In today”™s world, business owners have a unique opportunity to reach their target market affordably and effectively online. While television and radio advertising still have merit, there are novel and more cost-effective approaches to connect with your customers and gain new ones.
For example, you can run an advertisement on Facebook to gather email subscribers by offering a free, valuable gift. This gift can range from a weekly motivational message and a PDF file with strategies to increase your confidence to a free CD on guided meditation with a complimentary eBook.
To formulate your free offer to entice others to provide their contact information, identify a major concern in the lives of your target market. By choosing a specific problem and providing the exact solution through your free offer, you create that “aha” moment for your subscribers. You have just built rapport through your content. Now your customer base will have a positive association with your future messages, believing they will improve their lives or businesses.
By cultivating a relationship via useful information and methods, you become a trusted advice authority. Eventually, you can offer a product or service for sale through the same medium of email, perhaps using holiday coupons to make timely offers. After all, six to seven out of 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount they learned about through a marketing email in the prior week (35 percent) or month (33 percent), according to HubSpot.
More entrepreneurs should take advantage of this lucrative e-commerce trend, which combines the consumer glee of purchasing products and services that fulfill their needs with the convenience of online shopping. As an Experian report highlights, “e-mail coupons will prove even more valuable for marketers in the future.”
But, how you would set this up technologically or measure your progress? As opposed to aimlessly running an ad without monitoring the results, you can use certain benchmarks to ascertain your promotion”™s effectiveness.
Using the Facebook advertising example, you must determine the end goal of your promotion. Do you only want people to click on the advertisement, or to click and convert into a subscriber? Most marketers would like to convert people who click on their ads into subscribers, and Facebook understands this.
The social media giant can track your conversion rate for a slightly higher price. Simply put, your conversion rate is the number of people who provided their contact information divided by the amount of people who clicked on your ad.
If your goal is to get clicks on your ad, you can monitor the click-through rate on Facebook”™s Ads Manager. An attainable and realistic goal for your click-through rate is 4 to 6 percent over five to seven days. If the advertisement receives less than a 2 percent click-through rate ( less than 2 percent of people who see the ad click on it), change some element of its copy, image, or overall message. If your goal is website conversions, your target should be to convert 40 to 60 percent of the people who click the ad.
There are two ways to determine your conversion rate. You can have Facebook track it with their conversion tracking pixel or independently perform the simple calculation.
Obviously, if you are collecting email addresses, you have an email service provider such as iContact, Constant Contact, MailChimp or others. To calculate your conversion rate, look at the email list that shows the subscribers to the website you are promoting. Take the number of people on your list (the people who did what you wanted, they gave you their contact information) and divide it by the number of people who clicked on the advertisement. You have found your conversion rate without the use of a tracking pixel that can increase the overall cost of your ad.
As you accumulate subscribers, you continue to send them valuable information, periodically selling products or services during the year. This online ad and email strategy can enable you to tap into a flourishing digital marketing industry that the Wall Street Journal valued at $62 billion.
You understand the importance of connecting with your customers online and now you know how to create, measure and master your online advertisements. In 2016, give yourself the peace of mind that comes with earning a passive income by applying these strategies. Achieve the lifestyle of an entrepreneur who makes sales and gains customers while she or he sleeps.
Michael Guberti is a Fordham University student and social media and business blogger at Teenager Entrepreneur, the social media marketing and entrepreneurship training business he operates with his brother, Marc Guberti. He can be reached at michael@teenagerentrepreneur.com or at 914-722-6005.
