What Is a Marketing Plan

 No matter how much you stick to a plan, things go wrong. As the famous quote by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower goes: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

When it comes to ecommerce, consumer trends shift, circumstances change, and initial experiments don’t always go as planned. All of these things impact your marketing plan. 

Research shows that marketers who proactively write a marketing plan are 356% more likely to report success. So, what does a realistic ecommerce marketing plan look like? And how do you handle unexpected obstacles and overestimations that threaten your company’s marketing strategy? This guide shares the answers.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is the strategy a business uses to get its products or services in front of its target customer. It includes who the target market is, the channels used to reach them, and the messaging that will help the business sell its products. 

The purpose of a marketing plan isn’t to create a step-by-step, never-fail manual. Rather, it’s a roadmap to help you accomplish the best-case scenario, while also maintaining realistic expectations for your marketing initiatives and establishing backup plans if something doesn’t work.

Marketing plan vs. business plan

A business plan paints a bigger picture of how you plan to run your business. It includes a mission statement, products you’ll launch, and market research. A marketing plan, on the other hand, is a specific document that details how you plan to achieve these wider goals through marketing. 

Marketing plan vs marketing strategy

An overarching marketing strategy details how marketing will drive business results. A marketing plan is the route you’ll use to get there. It’s more specific than a strategy and includes a practical roadmap on how you’ll put your marketing activities into play. 

Creating your own marketing plan is no small job. You put hours into customer and competitor research to find the channels likely to have the biggest impact on your marketing goals. You can check out marketing plan examples, but when it comes to creating your own, you can save time with a template.

Types of marketing plans

Digital marketing plan

A digital marketing plan is a specific type of marketing plan that revolves solely around online channels like social media, email, and search engines. It doesn’t include offline channels like billboards or radio ads.

Social media marketing plan

A social media marketing plan focuses specifically on how a business will use social media to reach its target market. It gives you a framework of which channels you’ll use, the types of content you’ll create, whether you’ll invest in social media ads, and how you’ll drive product sales. This can take place either through your online store or a social media storefront such as Facebook and Instagram Shops.

Content marketing plan 

A content marketing plan details how you’ll produce content that turns people into paying customers. This can span multiple formats, including an email newsletter, infographics, product documentation, and user-generated content (such as social media posts). 

Alongside the more traditional elements of a marketing plan, a content-marketing-specific strategy would include:

• Keywords you plan to target
• Who you’ll use to create the content (e.g., freelancers or in-house marketers)
• How you’ll promote and repurpose your content

Offline marketing plan

An offline marketing plan details how a business will reach its target market without using digital channels. This might include billboards, radio ads, direct mail, event sponsorships, and outdoor advertising. 

How to write a marketing plan

Detail your unique value proposition

Outline your buyer personas

Run a SWOT analysis

Detail product features and benefits

Set key performance indicators

Outline your marketing funnel

Define your marketing channels

Decide on your content formats

Plan your marketing resources

Create a measurement and optimization plan

Detail your unique value proposition

A unique value proposition underlines your entire marketing plan. Regardless of the channels and formats you plan to use, consistency is key. Mixed messages on what you sell and what your brand stands for will only confuse potential customers.

A simple way to refine your messaging is to focus on your unique selling point. Costco, for example, is cheaper than its competitors. Harper Wilde’s products are comfier than any other bra retailer. Find the marketing channels each retailer uses and you’ll see messaging centered around its adjective.

Consult your customers if you’re unsure what your value proposition adjective should be. Research is the biggest part of any copywriting process. Survey people who’ve already bought from you, run an Instagram poll to discover why people follow your brand, and see where your competitors’ weaknesses lie. Look for adjectives that crop up frequently during the process.

What overarching goal are you trying to accomplish with the business? Why does it exist? Summarize it in one sentence, and you’ll have a mission statement to inform everything you do, which includes your marketing strategies.

Outline your buyer personas

Going overboard with assumptions is a common mistake among marketers. The end result is a marketing plan that doesn’t actually result in revenue.

While data won’t give you a foolproof plan, every assumption is one more bit of uncertainty you’re folding into your marketing goals. If an amazing plan has a 40% chance of holding up to real-world scenarios, one without much rigor—and lots of assumptions—might hold up 10% of the time.

Consult your customer segments and buyer personas to get as much information as you can about the person buying your products, such as: 

• Demographic data (location, age, and income level) 
• Interests, goals, and challenges 
• Channels they use to discover new products

Be careful not to confuse this with your target audience. Children would be the target audience of a toy brand; parents are the buyer persona. The latter is who you’ll be reaching out to with your marketing plan. 

Run a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis helps uncover your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats relative to your competitors. It’s useful to include one as part of your marketing plan because it can help anticipate problems you might encounter, make more data-driven decisions, and spot areas where you can get ahead of your competitors. 

Dive deep into the data you already have about your customer base by investigating marketing analytics, social media audiences, and customer surveys. It reiterates who you’re trying to reach—and more importantly, the triggers that would make them buy your product over a competitor’s.

Remind yourself of your unique selling proposition (USP) throughout this process. Tailor your marketing plan around key takeaways from these. 

Detail product features and benefits

Include any special features, competitive advantages, or customer favorites your marketing plan will lean on.

You could have the best mattress in the world—one made with 100 springs and cotton stitching, vigorously tested by sleep experts. But you’d struggle to market it if you lean too heavily on product features. A customer cares more about getting a peaceful night’s sleep than detailed product specifications.

“Every great marketing plan needs one thing first: a product that is 10 times better than the next,” says Nick Saltarelli, co-founder of Mid-Day Squares. “Once you have that, marketing is about deep human connections.”

Nick says, “It felt obvious that there was a sweet spot somewhere in between: people who wanted to follow along, and a true behind-the-scenes look into building a massive chocolate business from the ground up.”

As a result, the Mid-Day Squares marketing plan doesn’t prioritize product promotion. The brand instead “focuses on getting people to fall in love with us, the founders, to scale the human connection,” Nick says.

Set key performance indicators

What are you trying to achieve with your marketing plan? Create both short- and long-term business goals that relate to financial metrics like revenue growth, retention, or new customers.

Most marketers measure success using return on investment (ROI)—the revenue you expect to generate after spending your marketing budget. It’s every marketer’s dream to get $100,000 in sales from $1,000 in marketing spend. While that isn’t the most realistic expectation, knowing your target ROI will prevent overspending. If your ROI is hurtling beyond your predictions, you can better allocate that budget to be spent elsewhere.

But there’s more to marketing measurement than dollar returns. Revenue isn’t always the end goal. Brand awareness, website traffic, and social media followers are short-term marketing objectives that aim to get new people into your marketing funnel. Nail them early on and you set your business up for success later down the road.

Outline your marketing funnel

Not everyone will see your products and convert into a customer instantly. Most people progress through a sales funnel. Content that will make someone progress to the next stage depends on the one they’re currently in. 

If you were to use Facebook ads to sell your products to a generic audience modeled on your buyer persona, for example, you might not get the highest conversion rate. These people don’t know who you are, what you stand for, or why they should choose you over a competitor. 

But if you used Facebook ads to specifically target people at the bottom of your marketing funnel, you could use retargeting ads to show items someone had in their shopping cart. You’re bound to get a better return on your investment with this strategy because you’re only investing money into reaching people who just need a final nudge to convert. 

Let’s break down how you might outline your marketing funnel in a marketing plan. 

The marketing funnel has three stages: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.

Top of the funnel (TOFU)

People at the top of your marketing funnel don’t understand who you are or what you sell. Social media, podcasts, and video content play huge roles here. Each channel is used by potential customers looking to learn or be inspired.

For this stage, prioritize metrics that give insight into how people are engaging with your top-funnel content, such as:

Page views

Video views

Website clicks

Click-through rate (CTR)

Cost per click (CPC)

Middle of the funnel (MOFU)

People reach the middle of the funnel when they know they have a problem that needs to be solved. Look at the marketing channels and formats you’re using to target these people. Most often, it’s search engines and retargeted ads.

Google Analytics is your best bet here. While the dashboard can feel overwhelming for a lot of people, you don’t need to look at every report. Use the following metrics to see how people engage with your middle-funnel content:

Bounce rate

Pages per session 

Users by traffic source

Email subscriber conversion rate 

To track the data above, especially for advertising campaigns, add the Meta pixel to all pages of your store.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

Going for the hard sell? For marketing messages where the only goal is to convert your audience into paying customers, consult the back end of your ecommerce store. It’s home to sales and product-related data that helps you understand whether your marketing plan is successful, such as:

Added to cart conversion rate

Average order value (AOV)

Number of orders

Reached checkout conversion rate

Sales conversion rate

Shopify Analytics dashboard showing metrics like total sales, sessions, and conversion rate.

Shopify Analytics shows all the BOFU data you’ll need.

Post-funnel and retention

Planning to build a steady stream of paying customers off the back of your ecommerce marketing plan? It’s easy to assume revenue growth comes from audience growth. But oftentimes, the easiest way to grow your revenue is by focusing on the people we forget about: existing customers.

Resist the temptation to focus on flashy metrics like social media followers and YouTube subscribers. Instead, involve existing customers in your marketing plan. Use them as a source of testimonials and word-of-mouth referrals.

“Happy customers have been powerful word-of-mouth catalysts for our brand, and it has made sense to keep them engaged,” says Chris Campbell, partner at The Charming Bench Company. “We’ve been getting a steady stream of five-star ratings on websites and social media, which we then share on our Facebook, X [formerly known as Twitter], Pinterest, and Instagram profiles. It’s a great alternative to pushing loud sales messages that don’t always work.”

Define your marketing channels 

Channels are the platforms you’ll use as part of your marketing plan. Go back to your market research and uncover the online and offline channels your target audience is using to shop and get entertained or inspired.

Some of the most popular channels for ecommerce businesses include:

Social media. Social media is used by more than six out of 10 people. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are free to use (on the whole) and help brands reach their target audience. 

Search engines. Some 44% of online shoppers start their product research on search engines. By making search engine optimization (SEO) part of your marketing plan, you can generate new business by reaching people when they’re actively looking for your products or services.

Email marketing and SMS marketing. Email and text message inboxes are two of the most sacred places for a marketer to reach. A phone number or email address gives you a direct line of communication with your target customers, if they opt in to hear from you.

Podcasts. Record conversations you have with your team, customers, or experts in the industry and share them with your audience. By establishing yourself or your brand as a thought leader in your industry, you’ll inspire confidence that in turn builds trust in your products.

Offline channels. While digital marketing is vital in today’s world, offline and in-person marketing efforts can be equally powerful. Get in front of people when they’re not online, using channels like word-of-mouth recommendations, radio, billboards and outdoor advertising, or TV marketing campaigns.

There’s a sweet spot to how many channels your marketing plan should include. Go too wide and you burn resources on channels with poor returns. But become too reliant on one channel and you’re at risk.

Algorithms power most digital marketing channels. They’re praised as the type of technology that delivers personalized experiences for their users, but any changes to an algorithm can make marketing plans utterly useless overnight.

“If you rely on SEO, then any algorithm updates could potentially cut your revenue for months before you recover,” explains Marquis Matson, VP of Growth at Sozy. “If you rely on paid ads, then any changes to privacy policies can cut your revenue. If you rely on email marketing, then any ESP [email service provider] policy changes can cut your revenue. Diversifying your acquisition is crucial in a fast-paced digital marketing world.”

Footwear brand Hippy Feet is one ecommerce brand that failed to diversify channels. “The original marketing plan was to drive traffic to store through ads—relying heavily on paid Facebook and Instagram traffic,” says Sam Harper, Hippy Feet’s co-founder and CEO. “While this is still a major component of our marketing strategy, the decreasing effectiveness of these ads has forced us to expand our marketing efforts.

“A diverse media strategy is crucial to helping an ecommerce business survive in this highly-dynamic market. By driving traffic through SEO, email, and media coverage, we’re more resilient and less impacted by a single tech platform changing their algorithm.”

Decide on your content formats

For each channel, define which content formats you’ll use to capture attention and drive website traffic. That could include:

Audio. Reach podcast and radio listeners with audio content. 

Images. Capture visual learners and shoppers on visually dominant social media sites with infographics, GIFs, and memes.

Video. Get listed on YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine, with explainer videos and product demonstrations. Many social media platforms—Instagram and TikTok included—are also evolving to prioritize video content. 

Written content. Most search engine results retrieve links to optimized written content, such as blogs, transcripts, or landing pages.

Content marketing is a beast that constantly needs to be fed. Customers want newer, fresher, more exciting content on a regular basis. That’s demanding for a small business to keep up with.

If this sounds unsustainable, consider a content marketing strategy that collects user-generated content (UGC) from existing customers. The more they share their experiences with others, the more content you have to repurpose on each channel. It’s an effective route to scale your content marketing plan and stretch your editorial calendar if your marketing department has limited resources. Don’t have time to invest in promoting the content you create? Partner with popular influencers in your niche—those whose loyal audience overlaps with your target market.

Plan your marketing resources

Your marketing budget is the dollar amount you expect to spend executing your marketing plan. If you’re bootstrapped, you can run a marketing plan on a tight budget.

As part of your own marketing plan, state whether you intend to use each channel organically or boost it with advertising. Most channels allow businesses to run sponsored content, which is guaranteed to reach your target market across online and offline channels, like door-to-door sales, social media, TV, billboards, and radio.

“I apply for any competitions, press opportunities, and awards to get my small business out there at any given opportunity,” says Terri-Anne Turton, founder of The Tur-Shirt Company. 

The strategy has worked: The Tur-Shirt Company has won a Junior Design Award for best fashion newcomer and a shoutout from media entrepreneur Steven Bartlett after entering his #DeserveToBeFound competition with Facebook.

“I focus on those my target market knows of to build credibility,” says Terri-Anne. “Plus, most of the awards I enter are free or low-cost; they just need some time investment and creativity to take part. It proves my USP to my target market—that my kids’ clothing products are unique—without investing thousands into advertising.”

While you can run a strategy with little to no budget, this section of your marketing plan needs to account for more than any planned advertising spend. Time is a resource that needs to be managed and accounted for. Be sure to detail how much time you plan to spend executing your marketing strategy.

If you have a designated marketing team, it’s also worth noting who will be responsible for each element of your marketing plan. Who’s responsible for this marketing plan? Which team members are executing it? What experience do they have with marketing?

More importantly, detail what you expect from the resources you’re putting into your marketing plan. If you plan to spend $40,000 throughout the coming year, how much revenue will you get in return? If you’re producing a marketing plan for a large or public company, this is what stakeholders really want to see.

Create a measurement and optimization plan

Go back to the KPIs (key performance indicators) you set in the earlier section of your marketing plan. How will you determine whether you’ve met these KPIs? What happens if you’re exceeding or falling short of your target? It’s good to have a plan of action for either case.

Let’s put that into practice and say you expected to increase sales by 20% through your social media marketing plan. Detail exactly how you’d measure this, for example, you could say, “we’ll look at our Shopify sales report once per month and analyze which channel is meeting this KPI. If a channel falls behind, we’ll evaluate why and either adjust our marketing plan or deprioritize it in favor of more effective channels.” 

The best marketers approach their plans with an open mind. The hypothesis you started with might be proven wrong. Don’t take that as a negative. You just got closer to finding what will work. 

Tips for creating your marketing plan

Set conservative expectations

While it’s good to approach your marketing goals with confidence, high expectations often lead to disappointment when we fail to meet them. That disappointment is magnified in a marketing plan, as stakeholders or founders will have already bought into unrealistic predictions and business objectives.

Start small

Don’t overwhelm yourself and your team by trying to generate results with all marketing tactics at once: running Facebook ads, tweeting like crazy, writing daily blog posts for SEO, and making constant changes to site and content strategy to improve your conversion rate.

If you’re very lucky, one of these tactics will bring you consistent traffic and sales. But more often than not, trying everything at once will make you extremely busy without anything to show for it.

Originally, Jameela’s team planned to invest in several marketing channels—online and offline advertising, PR, trade shows, influencer marketing, and blogging included. However, the team changed its marketing plan. They went deep on one channel instead of spreading resources too thin by trying to be everywhere at once.

“We stuck to one course of action that was where our customers were, and ready to buy, and easiest for us to see a good ROI,” Jameela says. “What really worked for us was focusing on a handful of channels that we knew we could do well.”

Go back to your audience research and identify three channels your target audience uses most often. Put most of your energy into perfecting those before overcomplicating things with a more comprehensive marketing plan.

Use historical data as a guide

Past performance can help you temper your expectations for your marketing plan. If you know your click-through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads is 0.1%, don’t stray too far from that baseline with your social media marketing.

The same goes for website content optimized for search: If you’re currently getting 10,000 visitors per month from Google, scaling your traffic up to a million is a tough battle. Instead, 50,000 visitors is a more achievable goal.

Allow for flexibility

The purpose of a marketing plan isn’t to create a never-fail manual. Whether your marketing team has fallen victim to completion bias or focused too heavily on one channel, sticking rigidly to your original plan can be a big mistake.

Imine Martinez, assistant manager at Rainbowly, says: “Our regular campaigns targeting mainly birthday celebrations and anniversaries offered poor return on ad spend and inconsistent results over the months.

“That said, during festive seasons, such as Christmas or New Year’s, our targeted campaigns were particularly profitable, achieving five times return on ad spend with much cheaper cost per click and impression.”

Continuing with the same marketing strategies despite this data would only have resulted in heartbreak. Rainbowly would be pouring money down the drain on ads that wouldn’t perform, just because its marketing plan said to do so.

Creating a marketing plan is the first step

A lot of hard work goes into a successful marketing plan. To create an attainable one, you’ll need to spend hours diving into competitive research, audience data, and channels your target market consults when researching new products.

Most importantly, know that marketing is unpredictable. There are thousands of scenarios that fundamentally change the marketing strategy that’s best for your business. Global pandemics, PR crises, and the emergence of new social media platforms are unpredictable.

Treat your marketing plan like the best-case scenario. Plan SMART goals and strategies but remember to be flexible to give your marketing the best chance of success.

How to Send Marketing Emails

 If all goes well, you’ll have built a robust list of subscribers and leads waiting to hear from you. But you can’t start emailing just yet unless you want to end up in a spam folder, or worse, a blocked list.

Here are a few important things to remember before you start emailing your list.

1. Implement email segmentation.

Once you’ve added people to your list, you must break them down into different segments.

That way, instead of having a monolithic email list of everybody, you’ll have easier-to-manage subcategories that pertain to your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences.

Our subscribers are humans, after all, and we should do our best to treat them as such. That means not sending generic email blasts.

Why should you segment your email list?

Each person who signs up to receive your emails is at a different level of readiness to convert into a customer (which is the ultimate goal of all this).

If you send a discount coupon for your product to subscribers that don’t even know how to diagnose their problem, you’ll probably lose them. That’s because you’re skipping the part where you build trust and develop the relationship.

Every email you send should treat your subscribers like humans you want to connect with, as opposed to a herd of leads you’re trying to corral into a one-size-fits-all box.

The more you segment your list, the more trust you build with your leads, and the easier it’ll be to convert them later.

How to Segment Email Lists

The first step in segmentation is creating separate lead magnets and opt-in forms for each part of the buyer’s journey. That way, your contacts are automatically divided into separate lists.

Beyond that, email marketing platforms allow you to segment your email list by contact data and behavior to help you send the right emails to the right people.

Here are some ways you could break up your list:

Geographical location.

Lifecycle stage.

Awareness, consideration, and decision stage.

Industry.

Previous engagement with your brand.

Language.

Job Title.

In reality, you can segment your list any way that you want. Just make sure to be as exclusive as possible when sending emails to each subgroup.

2. A/B test your marketing emails.

Not all email lists are created equal. Some audiences prefer personalization, and others will think it’s spammy. Some audiences will like bright, eye-catching CTA buttons. Others will prefer a more subtle call-to-action.

You’ll never know what type of people make up your email list until you test the variables. That’s where A/B testing comes in handy.

A/B testing, or split testing, is a way to see what type of email performs best with your audience by analyzing the results of email A against email B. This can be especially helpful when working with templates.

“Since emails often have the same template, A/B testing is smart because you can usually control variables outside of the test and get a solid signal on what performs better,” 

Here’s the step-by-step process for A/B testing your emails:

Select one variable to test at a time, e.g., subject line, CTA, images.

Create two versions of the email: one with and one without the variable.

Allow your emails to be sent out simultaneously for a period of time.

Analyze your results and keep only the version that performed better.

Test a new variable and repeat the process.

When conducting an A/B test, consider these tips:

Test one element at a time.

“For example, try the same email with a different subject line. Or the same email and same subject line with a different CTA,” 

“It might be tempting to make several changes at once, but that makes it harder to pinpoint the true cause of your wins or losses,” 

Don’t try to “eyeball” an A/B test.

A/B test should be run with intention. Making quick changes and approaching results unscientifically can lead to incorrect conclusions.

“You might be tempted to run an informal A/B test by making a change and then casually paying attention to the responses that you get. This unscientific method can easily be skewed by factors outside your control (like seasonality or deliverability),” . “It also leaves out a ton of valuable data, like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, or sharing/forwarding rate.”

3. Analyze your email marketing performance.

Once you’ve got your first few campaigns, it’s time to see how they’re performing.

By diving into your email marketing analytics, you‘ll be able to make better decisions that will help your business’s bottom line, resonate with your subscribers, readers, and customers, and justify your work to the rest of your company.

Here are the best ways to analyze the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

4. Set email marketing KPIs.

There are four key metrics to pay attention to when evaluating the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.

Deliverability measures the rate at which emails reach your intended subscribers’ inboxes.

Open rate is the percentage of people that open your email once it reaches their inbox.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of people that click on your CTAs.

Unsubscribes measures the number of people who opt out of your email list once they receive your email.

5. Adjust email components to improve results.

Many factors impact your KPIs, and it will take some experimentation and guesswork to figure out which tweaks to your emails will yield the biggest significance.

If you aren’t getting the desired numbers, try playing with these variables to improve your email results.

Deliverability

Ensure that you’re following best practices regarding spam filters.

Remove inactive people from your email list to keep only engaged subscribers.

Check which emails have bounced and remove those email addresses from your list.

Open Rate

Play with the language in your subject line to entice people to click on your email.

Adjust the time and day that you send your email to see what works best.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Evaluate your offer to ensure that it provides value to your segmented list.

Rewrite your copy to make sure that it’s clear what you want the reader to do.

Try different CTAs, e.g., graphic versus Inline copy, bold versus subtle.

Unsubscribes

First, consider if this is a blessing in disguise, as uninterested parties are removing themselves from your list.

Regularly send an email to inactive subscribers on your list asking if they still want to be a part of it

Evaluate whether the email you sent is aligned with your brand.

Ensure you haven’t performed a bait-and-switch by promising one thing and delivering another.

Make sure your emails are providing value to your audience before trying to upsell.

6. Use an email marketing report template.

Once you’ve got some campaigns under your belt, it’s time to look at how they performed. Your data does no good if you can’t report it in an organized fashion.

An email marketing report is a spreadsheet where you can record your results in one place to help you make inferences from your KPIs and take action to improve them.

Here’s how you should organize your report.

Metrics

Total number of emails sent

Number of emails delivered

Deliverability Rate

Bounce Rate

Open Rate

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Click-to-open Rate (CTOR)

Unsubscribe Rate

Data

Subject line

Length of the email body

Offer

CTA (inline or graphic)

List segment(s)

Questions To Ask:

Was your deliverability rate high in comparison to previous periods?

How did your CTR compare to your open rate?

Were your unsubscribe numbers consistent with other emails?

Did a certain subject line perform better than others?

Does the length of the email make a difference in CTR?

Could another style of CTA perform better?

Was the offer appropriate for the list segment?

Email Regulations You Should Know

Email regulations are important to follow as they regulate and protect consumers’ desires to know how and why their information is being used.

If there’s anything we care about, it’s complying with what our customers—or potential customers—want.

There are a few key ones that you should understand:

1. CAN-SPAM Compliance

Technically, CAN-SPAM is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (because sometimes the two go together).

In practice, it’s a way to protect your subscribers’ right to only receive emails that they’ve requested.

The law was passed in 2003 and applies to any commercial emails used for business purposes.

Here are the ways to ensure that your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant:

Include your company name and address in every email.

Place visible unsubscribe links within your emails.

Use real email addresses in the “From” and “Reply to” fields.

Write subject lines that indicate the contents of the email.

Please note: This is not to be confused with legal advice. See the FTC’s site for more specific legal information regarding CAN-SPAM laws.

2. GDPR Compliance

While some may view these newly implemented email regulations as burdensome and unnecessary, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) moves us closer to building long-lasting, trusting customer relationships.

GDPR is about giving your customers the right to choose. They choose your emails. They decide to hear from you. They choose your products. And that is exactly what inbound marketing is about.

It is important to note that GDPR only applies to businesses operating in the European Union and businesses that market to EU citizens.

Noncompliance will result in significant fees that aren’t worth the risk, so make sure to read the GDPR guidelines entirely.

Here’s an overview of how you can comply with GDPR laws:

Use precise language when requesting consent to store personal information.

Only collect contact data that is necessary for and relevant to your business.

Store contact data securely and only use it for the agreed-upon purpose.

Retain data for justifiable business purposes only.

Delete contact data on request.

Make it easy for contacts to unsubscribe from your list or update their preferences.

Comply promptly with a contact’s request for access to their data.

Keep company records to prove GDPR compliance.

These regulations will be taken seriously (as they should), so it’s a good idea to create a GDPR strategy for your business before sending emails.

3. Avoid Spam Filters

You spend time creating the perfect email and adhering to regulations, so the last thing you want is to end up in a spam folder.

You’ll want to avoid the spam folder because:

It hurts your deliverability rates across the board.

Your contacts will likely miss all of your emails.

You won’t be able to measure your email marketing effectiveness accurately.

Your analytics will be skewed.

You can avoid being deduced to spam with the following.

Get whitelisted.

A whitelist is a list of approved senders that can reach the subscriber’s inbox. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have your new subscriber add your email address to their address book.

Include directions on how to do this in your welcome email.

Mind your copy.

Avoid using all caps and multiple exclamation points, as well as spam trigger words, like “opt-in,” “click below,” and “order,” that are easily detected and marked down by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Use a reliable email service provider.

Your email service provider’s reputation affects your deliverability, so stick to established, well-known companies.

Implement a double opt-in.

Once someone opts in to your email list, send an email asking them to confirm. This ensures that your new subscriber is genuinely interested in your emails and will likely be more engaged.

(Check out more ways you can avoid the spam filter.)

And last but certainly not least, you need to consistently measure the success of your email marketing efforts. There are a number of options you can choose from when it comes to your business’s email marketing analytics.

Email Marketing Tips

While you probably don’t think twice about the formatting or subject line of an email you send to a friend, email marketing requires a lot more consideration.

Everything from the time you send your email to the devices on which your email could be opened matters.

Your goal with every email is to generate more leads, which makes crafting a marketing email a more involved process than other emails you’ve written.

Let’s touch on the components of a successful marketing email:

Copy: The copy in the body of your email should be consistent with your voice and stick to only one topic.

Images: Choose images that are optimized for all devices, eye-catching, and relevant.

CTA: Your call-to-action should lead to a relevant offer and stand out from the rest of the email.

Timing: Based on a study that observed response rates of 20 million emails, Tuesday at 11 AM ET is the best day and time to send your email.

Responsiveness: 55% of emails are opened on mobile. Your email should, therefore, be optimized for this as well as all other devices.

Personalization: Write every email like you’re sending it to a friend. Be personable and address your reader in a familiar tone.

Subject Line: Use clear, actionable, enticing language that is personalized and aligned with the body of the email.

Featured Resource

100 Email Subject Lines We Actually Clicked

Pro tip: Leverage AI for email marketing. By using tools like our AI Email Writer, you can generate copy that suits your goals, saving time along the way.

Personalize your email marketing.

“Personalization isn’t just about adding a contact’s name to the subject line anymore but is all about creating personalized experiences that demonstrate you understand them and have insider knowledge about how they can use your products to succeed,” 

Now that you know who you’re emailing and what’s important to them, sending emails with personalized touches will be much easier.

Sure, you’re speaking to 100+ people at one time, but your leads don’t need to know it.

Personalized emails have higher open rates. In addition, 83% of customers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience.

You’ve gathered all this unique data. Your email marketing software allows for personalization tokens. You have no excuse for sending generic emails that don’t make your leads feel special.

“It’s more impactful to base email personalization on two or three factors instead of just what a contact is engaging with on your side,” 

 “Consider personalizing emails based on what you know about your contact, such as their location, industry, employee size, etc., alongside how they engage with your content.”

Here are a few ways to personalize your emails:

Add a first name field in your subject line and/or greeting.

Include region-specific information when appropriate.

Send content that is relevant to your lead’s lifecycle stage.

Only send emails that pertain to the last engagement a lead has had with your brand.

Write about relevant and/or personal events, like region-specific holidays or birthdays.

End your emails with a personal signature from a human (not your company).

Use a relevant call-to-action to an offer that the reader will find useful.

Beginning Email Marketing

While there are many rules to sending a marketing email, the most important is this: Treat the reader on the other end like you’re writing to a friend.

Trust me, you can achieve all of your email marketing goals if you keep this golden rule top of mind in every autoresponder, lead magnet, and subject line.

And remember, the more you help your subscribers, the more they will want to hear from you and look forward to opening emails that you send.

Email Marketing

I know a thing or two about email marketing.

Done correctly, email marketing can be as powerful as any other marketing tactic today. But notice the key phrase: done correctly.

Fortunately, you‘ve get this handy dandy guide you’re reading that will set you up for success in your email marketing strategy.

Without further ado, let’s review the best ways to leverage email marketing. I’ll also cover benefits and statistics that show the importance of email.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending promotional messages or newsletters to a list of subscribers via email.

The goal is building customer relationships, promoting products or services, increasing brand awareness, and ultimately driving sales.

In my experience, email marketing allows me to reach my target audience directly with personalized and relevant content. It’s also cost-effective, easy to track, and provides valuable data for analyzing campaign success.

Email has been one of the most highly used marketing channels ever since.

This is because email is a flexible yet cost-effective way to reach many people relatively quickly. I can also personalize my message to target specific audiences and generate leads.

Email marketing can take many different forms. These campaigns can include a single email announcing new content, an ongoing newsletter delivered regularly, or contacting customers about product updates.

Email isn’t as shiny as newer channels, like messaging and social. However, email is an effective way to build an audience that gets results.

“Access to someone‘s inbox is sacred, and for a person to welcome you in, there’s already a certain level of trust that you just can’t achieve with other platforms,” he says.

When to Use Email Marketing

Email marketing remains a powerful tactic to:

Build relationships. Build connections through personalized engagement.

Boost brand awareness. Keep your company and your services top-of-mind for the moment when your prospects are ready to engage.

Promote your content. Use email to share relevant blog content or valuable assets with your prospects.

Generate leads. Entice subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset that they’d find valuable.

Market your products. Promote your products and services.

Nurture leads. Delight your customers with content that can help them succeed in their goals.

Email Marketing Benefits

87% of marketers say that email marketing is critical to business success.

Email is the third most popular owned media platform B2B marketers used to distribute content in the past 12 months.

There are over 4.3 billion email users worldwide, so if you’re looking for a way to reach your customers, email is the perfect place to find them.

The number of global email users is set to grow to 4.48 billion users by 2024.

As of 2022, email generates $36 for every dollar spent.

51% of marketers say email marketing is the most effective marketing channel, according to our Marketing Trends survey.

53% of marketers are continuing to invest in email marketing in 2023.

33% are increasing their investment in email marketing in 2023.

33% of marketers send weekly emails, and 26% send emails multiple times monthly.

Beyond just the statistics, perhaps the best reason to use email marketing is that you own the channel. Outside of compliance regulations, no external entity can impact how, when, or why you reach out to your subscribers.

Time and time again, email proves to be an unsung hero in marketing.

Email Marketing Stats by Industry

Email marketing rules change based on your industry and who you’re marketing to. Below are some email marketing trends for B2B, B2C, e-commerce, and real estate companies that can inform your email marketing strategy.

Email Marketing Stats for B2B

Email is the third-highest owned-media platform B2B marketers used to distribute content in the last 12 months.

44% of B2B marketers say email marketing is the most effective marketing channel.

B2B marketers say email engagement is the fourth most insightful metric when evaluating performance over the past year, more than social media, search rankings, and lead quality.

Email Marketing Stats for B2C

50% of B2C marketers say growing their email list is one of the biggest challenges in their role.

37% of B2C marketers send daily marketing emails to their subscribers.

Email Marketing Stats for Ecommerce

57.2% of marketers say the e-commerce brands they manage have 1,000 to 10,000 contacts on their email lists.

85.7% of e-commerce marketers say the primary business objective of their email strategy is increasing brand awareness.

Roughly 72% of e-commerce marketers say the biggest challenge they face with email is low open rates.

Getting Started with Email Marketing

I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the vast possibilities of email marketing, so let’s break down a few key steps to get you started building a solid email campaign that will delight your customers.

You can think of these steps as creating a successful email marketing strategy.

1. Create an Email Marketing Strategy

You can learn how to build an effective email strategy and send emails that people actually want to read. It just takes a plan (one that can be broken down into a few key steps).

2. Define your audience.

Effective emails, whether a campaign or a one-off, start with understanding your audience.

Like everything else in marketing, start with your buyer persona, understand what pain points they’re dealing with, and tailor your email campaign to your audience’s needs.

3. Establish your goals.

Usually, before I think up campaign goals, I gather some context.

I always want to know the average email stats for my industry and use them as benchmarks for my goals. This should be your process as well.

4. Build your email list.

You need people to email, right? An email list (we’ll cover how to build your email list in the next section) is a group of users who have permitted you to send them relevant content.

To build that list, you need several ways for prospects to opt-in to receive your emails which we’ll cover in another section in just a moment.

Don’t be discouraged if you only have a few people on your list. It can take some time to build. In the meantime, treat every subscriber and lead like gold, and you’ll start seeing your email list grow organically.

5. Choose an email campaign type.

Email campaigns vary, and trying to decide between them can be overwhelming. Do you send a weekly newsletter? Should you send out new product announcements? Which blog posts are worth sharing?

The answer is subjective.

I like to start by learning about the types of email campaigns, then I decide which is best for my audience.

I also set up different lists for different types of emails, so customers and prospects can sign up for only the emails that are relevant to them.

If you need help writing your emails, consider using AI to help.

6. Make a schedule.

Decide how often you plan to contact your list and inform your audience upfront.

This way, they’ll know exactly what to expect ahead of time. Forgetting this can lead to high unsubscribe lists and even get you in their spam.

In addition, once you set a schedule, be consistent. It will build trust and ensure you stay top of mind for your audience.

7. Measure your results.

This should come as no surprise. As marketers, we measure everything. Being meticulous about every key metric will help you make small changes to your emails, yielding large results.

We’re going to touch on the exact KPIs to monitor in a bit (or you can jump ahead).

Now that you understand the steps to creating an email marketing strategy, we‘ll look at what’s involved in building your email list.

8. Choose an email marketing platform.

An email marketing provider (ESP) is an excellent resource if you’re looking for any support while fine-tuning your email marketing efforts. Depending on your needs and types of campaigns, there are several paid and free email marketing platforms including HubSpot, Constant Contact, MailChimp or other Mailchimp alternatives.

9. Build Your Email List

Now to my favorite part: filling the email list with eager prospects excited to hear from you.

There are many creative ways to build your email list (and, no, purchasing emails ain’t one).

Tactically speaking, list building comes down to two key elements that work cohesively to grow your subscriber numbers: lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Featured Resources

The Email Newsletter Lookbook

How to Create Email Newsletters That Don’t Suck

Here’s how I build and grow my email list.

10. Use lead magnets.

Your lead magnet is exactly as it sounds: It attracts prospects to your email list, usually as a free offer.

The offer can take many formats, should be valuable to your prospects, and is given away for free in exchange for an email address.

There’s just one problem: People have become hyper-protective of their personal information. You can’t expect to receive an email address without exchanging it for something valuable.

Think about a lead magnet that is relevant, useful, and makes your prospects’ lives easier.

Here are a few types of lead magnets you could create:

Ebooks.

Whitepapers.

Infographics.

Reports or studies.

Checklists.

Templates.

Webinars or courses.

Tools.

If you’re short on resources, you can even repurpose existing content to create lead magnets.

11. Create an enticing opt-in form.

Your opt-in form is how you get a prospect’s information to add them to your list. It’s the gate between your future leads and the incredible asset you created with them in mind.

Here are some tips for creating an enticing opt-in form:

Create an attractive design and attention-grabbing header.

Your form should be branded, stand out from the page, and entice people to sign up. You want to excite readers with the offer.

Make the copy relevant to the offer.

While your goal is to get people to enter their information, it isn’t to deceive them. Any information on your form should be a truthful representation of the offer.

Keep the form simple.

This could be one of your first interactions with your prospect. Don’t scare them away with a long long-form several fields.

Ask for only the most essential information: first name and email is a good place to start.

Set your opt-in form for double confirmation.

It may seem counterproductive to ask your subscribers to opt into your emails twice, but some research on open rates suggests that customers may prefer a confirmed opt-in (COI) email more than a welcome email.

Ensure that the flow works.

Take yourself through the user experience before you go live. Double-check that the form works as intended, the thank you page is live, and your offer is delivered as promised.

This is one of your first impressions of your new lead — make it a professional and positive one.

Next, let’s take a moment to cover some universally accepted email marketing best practices regarding how to send marketing emails.

20 steps to a better LinkedIn profile in 2024

 Professionals – particularly salespeople – invest a lot of time and resource in building brands. We’re trained at it – and we’re good at it. But how often do we apply those skills to building our own personal brands? For many of us, it’s nothing like as often as we should. I know that there’s more that I could be doing to build my own profile on LinkedIn – and I know that I’m not alone.

We don’t get around to it because we’re busy, and because it can sometimes feel selfish or egotistical to invest time in marketing ourselves. However, when we neglect personal branding, we don’t just sell ourselves short – we also miss a big opportunity, from a sales perspective. The impact of employees who share content is huge. And the most effective employee sharers are those who’ve built their personal brand on LinkedIn.

The LinkedIn profile page is the foundation for your personal branding. And we regularly add features to increase its capabilities as a personal marketing platform and give you new ways to signal your skills and motivations. If you haven’t checked your profile page recently, you might well find new ways to build your personal brand.

Here are 20 profile features you should check and update for 2024. Some of them are very quick wins, some of them may take a little bit of time – but all of them are very worthwhile. They will help to give you the LinkedIn profile and personal brand that you deserve.

1. Choose the right profile picture for LinkedIn.

Your profile picture is your calling card on LinkedIn – it’s how people are introduced to you and (visual beings that we are) it governs their impressions from the start. There are some great posts explaining how to pick the right profile picture on LinkedIn – but here are some quick tips to start with: make sure the picture is recent and looks like you, make up your face takes up around 60% of it (long-distance shots don’t stand out), wear what you would like to wear to work, and smile with your eyes!

2. Add a background photo.

Your background photo is the second visual element at the top of your profile page. It grabs people’s attention, sets the context and shows a little more about what matters to you. More than anything, the right background photo helps your page stand out, engage attention and stay memorable.

3. Make your headline more than just a job title.

There’s no rule that says the description at the top of your profile page has to be just a job title. Use the headline field to say a bit more about how you see your role, why you do what you do, and what makes you tick. If you’ve got sales reps at your company who are on the ball with social selling, then take a quick look at their profile page headlines for inspiration. They will almost certainly have more than their job titles in there.

4. Record and display your name pronunciation.

Tired of having your name mispronounced? You can help solve that by recording and displaying your name pronunciation on your LinkedIn profile. With it, people can listen to how you pronounce your name, so they can say it correctly. Learn more about adding this feature here.

5. Turn your summary into your story.

The first thing to say about your LinkedIn summary is – make sure you have one! It’s amazing how many people still leave this field blank when creating their LinkedIn profile. Your summary is your chance to tell your own story – so don’t just use it to list your skills or the job titles you’ve had. Try to bring to life why those skills matter – and the difference they can make to the people you work with. Don’t be afraid to invest some time, try a few drafts, and run your summary past people you know. This is your most personal piece of content marketing – and it’s worth the effort.

6. Declare war on buzzwords.

Buzzwords are adjectives that are used so often in LinkedIn headlines and summaries that they become almost completely meaningless. Our regular rankings of the most over-used buzzwords include terms like ‘specialized’, ‘leadership’, ‘focused’, ‘strategic’, ‘experienced’, ‘passionate’, ‘expert’, ‘creative’, ‘innovative’ and ‘certified’. Now I’m not saying you can’t describe yourself as these things – or that they don’t matter. However, just using these words won’t convince people that you have these qualities. You need to demonstrate them as well – both in the way you describe yourself, and in the way you use LinkedIn profile features to show what you’re about.

7. Grow your network.

One of the easiest and yet most relevant ways to grow your LinkedIn network is to synch your profile with your email address book. This enables LinkedIn to suggest people you could connect with. It’s amazing how effective this can be at surfacing relevant people for you to reach out to – and no connection requests are sent without your permission, so you can vet all of the potential connections. Beyond this, get into the habit of following up meetings and conversations with LinkedIn connection requests – it’s a great way of keeping your network vibrant and up to date.

8. List your relevant skills.

It’s one of the quickest of quick wins on LinkedIn – scroll through the list of skills and identify those that are relevant to you. Doing so helps to substantiate the description in your Headline and Summary, and provides a platform for others to endorse you. However, the key here is staying relevant. A long list of skills that aren’t really core to who you are and what you do, can start to feel unwieldy. Take time for a spring clean of your skills list every now and then.

9. Spread the endorsement love.

Endorsements from other members substantiate your skills and increase your credibility. How do you get endorsed on LinkedIn? For starters, go through your network and identify connections who you feel genuinely deserve an endorsement from you – that’s often the trigger for people to return the favour. Don’t be afraid to reach out with a polite message asking for endorsement for a few key skills as well. Remember though – relevance matters. Reach out to people whose endorsement you’d really value.

10. Manage your endorsements more proactively.

Once endorsements start to come in, you might find that they skew the emphasis of your LinkedIn profile in ways that don’t reflect who you are. It could be that your core area of expertise is content marketing for example, but the people who’ve worked with you on events are more enthusiastic endorsers. Be proactive in managing your endorsements list using the edit features in the Skills section of your profile – you can choose which to show, and which to hide.

11. Request recommendations.

Endorsements give people viewing your profile a quick, visual sense of what you’re valued for. Recommendations take things a step further. They are personal testimonials written to illustrate the experience of working with you. There’s a handy drop-down menu in the Recommendations section of your profile that makes it easy to reach out to specific contacts and request recommendations. Take the time to think about who you would most value a recommendation from – and personalize your request. It’s worth the extra effort.

12. Showcase your passion for learning.

When you complete a course on LinkedIn Learning, you’ll have the opportunity to add a course certificate to your LinkedIn profile. You do this from within the Learning History section of your LinkedIn Learning account – where you can also send updates about your learning to your network if choose.

13. Share media and marketing collateral.

The marketing collateral that you produce for your business can add an extra dimension to your own profile as well. Sharing case studies, white papers and other brand content helps to show what the business you work for is all about – and helps people understand what makes you tick. It demonstrates passion and commitment as well.

14. Share relevant content from your LinkedIn feed.

It’s one thing to have a network of connections on LinkedIn – it’s far better to have an active role in that network, appearing in your connections’ LinkedIn feeds in a way that adds value for them. Sharing relevant content with your network is one of the most accessible ways of doing this. You can make a start by keeping a close eye on your LinkedIn feed, and sharing content that you find genuinely interesting – and that aligns with your point of view.

15. Add comments.

Sharing is great – but it’s just the starting point. When you add comments to your shares, you give yourself greater prominence within the feed and start to express why you think a particular piece of content matters. Well-expressed comments also enable you to share a broader range of content. It might be that you don’t agree with a point of view but still find it interesting, for example. A comment that can express that viewpoint starts to establish your opinion and thought-leadership. It’s also more likely to draw additional comments, which then raise your profile across LinkedIn. Bear this mind when you’re writing your comment – and make sure you’re saying something you’re happy for people to associate with you.

16. Follow relevant influencers in your industry.

Following relevant influencers on LinkedIn helps to put a range of interesting content in your feed, which you can then share with others when you think it adds value. It also helps to give context to your LinkedIn profile, demonstrating your passion for what you do.

17. Turn on Creator mode.

Creator mode is a profile setting that can help you grow your reach and influence on LinkedIn. You can turn on creator mode to get access to additional tools and features that help you create content and grow your audience base on LinkedIn.

18. Spotlight the services you offer.

Consultants, freelancers, those working for smaller businesses, and others can showcase the services they offer via a LinkedIn Service Page. LinkedIn Service Pages are dedicated landing pages that showcase your services and businesses at no cost and operate on a request and proposal model. Learn more about Service Pages and how to set them up here.

19. Check out collaborative articles and share your contribution, if invited.

Collaborative articles are relatively new on LinkedIn. These articles begin as AI-powered conversation starters, developed with our editorial team, but they aren’t complete without insights from our members. Professionals are asked to contribute their thoughts to their area of expertise in them, ultimately resulting in an article showcasing a variety of perspectives on topics relevant to the professional community.

Here’s an example of a collaborative article. You, as a member, can react to each contribution or the article overall. Additionally, you might be invited to provide your perspective on a collaborative article. If so, it’s a great opportunity to share your knowledge and a path toward earning a “Top Voice” badge.

20. If you are looking to grow your business on LinkedIn, consider Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you get more conversations with the people who matter most. Compared to members who don’t use it, LinkedIn Sales Navigator users build 4.3x more connections on LinkedIn, and it leads to 42% larger deals, 17% higher win-rates, and 15% more pipeline.

10 Ways to Find Anyone’s Email Address

 If you know someone’s name but don’t know their email address, there are many methods you can try to find it.

This post lists every possible method to find the email address you’re looking for.

10 ways to find an email address, ranked by efficiency

Below are 10 methods to efficiently find an email address. Try them in this order to get the best results with the least amount of time invested. 

1. Use an email finder.

Your best bet if you’re looking for anyone’s business email address is to use an email-finding tool like Hunter’s Email Finder. It’s free to use, and it will help you find many email addresses in no time.

Once there, enter the person’s name and website address (or company name) in the input box and click “Find.”

Here’s what’s happening under the hood:

The Email Finder checks Hunter’s database of email addresses found publicly on the web. If the company website you provided contains the address of a person you’re looking for, the Email Finder will surface it.

If we didn’t find the right address or haven’t discovered that website yet, the Email Finder will attempt to guess the email address.

2. Guess their email address, then verify it.

If the Email Finder doesn’t find the email address you’re looking for, you can try guessing the address yourself. This involves looking for possible patterns firstname@example.com or firstlast@example.com, and verifying their existence with an email verifier.

According to a study we conducted at Hunter, 49.9% of the companies use the {first}@example.com email pattern.

3. Look on the company website.

A company website is a great source of information when you need to find company decision-makers and their email addresses.

Contact Us page

On the “Contact Us” page, you may often see generic contact forms, but some companies add the team members’ contact information who can help with specific requests.

Author page

Since most companies have blogs, another effective way to find email addresses is to visit each author’s individual author page.

Usually, you need to click on the image of the blog post author (or their name), and you’ll be able to get the author’s personal information. In some cases, you can find all the information under the blog post in the author’s bio box.

4. Use Google.

If you didn’t find any useful information on the company website, it doesn’t mean the email address you’re looking for isn’t listed elsewhere on the web.

That is where Google comes in handy. If you have a couple of email addresses you think are correct, search for them on Google.

Below is an example of how easy it is to find the email address of Buffer’s founder, Joel Gascoigne. I’m using quotations so that Google only returns the results that contain the exact string I’m looking for.

You can also experiment with adding other personal information to the queries, such as position, previous companies, city, etc.

5. Check social media profiles.

If you can find someone’s social media profile, you’ll probably be able to find their email address there.

Here are some tips on how to do it with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Facebook

When trying to find bloggers or general company email addresses, Facebook can be an excellent source to check.

Head to your target’s page and open the “About” section.

Most bloggers and small businesses include their contact details in this section. However, you can also often see the info@, hello@, and contact@ email addresses, which are not very useful if you’re looking to do personalized outreach.

LinkedIn

For LinkedIn, you may need to connect with the prospect to see their email address and other personal information.

Once you’re connected, open the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, click Contact Info, and the chances are that you’ll find what you’re looking for there.

You can also check the About section on a person’s LinkedIn profile. People often share their email addresses or those of those who work with them there.

Finally, you can try exporting your LinkedIn connections. Note that this will only work if the person doesn’t hide their email address from their LinkedIn connections.

Here’s how to do it:

Log in to LinkedIn, click the drop-down menu that has your profile photo on it, and then click on Settings & Privacy.

On the next page, click on Get a copy of your data, select the “Want something in particular? Select the data files you’re most interested in.” option, and then check the Connections box.

Finally, click the Request archive button.

LinkedIn will email you once your export is ready. It usually takes about ten minutes.

You’ll receive an email to download a .csv file containing a list of all your connections and their email addresses (where available). With some luck, the email address you’re looking for should be there.

Twitter

The most obvious way you may think of is to check the prospect’s bio on Twitter.

But since the bio is very limited in space, most people put other essential links and information here. Moreover, having a publicly listed email address on Twitter (that could be easily scraped) increases the chances of getting a lot of spam emails.

Since sometimes people tweet their email addresses, you can search past tweets to see if your prospect has ever done it.

You can check this using Twitter’s advanced search, which allows you to search for very specific information in selected Twitter accounts.

Search Twitter with Google

This technique is as simple as typing the following into Google Search:

twitter.com/username + “keyword”

Note that for “username,” you must have the person’s current Twitter handle. For “keyword,” you can experiment with other relevant keywords such as “contact,” “email,”  “email at,” etc.

6. Just reach out.

If you couldn’t find someone’s email address with any of the techniques mentioned above, try reaching out on social media, asking for a more specific email address, contacting info@ or hello@ email addresses, or even connecting with the company’s support via chat.

Reach out on Twitter

Don’t hesitate to find your prospects on Twitter and ask directly for their email address. You can quickly describe why you want to contact them or where you found their social media profile.

Ask for a referral via a generic email address

Usually, it’s effortless to find a generic email on a company website. It usually starts with “info” or “contact” + @domain.com.

If you write a short email describing who you are, who you need to contact, and why, the chances are that someone behind the generic email address will provide you with a personal email address you can contact.

It doesn’t hurt to ask.

💡

If you can’t find a generic email address, you can send your message via the contact form on the company website.

Use the support chat

There is always a human behind the company’s support chat. The communication happens in real-time, so the chances to get a reply fast are high.

7. Subscribe to the prospect’s newsletter.

Many companies and bloggers send newsletters using their personal email addresses. This is an excellent way to build relationships and show that there’s a real human behind the emails.

You can leverage this to find an address they’re likely to use regularly.

Step 1: Find the opt-in form & subscribe

Step 2: Check your inbox

Check your inbox in a few minutes, and you’ll find a welcome email or the first part of the newsletter (or, in some cases, an opt-in confirmation email).

Also, you’ll get the email address you were looking for.

Don’t hesitate to hit “Reply” and start a conversation. The chances that your prospect replies are much higher than in the case of sending a completely cold email.

8. Check WHOIS records.

If you’re trying to find the email address of someone who owns a website or blog, you can do it with WHOISWHOIS.

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store basic information about a registered domain, such as domain owner contact information, domain availability status, and company details.

All you need is perform a WHOIS search of the prospect’s domain on one of many websites that provide access to the WHOIS database. For example, WHO.IS, Namecheap, or GoDaddy.

💡

WHOIS offers an option to hide the contact information from the public, so this method might not always work.

9. Ask for an introduction.

Think about whether you have a mutual acquaintance with your prospect. If so, it doesn’t hurt to ask for an introduction.

You can easily determine whether you have any shared connections on social media.

Let’s take a look at this example: I want to connect with Typeform’s CEO, Joaquim Lecha, and all I have is his LinkedIn profile.

I can easily check if we have any mutual connections, and if someone I know is well-connected to Joaquim (like my friend or colleague), I can quickly reach out to them and ask if they can make an introduction.

You can ask for an introduction using this short and straight-to-the-point message:

“Hey [name], I saw you are connected to [target person]. Mind making an introduction so I can [1-2 sentences maximum about the reason you want to connect]?”

Or you can just simply ask for the right email address to contact your prospect, and when contacting, mention the person who provided you with it.

Just drop a few lines, and that’s it.

10. Check your own email list.

If you have a big email list, you might already have the person’s email address stored there.

How to Write the Best SEO Title and Meta Description

 Even if you have an optimized website, the best keywords, and a perfect content strategy, you might be missing these two crucial things for your business’ success! If you don’t have an enticing SEO title or engaging meta description accompanying your content, the chances of your website being seen (let alone ranking on search engines) falls drastically. 

Imagine you are looking at a Google Search Engine page. Each result you see has a blue headline and black subtext underneath. That blue headline is your SEO title and the black text underneath is called your meta description. Each and every page on your website has it’s very own SEO title and meta description. And yes, you should absolutely be writing this yourself not letting your website provider automate this. The automations are great when set up correctly, but what we usually find is that these titles and descriptions will end up being way too long.

Your title is the first thing your audience will see, so it needs to be eye-catching! 

What Is An SEO Title?

Think of your SEO title like a paid ad. How can this headline entice a click? An SEO title is one of the most important aspects of your website content, so it needs to be attention-grabbing to draw in your audience. 

We suggest writing your SEO title to be 50-60 characters so your entire title will show up on the SERP. As you compose your SEO title, make sure to incorporate keywords about your business and the services you offer as early as possible. Relevant keywords ensure that your title answers what people are searching for. It also helps your website rank on search engines. 

Your SEO title needs to be readable, which means using title case to stand out. It should have proper grammar, spelling, and capitalization. Error-riddled SEO titles aren’t inviting because they aren’t readable or credible to your audience or search engines.

Quick Tip: Leverage characters like the vertical line and ampersand to help save space!

Another question we get all the time is when to use your brand name in an SEO title. The answer is definitely not everywhere. We suggest only using it on your home page because it’s likely people aren’t searching for your brand name. They want the solution you provide! For blogs, don’t use your brand name at all; focus on the question you’re answering with the content.

Our favorite SEO title “equation” is: Keywords + Context / Urgency + Brand

SEO titles are just one thing you need to include for your content to be successful. Don’t forget the meta description! It’s just as essential as the title. 

What Is A Meta Description?

Your meta description should elaborate on your title or provide more context to what’s on the webpage. Meta descriptions that represent your content well encourage your audience to click on the search result, which will help boost your website’s ranking. Your SEO title should grab your audience’s attention, and the meta description should get them to click on the result. 

Don’t treat meta descriptions like a social media caption or intro to a blog post. There isn’t much space for the description when it shows up on a SERP, so every word counts! Make sure you include keywords about your business/services, who you are, or where you’re located. Meta description should be 155-160 characters, which can fit almost everything you need on those two lines of the SERP.

Our favorite meta description “equation” is: Keywords + Pain Point / Benefit + Call to Action

Your SEO title and meta description should complement each other, but they shouldn’t be repetitive! If both contain relevant (but different) information about your business and website, then it will drive traffic and engagement to your website. 

How To Write The Best SEO Title And Meta Description

It might seem like there are a lot of rules to master when writing great SEO titles and meta descriptions, but it isn’t too hard! This is something I want you to remember because this is going to take all the stress away from this little SEO optimization.

SEO titles are a ranking factor.

Meta descriptions are NOT a ranking factor.

This has actually been confirmed by the head of search at Google! Although it’s best practice to use keywords in your meta description it’s not going to affect where you rank on the page.

Here are a few best practices we use when we write our own.

UTILIZE ONLINE TOOLS

These are some of my favorite tools to use when writing these two things for my clients.

MRS Digital when I am writing this  myself

AI tools. Ubersuggest has a brand new one under their Labs tab and you can get a personalized writer for things like SEO titles, meta descriptions, headlines and more. 

I also love to use ChatGPT. I ask it to give me 5 options of meta descriptions for a web page in this industry, using this keyword. Be specific!

KEYWORDS

We’ve touched a bit on this already, but we can’t stress enough how important it is to use keywords in your titles and descriptions. A LOT of SEO success depends on the keywords used to drive traffic and build online visibility. 

The best way to incorporate keywords into your titles and descriptions is to research some relevant to your business. These keywords should ideally have a high search volume and low to medium competition. These types of keywords help your website compete and rank on search engines. 

LEVEL OF DETAIL

Next, your titles and descriptions should hit the right balance of simple and descriptive. A nonexistent title or description will do nothing (or possibly hurt) your business’ search rankings. SEO titles and meta descriptions that are too simple aren’t compelling enough to pull in your audience because it lacks context and relevance. An SEO title and meta description with too much detail usually have more information than the character limits allow. 

If titles are too long, they’ll trail off into ellipses. Ellipses aren’t always a bad thing, but your audience is less inclined to click on the search result of your business if the title or description doesn’t address their search inquiry right off the bat.

A well-written SEO title has keywords, context, or urgency to click on your website and your brand. An effective meta description should have keywords, an audience pain point you’re resolving or a benefit they get from your content, and a call to action to encourage them to click on the result. 

If you have to take away one lesson, let it be this: Keywords take priority! So much of your SEO success hinges on the keywords you use, so make sure they’re relevant to your business. 

One final piece of advice: If you update any of these, be sure to request a manual recrawl in Google search console. This helps Google index your new data and serve it to people faster.

We can’t stress enough how crucial compelling SEO titles and meta descriptions are for your business’s online visibility and organic traffic. We hope these tips and tricks gave you some guidance on crafting the best titles and descriptions! 

5 ways to be seen as an expert

 I hear a lot of business owners say they are struggling to convert clients on calls or per email, but they don’t want to be salesy or pushy when selling their services. And I get it; I feel the same way.

But looking back on the consultations calls that I have done, I see a common thread. Those times that I felt I really had to sell my service, or convince the potential client that building a strong foundation is necessary, I was talking to someone who was not my ideal client. The times that I had consultation calls that felt more like a conversation between 2 business owners getting to know each other and talking about the project, those were the calls withy ideal clients.

Some even told me afterwards that after speaking with a lot of other designers, they still came back to me. And 1 client did not even go ahead with the other calls that were planned. She mentioned that she felt an instant connection during our call, she got a few quick wins from the call, and I showed how knowledgeable I was. 

If you feel you really have to push and sell hard during calls, you’re getting the wrong people on your calls. And this all comes back to positioning and how your potential clients think about you and what you can offer them.

So if you have the ‘wrong’ clients reaching out to you, there is something in your messaging, your content topics, the way you interact on social media that gives them another impression than the one that you want them to have. 

Let’s have a look at 5 things you can do so that your audience does see you as an expert in what you do. 

In this blog, you’ll learn:

How you can learn about the problems of your audience while building connections and grow your audience

How and when to grow your visibility

How interviewing other experts can help you 

How you can learn from other experts

But that above all you need to believe in your own abilities

Solve your audience’s problems

Help your audience solve their problem. This one is always key because, in the end, your audience is following you for a reason. They are looking to solve a problem that they have (ok, and you have your competitors following you to see what you are doing, and other business who are hoping to get business out of you – but those are not the ones we should consider in this).

There are several great ways to get to know what your audience is struggling with like through interviews or surveys, ask questions or create polls in online groups or Facebook groups (others or your own) or include a couple of questions in your welcome sequence. I go more in details about this in my blog about market research. 

The great thing about Facebook Groups is that not only you can learn more about the problems your potential clients have which you can use as inspiration when creating content for your blog, newsletter or social media channels. 

You can build connections when you help them by answering their questions, and building connections is what it is all about. But this will also help with them seeing you as an expert, which in turn will get them to follow your social media channels or visit your website. I’m not saying spend hours and hours a day going from Facebook Group to Facebook Group to do this. Definitely not, because you can spend your time better elsewhere.

But if you do this strategically, set a timer on how much time you spend on this every day and use the search option in Facebook groups to search for keywords in posts that are relevant to what you offer and what your audience’s struggles are. This way, you don’t end up scrolling aimlessly through posts to find ones that are relevant and that you can answer. 

Grow your visibility

This is a step that builds on the first one, and that is to grow your visibility. And I know that growing visibility is a goal for most business owners because we need more people, right? But the things is that if we don’t have the right message (aka don’t actually solve the problems of our audience), it does not matter if you have a small or large audience. It won’t all of a sudden work by spreading it to more people. So make sure you have step 1 covered first. 

But if you know your message is working, then it’s time to spread the word through being a guest on podcasts, presentations in Facebook Groups, interviews, write guest posts or through collaborations. Off course there are more options, but the key is that you get in front of someone else’s audience that is similar to yours. 

The best thing to do is to find a business that is complementary to yours. So if you are a copywriter, you could work together with a marketing expert, a coach or a designer that target the same market.

You can start small by asking the business owners you already know if you could work together on something. When you feel more confident, you can go to Facebook Groups like ‘Podcast Guest Collaboration Community – Find a Guest, Be a Guest’ where you can post that you are looking to be a guest. And if you’re up for it, you can always cold pitch to larger podcasts or outlets like Forbes or medium. 

Interview other experts.

Suppose you do want to put more focus on being seen as an expert but don’t feel ready just yet for the above step. In that case, you can also interview experts yourself or create a round-up post with other experts opinion about a specific topic. 

It might feel a bit odd that you are trying to position yourself as an expert by asking other business owners for their expertise. Why this works is because you are the one supplying your audience with this advice. But it also shows them that your business is not all about you but about providing your audience with the best information possible for them to solve their problems. And that you feel comfortable enough about your own expertise that you share other experts advice.

Follow other experts

Never stop learning about what works and doesn’t work. And this is where following other experts come in. This can be a tricky one because it’s easy to fall into comparing yourself with them and feeling even less secure about what you are doing. So try to find experts about your topic that are not necessarily competitors of you as this will help to creates some distance.

Look at what they’re doing, what topics are working well for them or what graphics are working well for them. And then, give it your own spin, tailor it to your audience or give your opinion why it would or would not work in your market.

Believe in your own abilities.

This might even be the most crucial step. I see this regularly when talking to other business owners or clients; they don’t feel like an expert. And this belief is holding them back to show up more, to start that (group) coaching program that they have wanted to for so long or to go on podcasts to grow that visibility.

If this is you, then try to think back to a couple of months ago or a year ago and remember how far you have already some. How much more knowledge you gained since then. How much more experience you have gained since then. Would you not be able to help someone who is at that point where you was 3 months or a year ago? Sure, you can.

And if you still doubt yourself the best thing you can do in my opinion is help other business owners. One of my clients that was doubting her abilities was asked to answer a few questions from a junior designer wanting to know how she got her business to where she was. This was a week after we spoke about her belief she was not an expert (while I was telling her she absolutely was) and a couple of weeks before we would talk again. By the time we spoke again, she had answered the questions and gained so much confidence about her knowledge that she felt ready to start presenting herself as a mentor for other designers. 

You might not be asked to answer questions like my client, but you can go into the Facebook groups and see how many questions you can actually answer. I’ll bet you; it’s more than you think.

How to Raise Your Prices (without losing clients)

 Discussing rate rises with your clients can feel like an icky subject, and one that I tried my darn hardest to avoid for as long as possible.

But here’s the thing – you didn’t quit your 9-to-5 and start your own business, only to work harder, earn less, and feel overwhelmed a.f. all the time.

The 4 secrets to communicating your rate rise

The 4 essential element for raising your prices are:

• Be very clear about your new rate (including updating your pricing on your website).
• Communicate your value and credibility, using stats wherever possible (for example, “over the past 6 months it’s been wonderful watching your business grow thanks to [insert your service]”).
• Communicate the “why” behind your rate increase (for example, “the new fees will help me to get them more inline with average market rates”).
• Give your clients plenty of notice

Tip: ensure your contracts include a line about potential price increases.

Here are my scripts for raising your prices in a way that’ll make your clients want to stick around.

Your email scripts

Package your services in a new, client-centric way:

“I wanted to let you know about some exciting updates I’m making to my services. I’ve created these so I can further help my clients achieve XYZ.” 

Lock them into another retainer or package:

“Every year I reassess my offerings, and in the new year I’ll be raising my fees. If you’d like to lock in your current rate for another X months, please let me know and I’ll book you in for another pack.”

Create a VIP experience

“In X months I will be increasing my package prices, however I currently still have X number of spots still available at the current rate. I’ll be opening up these spots to my database at the end of this month, however I wanted to give you the opportunity to jump in first.”

Lastly, give your clients an opportunity to discuss this further with you over the phone.

And now you’re ready!

How to deal with “bad clients”

 Oof. “Bad clients.” Unfortunately when you run a service based business a few not-so-ideal clients come your way. These clients come in different forms — they no longer align with your services, go out of scope, request endless revisions, or don’t adhere to your process. Whatever the situation is, I thought I’d shed some light on this not so fun topic in hopes that you can move past it with grace.

First things first, we need to accept some responsibility (channeling my mother’s voice here)! However they stepped out of line, we need to acknowledge our role. Maybe we didn’t set firm expectations to begin with, establish appropriate business hours for communication, or create a timeline with feedback deadlines assigned to our clients. There are ways that we could have better directed the process. I’m speaking from experience here!

I’ve seen this celebration pop up over the past couple years over “firing clients…” that I don’t love. As if when we fire a client we should rejoice, have gusto, and feel empowered. Listen, I never have felt this way. Instead, I feel deflated. Just worth a mention here, our goal is to best serve our clients, so saying goodbye to them shouldn’t be a moment of celebration! That’s not a great way to run a business.

But… sometimes it’s necessary.

So, I wanted to share my experience on how to deal with these tricky situations.

Learn from the experience

Before hopping into how to let go clients, let’s learn how we can avoid these situations moving forward. Ask these questions to yourself, or even jot them down in your notebook:

What went wrong?

Where could you have anticipated the wrong turn?

Is there a way you can set some better boundaries for future clients?

Is your contract secure? If not, get covered. Now. (here’s the contract I recommend)

Option 1: Continue working together

You’ve found yourself in a bit of a sticky situation, but not all hope is lost and you’re hoping to salvage the client relationship. You recognize you need to establish new terms, or possibly set some boundaries, with your client and then you can proceed with the project.

This can be tough to stomach for those of us who are people pleasers. Part of us considers continuing the project as is, despite the less-than-ideal circumstances if only to avoid confrontation. Yet, another side of us knows we should stand our ground as a professional. Not to fear, I’ve got some helpful tips to guide you through this rough patch.

Out of scope clients: This is probably the most common client dilemma with designers! If your client requests work outside of the original agreement, by all means let them know if they are unaware. Let them know you’re willing to work together, and the cost for the additional work.

Communication: If your client calls you outside office hours, texts instead of emails, or drips revisions through several messages rather than one response, you have an issue with communication. In this case, I’d recommend responding through your preferred communication channel and establishing your preferences. Be direct and clear to help steer them in the right direction.

Revisions: Another common pain point with client work. If your client needs to exceed the rounds of revisions allotted in your process, let them know how they can proceed. I typically have an hourly fee I use for additional revisions, and will tell the client how much I anticipate for the additional work. For this response though, your client needs to be aware of how many revisions are allotted in your process. Ie: don’t surprise them with a bill. They should anticipate it coming!

New projects: If you’ve had a past difficult client who wants to continue working together, you’ll need to establish some boundaries. This is if you’ve already wrapped up the initial project and realized you weren’t firm in your process, but now need to re-establish expectations. In your response you can mention that you’d enjoy working together, however since the last project you’ve adjusted your process. Then dive into the details.

Option 2: Back away… slowly

So, you’ve opted to cut ties with your client and move on. You realize that it isn’t the best fit, and isn’t worth your time/energy to continue working together. I respect that.

But what next? You’re anticipating a fallout of sorts, and that’s giving you anxiety and stress. (been there!)

Here’s some guidance if this is you (and I’m sorry if it is!!)

• First, take a deep breath. As mentioned before, recognize why they aren’t the right fit. You’ve gained clarity in the process, and that is huge!
• Don’t feel obligated to continue working together if it isn’t the right fit, or you feel abused as their designer. It’s your business, and you can say no!
• Try to resolve the situation first if you can, and then if it is clear it’s time to discontinue working together.
• If this client is a hot mess, avoid passing the problem along to a specific designer. Instead, you can recommend websites that have design directories they can select from.
• Schedule a massage or movie after you hit send on your “break up” email. Otherwise you’ll be refreshing your inbox nonstop!