Julians Hints, Tips and Hacks

Here’s the problem…

People are busy.
People are lazy.
People don’t care about you (at least not as much as you think they do).

It’s harsh but true!

Your prospects are NOT taking the time to read your sales letter, email or landing page copy as thoroughly as you think they are.

FACT: people are skimmers

They glance at a page and decide whether or not to read it.

They half-read the first sentence and decide whether or not to continue.

In today’s modern world of shortened attention spans how are we, as marketers, meant to get our message across to people?

The answer…

…formatting.

That’s right. The way you format your text has never been more important to the success of your marketing.

More specifically, the size and ‘bold-ness’ of your text can make or break you – and most people are totally disregarding both of them!

Here’s how most people read what you put in front of them:

• They read what’s big and bold
• They actively avoid large paragraphs and small text

You know it’s true – because YOU do it too!

(you’re probably doing it right now!)

And you probably read that line above because it’s a little bigger than the rest of the text and is italic, so it stands out…

If we accept that people will skim over our message, then we need to make sure our marketing appeals to them.

What does that mean?

You need to make your KEY MESSAGES stand out by:

• Bolding
• Underlining
• Changing Colour
• Increasing Font Size
• Capitalisation
• Italics
• Bullets/Numbered Lists
• Boxes/Circles
• Shading/Background Color

Your marketing WILL be skim read.

Prepare for it. Embrace it. Compare these two paragraphs:

 

You can skim read the second paragraph and get the message – the Profit Accelerator comes with a Double Your Money guarantee.

But there’s NO WAY people would get the same message, that’s using the same words, from the first paragraph.

All because the formatting is not suited to the ‘skimmers’.

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How to implement this properly:

There’s a simple 3-step process you can follow to get this right in your marketing.

Step 1:
Copy and paste your email/sales letter/landing page into a Word document and make it all the same font, size and plain.

Step 2:
Highlight, bold, underline or capitalise ONLY the words and phrases that convey your main point, benefits and offer.

Step 3:
DELETE the rest of the text.

If the text you have left would still work on its own – you’re on to a winner.
If not, go back to the drawing board and enhance what you MUST convey to the reader. Don’t be afraid to enhance entire sentences if that’s what’s necessary.

Too many individual words bolded up is a recipe for confusing the reader with too much ‘visual noise’.

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So there you have it.

Formatting matters. A lot.

And now that you know, make sure the next time you write ANYTHING to your prospects to make the key points CAPITALISED, large point size, colour,  bold, italics, even underlined.

As long as they STAND OUT!

Royal Mail door drops with leaflets can be very effective for companies that provide products and especially services for homeowners – home maintenance, garden maintenance, restaurants etc etc. I am sure you will know yourself if door drop leaflets is suitable to target your ideal customers.

But how do you go about it?

Well, Chris Bailey from Bailey’ Floor Care in the West Midlands has created a fantastic guide for the Entrepreneurs Circle on the whole process of getting door drop leaflets in the hands of your ideal prospects and customers.

• How to track your key numbers and return on investment
• Leaflet design – how less is more
• Repetition – you need a consistent campaign – not a one hit
• Use Royal Mail Door Drops to deliver – avoid the leaflet delivery cowboys
• How to get your Royal Mail door drops for just £28/1000 compared to the regular £60+/1000

This powerful content is exclusive to Entrepreneurs Circle and here is a link to a quick screen share video showing you how to find this content in the Entrepreneurs Circle Vault.

If you are not a member then here is a tip for you – you can still access this content – simply take up a free 3 month bursary to the Entrepreneurs Circle and you can access this content and all the rest of the training and resources during your 3-month membership. Click here to claim your free 3-month membership.

If you have any questions then feel free to get in touch.

Asking your email list subscribers to unsubscribe from your email lists may at first seem counter-intuitive. After all, it feels good to see that you have a big email list – right? But long term it makes perfect sense to ask people to unsubscribe.

Back when I started email marketing in the 1990’s having a large email list and blasting out emails made perfect sense. But times have changed.

1. There are more companies sending consumers emails – every company these days has a list and email marketing is seen as easy and “free”.
2. As consumers are receiving more and more e-mails, so there is more noise in everyone’s inbox and so consumers have become less engaged and responsive to emails – especially to the blatant “buy my stuff” emails.
3. ISP’s such as Hotmail, Gmail, Office 365 etc etc have got much smarter. They know who is and who isn’t opening and responding to our emails.

So we know that the ISP’s can measure how engaged our email list is with our emails. So if you have a huge email list where say only 25% of that list are engaging ie opening the emails, clicking links and replying and you are regularly blasting out emails then the ISP’s will know this. And having a list with say 75% non-engagement will lower your quality score as a sender with the ISP’s. As a result, more and more of your engaged email contacts will end up in the spam folders. So I hope you can see how damaging it is to keep hold of old non-responsive email contacts for the sake of the vanity of having a large email list.

There are many list hygiene actions you can take. Check out my other post. But an easy one to implement in your email sending platform, be it Infusionsoft, Keap, MailChimp, Constant Contact etc is to regularly ask your subscribers to unsubscribe if they are no longer interested in receiving your emails.

Email Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

Request your free copy of the Entrepreneurs Circle LinkedIn Lead generation Guide for B2B Businesses.

 

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Here is a great tip I just learnt from one of my clients who uses this to feed leads to his sales team.

This is how he gets B2B sales leads from Google My Business.

He uses a tool called OutScraper.

So for instance. If you are looking to target painter and decorators in Manchester. In Outscraper, search for “painter” and “decorators” and “Manchester”.

You can then download a spreadsheet with all the contact details that are available from the GoogleMyBusiness listing. Now, the more active and qualified leads are more likely to have a number of reviews.

So then you or you salesperson can do a little more research to find the company owner etc and follow up.

I thought this was a killer lead generation tip. If you would like to discuss how you could use this in your business, schedule a 15 minute Discovery call.