here is a quick look at some of the standout features of WSDesk.

• Easy to manage support agent profiles
• Ajax-based interface for fast loading and sorting of tickets.
• Customize the contact forms.
• Triggers and automation to optimize your support workflow.
• Integration with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
• Canned responses for faster issue resolution.
• Back and restore settings and ticket data.
• Advanced shortcodes to customize certain functionality.
• GDPR compliant.

A single site subscription of WSDesk will cost you $89.

WooCommerce Help Scout

This plugin helps you integrate your WooCommerce store to Help Scout customer support solution. That means you will have to subscribe to a Help Scout subscription plan as well to make full use of this one. With the help of a shortcode, you will be able to place a Help Scout support form anywhere on your website. Moreover, it lets you initiate a conversation with any customer right from the order details page. This is a comprehensive solution that will help you manage your customer support much more efficiently than relying on multiple tools.

Feature highlights

Here are some of the exceptional features of Help Scout:

• Multichannel support through email and chat.
• Initiate targeted conversation with customers.
• Better collaboration of support agents with features like private notes, tagging, saved replies and collision detection.
• Automate actions to optimize workflow.
• Intuitive reporting features.

The single site subscription of the plugin has a price tag of $79. This is in addition to the Help Scout subscription.

Zendesk for WordPress

With the help of a free WordPress plugin, you will be able to integrate Zendesk support system to your blog or website. On your website or blog, you can display a Zendesk feedback tab that will let users search the knowledge base, chat with an agent or submit a ticket. Users registered to your website will be automatically signed in to Zendesk as well. You will be able to turn blog comments to tickets to respond to users promptly. Please note, you will have to subscribe to a plan of Zendesk to be able to use it.

Feature highlights

• Zendesk offers a range of advanced features to make your helpdesk system extremely robust.
• Multichannel support through email, mobile, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Multilingual admin interface with support for over 40 languages.
• Custom contact forms with conditional logic.
• Automation and triggered workflow to make your support system more efficient.
• Canned responses for quicker response to customers.
• Extensive analytics insights to improve customer experience.

WPHelpdesk

This plugin will help you focus on enhancing the customer experience on your site with an organized approach to customer support. WPHelpDesk has a robust filtering system that will help you prioritize support queries. Depending on the size of your team, you will be able to customize it to get absolute control over your support workflow. With the help of add-ons, you can easily integrate it with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

Feature highlights

Let us take a look at some of the features of WP Helpdesk that will help you improve your support process.

• Easy to configure
• Extensive customization options to mould the user interaction pattern.
• View ticket history of each customer to prioritize requests.
• Integration with eCommerce platforms.
• Collaboration between support agents.
• Suitable for businesses of all sizes.

The single site subscription of the basic version without add-ons will cost you $99.

WP Support Plus Responsive Ticket System

This is another WordPress plugin that will help you set up a customer support system for your business. It will let you set up a customer support system with unlimited tickets and agents. It even allows guest users to submit a ticket. The plugin is Ajax based and helps to make your customer support system extremely fast. It comes with a set of add-ons that allows you to extend the functionality and features. You can opt for the free version or one of the paid options that comes with dedicated support and multiple add- ons.

Feature highlights

Here are some of the notable features of this plugin.

• Import emails directly to your ticket system
• Notifications to different users on your helpdesk system.
• Set up rules to assign incoming tickets to specific agents.
• Integration with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
• Enhanced customer experience with knowledge base and canned replies.

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6 Steps to Create an Amazing Customer Experience Strategy

You may offer high-end products with the lowest price on the web, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee conversions or customer loyalty. There is a lot of competition out there, not just from Amazon but also smaller boutique sites that offer similar products.

Customer experience is what sets you apart. It is the sum of all interactions that a customer has with your business, including interactions before and after a sale. It can include how they research products on your site, how they complete their transaction, what happens when they receive their product, and so on.

Customer experience is one of the main factors that determine whether or not consumers will buy from your brand and become loyal customers.

In fact, a PwC survey found that 17% of U.S. consumers will walk away after just one bad experience. And 59% of U.S. consumers will walk away after several bad experiences even if they love the company or product.

This makes it crucial to set up a game plan to ensure that you deliver a positive and meaningful experience for your customers across every interaction. That’s why you need to have an effective strategy in place so you can take a more structured approach to enhancing customer experience.

In this post, you’ll discover six useful steps to create an amazing customer experience strategy. Let’s get started.

1: Have a Clear Understanding of Your Customers

Unless you thoroughly understand who your customers are, you’ll have a hard time figuring out how to deliver experiences that appeal to them. Without understanding the situations that your customers face, you won’t be able to empathize with them and provide them with viable solutions.

At the same time, it’s important to note that not all of your customers will experience the same issues or have the same pain points. So you need to start by creating accurate buyer personas, which are profiles that represent a common group of people.

You can include demographics data like age, interests, buying behaviors, job profile, etc. to clearly define the characteristics of each persona.

For an even more accurate picture of each persona, make sure you conduct surveys to understand your different types of customers. Use this data to build a customer experience strategy that effectively addresses the needs of all of your customers.

Make sure you maintain a record of all surveys and personas so every department can easily refer to them when needed. HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool simplifies this process. You can name the persona, choose an avatar, and fill out all the details relevant to it to create an attractive buyer persona. You can easily store surveys in a shared Google folder or Dropbox.

2: Map Out the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping is essential to get a visual overview of the customer’s interactions with your brand from start to finish. This helps you get an even better picture of the customer experience at every touch point, so you can identify their needs and perceptions.

Create an accurate customer journey map for each buyer persona to outline the key steps of their journey. How do they begin the journey and how do they normally interact with your brand? You can then outline their pain points, values, and motivations to better understand how you can enhance their experience at every touch point.

3: Collect Competitive Insights

Competitor research can help you discover what kind of customer experience your competitors are delivering. What can you learn from them and what can you do better? There are plenty of ways to collect competitive insights to enhance your customer experience strategy.

You can start by finding out where and how your competitors are getting their customers using tools like SpyFu. This gives you a detailed look at the organic and paid clicks your competitors are getting as well as their top keywords. These insights will help you understand user intent by identifying the top search terms people are using to find your competitors.

Additionally, the backlink data provides you with information about which websites are sending traffic to your competitors. You can try to replicate this strategy to attract your audience where they’re most likely to be.

You can further research your competitors’ customer experience strategy by going through the various channels where customers interact with their brand. This includes their website, social media, app (if they have one), and so on.

Get a feel for what it’s like to interact with the brand and make a note of any mistakes they might be making. See if there’s anything you can replicate or improve for your own strategy.

In addition, you can also conduct social media listening to see what people are saying about your competitors and the brand sentiment around their companies. What are the biggest complaints people seem to have about their products? What are they praising them for?

Tools like Mention and Sprout Social can help you with this aspect of competitor research.

4: Make Reachability and Customer Service a Priority

Communication is a major factor that influences the overall customer experience. You have to be available to your customers no matter what channel they choose to be on. Otherwise, you could miss valuable opportunities to engage with them.

For this, you have to find out which channels your customers are most active on and ensure that your brand is reachable on those channels.

The best way to get a clear and accurate picture of the performance of different channels is by using UTM parameters. Tag all of the links you share on different channels with unique UTM parameters and find out how those links are performing.

You can simplify the UTM creation and management processes by using tools like UTM.io. This tool lets you create UTM templates that you can easily reuse and customize for each channel. So you can maintain a uniform naming convention that’s much easier to keep track of.

Once you identify the top channels that your customers are active on, you can come up with a strategy to enhance customer experience on those channels. This will involve improving service convenience on those channels in addition to being reachable.

Get familiar with each of the top channels and understand how people are using them to communicate with your brand. What kind of improvements can you make to enhance the customer experience? What other channels do they want you to be present on?

Maybe you already have live chat support on your website, for instance. But people also expect chat support through social media. Or maybe you have people who expect 24/7 chat support, which may not always be a viable option for most businesses. In this case, you can also provide support through chatbots during non-working hours.

You can study customer behavior, reviews, and engagement to look for opportunities to make improvements. You can even ask them directly through surveys.

Cuyana provides convenient customer service by enabling customers to reach them through Facebook Messenger. They even provide customers with predefined questions to choose from, minimizing the need to type everything out.

5: Improve Purchase Convenience

The purchase experience is another major factor that influences the overall customer experience. Factors like how easy it is to find what they’re looking for, how seamless it is to navigate your site, how simple it is to complete their purchase, etc. will all play a role.

So it’s crucial to keep looking for opportunities to optimize your site or app to improve purchase convenience. Make it as easy as possible for people to complete their purchases.

The basic steps include:

1. Optimizing your search bar so it’s easy to find and use
2. Neatly sorting out your products into relevant categories
3. Improving page load speed
4. Providing secure and seamless checkout
5. Optimizing fonts, colors, and images to improve aesthetics

You can further include useful and clever tools, videos, or images to guide their purchases. Bellyroy does a great job of this by showing what kind of items you can fit inside their wallets.

6: Connect Emotionally with the Audience

How customers feel about your brand also influences their experiences. An emotionally connected customer is more likely to enjoy their interactions with your brand and therefore, have a better overall experience.

In fact, fully connected customers are 52% more valuable than customers who are just satisfied. They also have a high lifetime value and are more likely to advocate for the brand.

This makes it crucial to develop an emotional connection with your customers if you want to create an effective customer experience strategy. You need to come up with a plan to enhance their emotional connections at every touch point – right from marketing and sales to post-sales service.

Aside from better employee training and advocacy, you can also make improvements in the marketing aspect of your business. Switch from bland and pushy ads to more intimate and humanized marketing tactics such as micro-influencer marketing.

Micro-influencers are social media users who have some authority in their areas of interest. They are relatable to the audience because they are just like everyday consumers. As a result, they also have significant and highly-engaged following.

Influence.co even found that micro-influencers drive much better engagement than macro-influencers. The average engagement rate could range anywhere from 2.5% to 6% for influencers with 2000 to 100,000 followers. This rate drops gradually as the following size increases.

In other words, micro-influencers can drive relevant conversations around your brand and your products. So they can help you establish strong emotional connections between your brand and your target audience.

Have them present your product or services in a way that will resonate with their followers. They could share their experience using it, demonstrate how it solved a problem in their life, etc.

One of the most challenging steps is in identifying the best influencers to work with. You can simplify this process by using platforms like iFluenz. All you need to do is create your campaign and wait for the best-matching influencers to apply. So instead of conducting a grueling influencer search, you’ll have the most relevant influencers come to you.

Final Thoughts

These are the basic steps involved in creating an amazing customer experience strategy. But it doesn’t just end here. You also have to keep making improvements to your strategy based on analytics insights and customer feedback.

Listen to your customers, actively collect feedback, and look for opportunities to adapt your strategy according to the changing needs of your customers.

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Email Marketing Made Simple: How To Start & Run A Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment in all of online marketing. For every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect about a 3800% return.

And no, that wasn’t a typo.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Email marketing requires a combination of work and the right tools. Only you can put the work in.

For my tool, I’ll be using Constant Contact. They can build opt in forms, send email blasts, run email automations, and have super powerful list management tools.

All the better? You can try Constant Contact free for 60 days, no payment method required. You can use the trial to follow along in this guide and set up your own email marketing campaign.

Click here to try Constant Contact free for 60 days

Run your email marketing campaigns with Constant Contact

Benefits of Email Marketing

I’m a big believer in the power of email marketing. There are a few reasons for that.

1. Everyone Uses Email

Email is a fact of life. And whether your audience is old, young, or somewhere in the middle, it’s almost guaranteed that they use email to some extent.

An OptinMonster survey showed that 99% of people use email every single day. You can’t say that about any other communication channel.

Imagine it like this: You have a business where you can sell an item to 100 people. You have 100 potential buyers.

But what if you could change locations and have 10,000 potential buyers? The move might be a little inconvenient, but that’s a huge increase in the amount of potential income you can make.

You can make the exact same comparison with social media vs email. You could reach a fraction of your audience on social media (despite its hype, social media doesn’t encompass everyone; I’m a male in my mid-20s and despise social media). So you could reach some of your target demographic on social media.

Or you can reach 99% of people with email.

That’s a no brainer. No other communication channel is so prevalent (or so easy to market to).

2. You Control Your Traffic

As a guy who makes his living by getting visitors to a website, this is a big one for me. Email allows you to control your flow of traffic.

Social traffic can be hard to build (though Pinterest traffic may be an exception). Organic traffic leaves you 100% in the not-so-benevolent hands of Google. And with the ever-increasing trend of using featured snippets to steal clicks, I don’t think that trusting organic traffic is wise.

So what can you trust?

Your email list. They believed in your brand enough to sign up for your email list. If you did a good job on your lead magnet, these people already know and trust you. You’ve already established your value by giving them something. They don’t mind clicking a link you sent them as long as its relevant to their interests.

Which leads me to my next point…

3. Email Converts Well

Since your audience trusts you and since you’ve established value, you can expect pretty high conversions on email.

Joe Blow who started down the rabbit hole by searching about dolphins and somehow landed on your site? Nah.

But someone who you’ve demonstrated your value to? Someone who already knows your name, your brand, and trusts you?

I can tell you from the Niche Pursuits email campaigns that email converts well. It’s an audience of people who are familiar with you and know that you do good business. The conversions are awesome.

4. You Own The List No Matter What

This is by far my favorite thing about email marketing. Yes reaches everyone, yes you control it, and yes it converts.

But no matter what happens, you can always have your email list.

If the stock market goes down, if real estate goes bust, if you lose everything in a divorce, you still have your list.

You still have your audience.

An email list is the ultimate guarantee that you won’t have to suffer financial hardship again. You own it, you control it, and no one can take it away from you.

It’s the fruit of your labor. So let’s talk about how to use it.

How To Start An Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing starts with building an awesome list. This means that you’re going to have to use some kind of opt in form to generate interest for your list.

It doesn’t mean that you have to create annoying popups with pretty much zero value.

You know the type:

That opt in provides zero value to me. Of course I love adventure! That doesn’t mean I’ll get an ounce of worth out of their email list. 

You need to show your audience that you provide amazing content, that you’re trustworthy. We call this a “lead magnet”. It’s something to hook in your audience.

But how can we build a lead magnet without being spammy?

It’s easier than you think. 

Best Practices For Opt In Boxes:

• Use pop ups
• Offer something of value
• Make them relevant to what the reader is learning about
• Make it actionable
• A pop up within 10 seconds of a reader landing on a page is about right
• Use content upgrades as your bread and butter
• Use super lead magnets to build trust for high ticket items

Bad Practices For Opt In Boxes:

• Putting them in the sidebar (you won’t convert anyone!)
• Popping up too late
• Offering “tips, tricks, and hacks” or other unclear value
• Making a general opt in for your whole site

Converting Without Being Spammy

A good opt in box will help your audience achieve or get something. In internet marketing, we call this a “lead magnet”. Your readers like it, they want it, and they’re willing to give you an email address for it.

There are tons of strategies for developing lead magnets, but here are the two that work the best:

1. Offer your readers a bonus on an existing piece of content. In the olden days when Jesus walked the earth, these were often a PDF form of the post. There are better things to offer than a PDF. You want something actionable and easy for your readers to fall in love with. We’ll call this a “content upgrade”.
2. Offer your readers a super awesome, super amazing, super fantastic something that they would pay for. The good news is that they don’t have to pay for it; they can get it in their email address for free. These are best used if you have a funnel and sell higher-ticket items later on down the road. We’ll call this a “super lead magnet”.

Of the two of these, the content upgrade will be your staple. It’s the bread and butter of email marketing.

We’ll discuss how to build an awesome content upgrade and then talk about making a super lead magnet.

Quick Note: I’ll be using Constant Contact to build my email list. You can also use them to build your opt in boxes 🙂

Click here to get access to Constant Contact free for 60 days. No credit card required

Content Upgrades For The Win

A content upgrade is when you offer your readers something that’s “content plus”. If your page is about DIY craft ideas, then a content upgrade would be a video walkthrough for building home furniture (or whatever).

If you’re writing about how to catch big mouth bass, a content upgrade would be a free lure for bass.

The goal here is to take whatever your reader is learning about and upgrade it. Make it bigger, better, and more actionable. You want your content upgrades to be:

• Related to what the viewer is reading now
• Easy to consume (video, audio files, etc.)
• Actionable

The first step to making an awesome content upgrade is to make it related to whatever your viewer is already reading. You don’t have to make these on a post per post basis, but I think that you should at least have a different opt in for every category.

Category level opt ins help you boost your conversion rate and will allow you to segment your audience. This is a big help later when you’re sending out emails or selling products. You already know what each segment is interested in, so you can craft emails or products just for them.

It’s a bit more work on your part, but the payoff can be enormous. 

I found an amazing content upgrade on Healthline. I opened up an article about sweeteners that parents should watch out for. Here’s the opt in box I got:

This content upgrade is brilliant for a few reasons.

1. It is related to what I’m reading. I am curious about unhealthy sweeteners, Healthline gives me an option to take a mindful eating challenge
2. It’s easy! Look at the wording here. “Free”. “Our Nutrition team will show you how to create lasting, healthy eating habits“. Lasting, healthy habits for free? I’m all in.
3. It’s actionable. It’s a challenge: go on this journey with us for 21 days 

I can’t see their opt in rate for this, but I’m guessing that it’s pretty significant.

That’s a great opt in. What are the characteristics of a bad opt in?

I did a little digging and found a bad opt in. It didn’t take me long.

This is a bad opt in for a few reasons. First, you can see that it doesn’t offer me much of value.

A Roadie insider? What is that? Why would I want to be one?

The next things they offer me are “exclusive deals and discounts”. I don’t think I’m interested. I’m reading an article about how to tune a guitar. Odds are good that I already have a guitar, so I don’t need deals or discounts.

Second, they don’t offer anything actionable. Since this is an article about guitar tuning, an awesome content upgrade would be a video guide. It would be easy to consume, helpful. 

And third, this is unrelated to the content I’m consuming. Nothing here about being a better musician or tuning guitars better. I’ll pass, thanks.

The biggest problem with this opt in is that it doesn’t offer me much value. What does “deals and discounts” even mean? Is that a $10 off coupon once a blue moon? Or is it 50% off a $500 purchase? The difference between those two things is enormous. They need a better value proposition.

Here’s an opt in that is okay. It’s not great, but it doesn’t make me want to bleach my eyes:

The value proposition here is better: saving money on my next trip. That’s pretty appealing. I do love saving money.

But it doesn’t tell me how I’m saving money. Will I be spending less on airfare or will I be swapping a nice Airbnb for a hut in the wall?

It also doesn’t tell me how much I’ll be saving or what I’ll need to do to start saving. A better opt in might be “3 things to say to your airline to guarantee cheaper flights” or something like that.

It’s a fine opt in. But it’s pretty eh. With a clearer value proposition and more actionable content, this could be a killer.

So now let’s look at an amazing opt in:

Woah. Take a look at that copy.

I have no desire to be a profitable Youtube music star, but I opted in anyways. Let’s break this down:

1. It’s related to what I’m reading. I was checking out best apps to learn guitar. They know I want to play music, they know I have a technical inclination. I’d rather use my phone than go to an instructor. There are good odds that I’ve seen someone teaching guitar on Youtube and have thought that I’d like to be in their shoes. They know that I’m a “real world independent musician”.
2. It’s easy to consume (a free book, nice!) and has a super clear value for me. I could make between $4,077 and $22,573+ per month! Look at those specific numbers.
3. It’s very actionable. 5 steps to a profitable music career. What gets easier than that?
4. It has social proof. They show you that the book has 4.5/5 stars. Nice!

That’s an awesome content upgrade.

As mentioned before, you can build these types of content upgrades in Constant Contact. Try Constant Contact free for 60 days, no payment method required

Super Lead Magnets For High Ticket Items

Content upgrades are great at building your email list for pretty general purposes. You want direct traffic, you want affiliate sales, you have a small funnel.

But if you sell big ticket items?

You might need to build a little more trust with your audience. You need to show them that business with you is always a win for them. 

The easiest way to build trust and give amazing value is to give something away for free. But this can’t just be anything for free; it has to be something so cool, so awesome that someone would pay money for it.

These “super” lead magnets should be something that most people would pay in the range of $20-$100 to have… and you’re giving it away for free.

The best super lead magnet I could find was on Authority Hacker. They have a course called The Authority Site System that teaches you how to build a 4+ figures per month authority website (check out my Authority Site System review).

Their opt in process looks like this:

First they have a popup that offers relevant, actionable, easy-to-consume content:

And the free training they mention?

It’s an hour and a half long webinar that tells you step by step how to build one of these sites.

No hype, no fluff. It’s an hour and a half of pure value. They give you their strategies for building sites, proof that the methods work, and tell you how to replicate it on your site.

This free training alone is better than some online courses.

And I don’t know their numbers, but I’m going to guess that The Authority Site System sells like hotcakes.

That’s the power of a super lead magnet: you establish trust with your leads. And once they trust you, they won’t have a problem buying from you.

Since these are more difficult to make than a content upgrade, I recommend a super lead magnet if you’re looking at selling your own products. Super lead magnets work well with high ticket items that require a lot of trust beforehand.

Now that you have a strategy for your lead generation, let’s look at what to do once you have the email list.

How To Run An Email Marketing Campaign

The best way to run your email marketing campaign is to start with the end goal.

What is your ideal outcome?

Do you have a funnel where you want someone to buy or do you want to build the relationship? Are you trying to wish a happy birthday to the members of your list or are you planning a 7 email series to create customers?

Or maybe you want all of these things for different audiences. Maybe high ticket clients get a happy birthday and others get a welcome message when they join the email list.

No problem. You can do all of that.

The post Email Marketing Made Simple: How To Start & Run A Successful Email Marketing Campaign appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

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How To Build An Email List [3 Steps To Building, Monetizing, & Maintaining Your List]

The money is in the list. Email marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to grow your business. Once you’re inside the inbox, you have an enormous amount of leverage with your audience. You’ve built up trust. And studies…

The post How To Build An Email List [3 Steps To Building, Monetizing, & Maintaining Your List] appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

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Constant Contact Review: Build Your Brand With Email Marketing [And More]

Email marketing is the new black.

Studies show that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you get a whopping $38 in return.

But your mileage may vary depending on your email marketing platform. In this Constant Contact review, we’re going to look at how much power Constant Contact gives, how much it can automate your work, and whether it’s worth the price.

And of course, we’ll see how it compares to other email marketing tools.

Click here to follow along in my review with a 60 day credit card free trial

Try Constant Contact free with no credit card for 60 days

• Ease of Use - 100
• Email Features - 95
• List Management - 100
• Branding Options - 100
• Price - 95

98

Summary

Constant Contact provides a suite of tools, including email marketing, to help you build your brand. It’s easy to use, it’s powerful, and they offer a 60 day, no credit card trial to test their software out. Click here to try Constant Contact free for 60 days, no payment method required.

Pros

• Super powerful segmentation and tag features
• Automation is super easy to use
• You get stock photos
• Easy integrations with lead gen and ad software
• Offers much more than email marketing

Cons

• Funnel building could be a bit easier (but this won’t affect 95%+ of users, so it’s a minor gripe)

Constant Contact Pros

Here are some things that Constant Contact does very well:

Super Segmentation & Tagging System

One of my favorite things about Constant Contact is that their tagging and segmentation systems are on point.

There are two ways to segment your list:

1. At the opt in level, you can offer differing lead magnets to figure out what your list is attracted to. This helps you know what your audience wants.
2. At the list level, you can see how your subscribers are behaving when they get your emails. This helps you know what your audience is doing.

Constant Contact does a great job of helping you figure out what your audience is doing. With this info you can try to boost your subscriber engagement, reward or offer more to your raving fans, and keep track of everyone in the middle.

I love the list segmentation in Constant Contact.

Free Stock Photos

This isn’t a make or break feature, but it’s a super nice add on. Constant Contact can provide you with free stock photos to use in your email marketing campaigns.

Considering that most stock photo services will run you near $100+ per month, Constant Contact more than pays for itself with this feature alone.

Powerful Tools To Keep You In Front Of Your List

Constant Contact does email marketing, but it’s more than an email marketing software. True to the name, this software’s goal is to keep you in constant contact with your customer base. 

Constant Contact has email marketing and I recommend that you use it. But it also integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads. You can set up and run your campaigns from the Constant Contact dashboard. 

If you don’t have a website (or have a site run by Wix, Weebly, or other site builders), then Constant Contact has a cool solution for you too. They offer a free website builder using drag and drop software.

It’s not as powerful as a WordPress site with something like Elementor, but you know how the old saying goes:

It’s better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

All in all, Constant Contact offers a ton of tools to keep you in front of your list at all times. It’s more than email marketing. It’s branding.

Constant Contact Cons

Now let’s talk about what Constant Contact could do better. I could only find 1 (minor) gripe:

Email Sequencing Could Be A Bit More Intuitive

The automation works great with Constant Contact, but there’s not a super simple way to build massive funnels for your audience.

That’s not to say you can’t do it: you can build amazing funnels using segmentation and trigger settings. But there’s no super easy way to do it.

That said, this will not affect 95%+ of people who do email marketing. You can set up sequences, you can build email automation for subscribers. If you don’t have your own products, I doubt you’ll ever need any sort of email funnel.

So it’s a minor gripe and I doubt it will affect you at all, but there it is.

Overall, Constant Contact is a super powerful tool with amazing branding features. I don’t have any serious problems with it.

Try Constant Contact free for 60 days – no credit card required.

Build stronger brands with Constant Contact

Constant Contact Review

Let’s take a look at the Constant Contact platform. I’ll be using the trial version of Constant Contact since they don’t restrict any features for trial users.

Let’s get started.

Getting Started With Constant Contact

I’m the first to admit that I’m not the best with tech. I appreciate that Constant Contact makes it pretty easy to get started with your emails. Once you give them your email address and say that you want to start, they get some info about you:

If you’re doing this step during business hours, they have a chat box where you can talk with a support rep on the spot.

Once you answer these first few questions, you’re set up and ready to go. Time to jump in to the dashboard.

Constant Contact Dashboard

The dashboard is the first thing you’ll see when you log in to Constant Contact. It looks like this:

I’m a pretty big fan of this dashboard. For one, it’s allows you to get to the most important stuff at a glance. And I appreciate the shortcuts that Constant Contact puts up here.

As you advance more in your email marketing, your dashboard is still relevant. You can create new automations, check statistics, make new emails, or get help and coaching in a few clicks.

I like how everything is easy to get to and that this is a good dashboard for beginners or pros.

So let’s look at the most important thing about Constant Contact: creating emails.

Creating Emails

There are a ton of ways to get to the email creation screen. I’m going to click the big honking box that says “Create an Email“. Constant Contact will give you a pretty wide range of templates to choose from. I’m going to select the first one.

After you select your template, you get a very simple email editor tool.

The editor is off to the left side and the email takes up the middle of the screen.

You can drag and drop elements to build an email:

You can select any element on the email and edit or move it somewhere else. If you click an element on the email, you get an editing menu off to the right. You can move the element, open settings, or click a neat little lightning bolt…

When you click that little lightning bolt, you open up options to use dynamic content.

Dynamic content is super powerful and I’m thrilled that Constant Contact has it. Dynamic content shows customized content based off of segmentation for your audience. So you could show them their city name, their business niche, or how you met. 

You can insert any custom values into the dynamic content. This makes your emails super personal, increases response rate, and helps build that relationship with your list.

One downside is that you have to be in the Email Plus plan to get access to dynamic content:

You’ll need to be in a higher plan to get access to dynamic content. But most of the people who have super advanced segmentation will already be trending towards higher plans.

Once you have your emails set up, you click Continue and get to the next screen. You get a lot of options here.

You can set the campaign title, tell Constant Contact what lists you want this email going to, and the subject line that you want for your email:

Further down the page, you get some sats in regards to open rate, click rate, deliveries, bounces, and other metrics.

And then at the bottom of the page, you get some additional info about click through rates and stats.

Now that we’ve taken a look at composing emails, let’s look at automating them.

Automation

Adding an automation is pretty easy with Constant Contact. You go to Campaigns on the header menu and then click Create. You’ll get a little popup and you want to select Email Automations:

You’ll get a few options you can choose from: a welcome email, a birthday email, an anniversary email, or building your own automation.

I recommend that each subscriber gets a welcome email, but I’m going to build my own automation for this example.

First you select your trigger. What event starts the automation? You can choose from link clicks, email opens, and subscribers joining a list. If you’re building your automation from the ground up and wait it to be something of a funnel, choose the “When contacts join a list” trigger. 

And then you specify the list:

And then you build your campaign like normal. You create your emails, specify how long subscribers wait between each email, and voila.

The campaign creation screen looks like this:

All in all, I’m a big fan of how Constant Contact’s campaign creation looks. It’s simple to build, easy to follow, and makes intuitive sense. 

They don’t allow you to create massive funnels by specifying what to do if a subscriber doesn’t click, for example. But you can make your own “funnel” by segmenting your subscribers who don’t click, or open, or whatever.

It’s a bit more manual, but the process works just fine. Because segmenting with Constant Contact couldn’t be easier. The list management is super powerful:

Lists & Contacts With Constant Contact

There are a couple of ways to get to your lists and contacts with Constant Contact. From the dashboard, you can click Simple Contact Management. From any screen, you can click on Contacts. Either one will get you to where we’re going:

The Contacts screen has 4 sections you can look at: contacts, segments, reports, and activity.

And now we start getting into the true power of Constant Contact: list management. Constant Contact has a great system for segmenting your audience, adding tags, and knowing what your audience is interested in.

The Contacts tab is easy to navigate and helpful. The right side of the screen has a list of a few of your contacts. The left side shows your email lists and any tags you have:

I’m a big fan of Constant Contact’s list segmentation. If you go into the Segments area, you get the option to create different segments for your audience. 

I can’t recommend segmentation enough. You’ll get better opt in rates, convert more leads to sales, and develop more trust with your audience. With proper segmentation, you can help your audience get what they want.

One way to segment is to do it with your opt in. A DIY site might have one segment for crafts and another for carpentry.

But Constant Contact allows you to take that to the next level. You can segment your already-existing audience to get the most out of the list you already have. I love how I can set certain requirements for my segmentation:

In less than a minute, I set up a segmentation for my subscribers who were “losing interest”. These subscribers will have not opened any of my last 5 emails to them.

There are a lot of settings here and I was very impressed at what all I could do. 

And then we come to reporting for your contacts. I like the reporting sections pretty good. You can see your contact growth, get a nice graph, and can see the growth source.

I’m very fond of being able to see the growth source at a glance. That’s a great way to get a bird’s eye view of what is and isn’t working for you and your list. If you want more detailed reporting stats, Constant Contact also has a dedicated section for reports.

Other Features In Constant Contact

I’m very impressed at what all Constant Contact offers. We’ve already hit a lot of the most important aspects, but there’s a lot that we haven’t discussed:

Not all of this is necessary for everyone so we won’t spend as much time here. But here is a highlight of many of the other features you get with Constant Contact:

• Sign-up Forms: I recommend that people use a dedicated lead generation software for this. I like OptinMonster and Convert Pro. But neither of these tools are necessary; Constant Contact can build lead gen for you. They impressed me too: they can do regular sign up forms, but also stuff like pop up boxes. Very cool.
• Library: This is one thing I love about Constant Contact. All subscriptions get access to free stock photos to use in your emails. Stock photo subscription services are pricey, so this is an awesome feature that I’m thrilled about. You can also upload your own photos and use those in emails. All in all, Constant Contact gets top marks for including stock pictures in their plans.
• Social: The social tab allows you to upload and publish content to your social media accounts inside of the Constant Contact dashboard. Constant Contact allows you to connect Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook/Google accounts to run ads and build your list. This is a super cool feature inside of Constant Contact
• Integrations: About what you’d expect here. This is where you integrate your account with different apps like Facebook, your lead gen software, etc. Pretty standard stuff, but I will admit that there are a lot of integrations you can make here.
• Website: And here we get to a super unique feature. The Website tab allows you to create your own website for free using a drag and drop builder. I don’t think I’ve seen this feature in other comparable tools, so it’s pretty neat to see here. I would still stick to WordPress, but the option is here if you want to save a little bit of cash.

Overall, I’m very impressed with Constant Contact. They do a great job of allowing their brand to be more than just email marketing. 

Constant Contact helps you to be in constant contact with your possible customers. The ability to create your own opt ins, publish high quality pictures, run social ads from the dashboard, and make your own website makes this more than just an email marketing software.

Constant Contact is about keeping your brand in front of your customers at all times. There’s never a moment when your ideal lead, buyer, or visitor won’t be seeing you. By providing access to more avenues of getting to your customer, Constant Contact allows you to build strong branding.

My favorite thing about Constant Contact is that it’s more than just email marketing. It’s branding.

Try Constant Contact free for 60 days – no credit card required.

Build stronger brands with Constant Contact

Constant Contact Price

Now let’s talk about the all-important pricing. Constant Contact allows you to have a 60 day free trial where they don’t require a credit card. After that, they offer 2 plans: Email and Email Plus. The pricing is based off of how many email subscribers you have and I will be giving the prices for 0-500 subscribers.

Let’s talk about all of your options here.

Constant Contact Free Trial

The free trial lasts for 60 days and doesn’t require you to input a credit card. You get access to most account features with this plan, but you’ll be missing a few things.

You get all the integrations, list management features like segmentation and tagging, all the email templates, the website builder, and access to the awesome chat service.

You don’t get full automation powers or the lead generation stuff like opt in boxes or pop ups.

Considering that the trial lasts for 60 days and doesn’t require a payment method to get started, there’s plenty for you to get a test run before you buy.

Constant Contact Email Plan

Constant Contact’s email plan starts at $20 per month. It’s pretty comprehensive: you get everything in the free trial plus a few extra features.

You’ll get some opt in features that aren’t available in the free trial. These opt ins aren’t perfect and I recommend something like OptinMonster or Convert Pro. But you get access to popups that have Constant Contact branding and aren’t super customizable.

You can also start automations for welcome emails, birthdays, and special events. You don’t get access to full automation power like email sequences or building funnels, but there’s enough here to make this plan worth your while. It’s still packed with tons of helpful tools for your branding overall.

Constant Contact Email Plus Plan

The Email Plus plan starts at $45 per month. It includes everything in the Email plan, but helps add rocket fuel to your email marketing efforts.

Email Plus unlocks several cool features that you can take advantage of. You get access to very customizable opt in forms. This includes inline content and popups. You can customize the open time on popups, remove the Constant Contact branding, and set an open time.

You can also start using automated email sequences. This would include things like funnels to your subscribers, follow up messages, and so on. 

Plus will allow you to split test your headlines, use dynamic content that we discussed earlier, add surveys or polls, and more. It’s a powerful email marketing platform and this plan will include pretty much anything that you could want in email marketing software.

Best of all is that you can try it for free. Click here to use Constant Contact free for 60 days, no payment method required.

Use Constant Contact free for 60 days to build your brand

Who Is Constant Contact Best For?

Now let’s discuss who Constant Contact will serve the best. We’ll cover a few situations you might find yourself in and see if Constant Contact is a good fit for you.

The Beginner Email Marketer

I’m going to put you in this camp if your online business is making less than $1,000 per month. You’re still looking for cost-effective tools and may not be sure about this whole internet marketing thing.

No worries. I get it. Everyone started there.

The question you’re asking might sound like this: Is Constant Contact going to provide me with the highest ROI for my email marketing campaigns?

I think it can. Constant Contact provides a lot more power than other tools and does a great job of helping you get your branding out there. If you want to save some cash, you can use their lead generation service to keep you from having to buy something like OptinMonster or Convert Pro.

You can use Constant Contact’s stock images to make your brand look high quality, beautiful, trustworthy.

It isn’t the least expensive option. But it gives you 2 free months to learn the ropes and provides you with super high quality tools in the process.

I think that Constant Contact works fine for a beginner email marketer.

The Complex List Owner

Your list is tougher to crack than the world’s largest diamond. It’s got odds and ends, subscribers here, subscribers there, and no sense to any of it.

I’m putting you here if your list has (or needs) serious segmentation. Maybe you offered too many lead magnets on your site and now you can’t figure out what the majority of your list wants. Maybe your open rates and plummeting and engagement is taking a nosedive. 

Whatever the cause, I think that you’re right in Constant Contact’s ballpark. 

I love the list segmentation and tagging features inside of Constant Contact. Your ability to figure out what is and isn’t engaging your audience can be mind blowing. This whole software is about keeping you in front of your subscribers’ minds and staying there.

You can segment those who are responding and give them a special “Thank you”. You can find those who aren’t opening your emails and send them some awesome content to figure out what they want.

Constant Contact has amazing segmentation and tagging features.

The Internet Marketing Guru (And Mad Funnel Builder)

Do your funnels look like crazy spaghetti? Could you turn your email sequences into a maze for grown adults and make a ton of money?

You might be an internet marketing guru and a mad funnel builder. You’ve been tried and split tested. You earn a lot of money from the internet and spend your time making people jealous on Instagram.

How does Constant Contact perform for you?

I think you’ll find the segmentation and tagging systems top notch. As said before, Constant Contact’s list management features are great at helping you boost engagement and earnings.

Constant Contact’s real strength is that it is an awesome tool for keeping your brand in front of your visitors. The integrations with Facebook/Instagram, Facebook Ads, and Google ads are amazing. Those integrations represent a significant boost to your branding capabilities.

The only place you might find a little lacking is the email sequencing. Constant Contact doesn’t have a super fluid interface for building email funnels, but it can be done without looking like spaghetti.

Building those long, powerful campaigns just takes a bit more leg work.

Growing Your Brand

Constant Contact is more than an email marketing tool. It’s a branding software.

It helps you get into the inbox, market how your subscribers want, and grow your branding through emails or ad campaigns.

Best of all is that you can try it for free before buying.

Click here to use Constant Contact free for 60 days, no payment method required.

Use Constant Contact free for 60 days to build your brand

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