Email marketing tips for small businesses.

The 4 core components of my small business and how they generate my income. #1 Attention Engine In today's online world, 'attention' is the most valuable of currencies. If you're not able to capture the attention of your ideal targets among the passing traffic, you'll struggle. The two places small business owners most commonly seek attention are on social platforms and their websites - and in that regard, I'm no different. LinkedIn and my website I'm active on just one social platform and...

How to sell your freelance services using ConvertKit. What is ConvertKit? As one of many on the market today, ConvertKit is my preferred email marketing platform, one that I've been using for a few years. Started in Boise, Idaho in 2013 by Nathan Barry, it was his frustration with Mailchimp that incentivised him to take the plunge into the SaaS (Software as a Service) world and create an alternative that would be powerful in features yet simple to use. Amongst its ever-growing list of...

People need a good reason to subscribe to your email list Nobody scrolls through social media or websites thinking... "I need more emails.". Subscribing to an email list happens only when a subscriber is convinced that enough value exists on the other side of that sign-up process. You've done it yourself, you'll be on LinkedIn, and you see someone sharing a post saying they are running a webinar next week showing you how to [fill the blank] - the only way to get access to the webinar is by...

Leveraging ScoreApp to attract email subscribers What is ScoreApp? You may have heard of Daniel Priestley, he's an Australian entrepreneur who's now based in the UK. He mainly focuses on helping small business owners start and grow their businesses and offers various tools to assist that outcome - one of which is his software platform called 'ScoreApp'. Essentially, it's a quiz/assessment/test/scorecard* software platform that he sells using a SaaS** model, i.e. you pay a certain amount each...

Send more of what your subscribers want, using polls Arguably, the difference between a subscriber opening and reading your emails and reaching for that 'get me out of here' link, is how personal your messages 'sound'. To weave effective personalisation into your messaging, you need to collect zero-party data* from your subscribers - one of the simplest ways is by using 'polls' in your emails. (*zero-party data is personal data collected directly from subscribers, given voluntarily and...

How to edit an existing ConvertKit Visual Automation without impacting in-flow subscribers The challenge we need to overcome Now and then, we need to make changes to existing Visual Automations when several subscribers can be mid-flow (i.e. started the automation, but not yet completed) and we don't want to upset or impact their progress (which editing a Visual Automation can do!). So, rather than tinker with the 'live' version of a Visual Automation whilst people are funnelled through its...

How to automate your email marketing system using ConvertKit’s ‘Rules’. What are 'Rules' in ConvertKit? 'Rules' are best summed up as this... "If this event happens, do this 'thing'." The first part of this is the 'trigger' and the second part is the 'action'. Triggers cause actions to occur. Here are a few examples; (It's easier to wrap your head around these things with contextual examples); If a subscriber clicks on this link, add the 'tag' - "Interested in Pottery". If a subscriber buys...

How to create an opt-in form in ConvertKit and embed it on your website. What's an opt-in form? An opt-in form is something you've probably seen a thousand times before; they're widely used and look similar to the example shown below, taken from my website; In their simplest form, they collect subscribers' email addresses, however, you can request additional information, if you wish. I collect my subscribers' first names to make my emails more personalised by referencing each subscriber by...

How to create and use 'Link Triggers' in ConvertKit. Firstly, let's look at exactly what 'link triggers' are and how they can be used to take care of automated tasks for us. What is a link trigger? The clue's kinda in the name... it's a 'link' that 'triggers' something to happen, based on your configuration. You can use them to automatically fire an email sequence, a tag to be added to, or removed from, a subscriber's profile, add or remove subscribers from sequences, or update the value of a...