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Important Ways To Improve Your Direct Mail Marketing

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

For some, direct response marketing seems old fashioned. It is not. It’s just getting more effective. More than 80% of marketers credit email as their most vital channel for customer acquisition so email marketing is not going away anytime soon. New trends are emerging that will help you increase leads and conversions and improve your relationship with your prospects and customers. For example, Personalization is becoming more and more important and you need to learn how to target potential customers and target your messages to them.

We need to gather more information about our target audience from the analytics we get from previous mailings. Also, segmenting prospects by demographics, expertise, decision-making level makes your message more personal. Are the recipients active or inactive, opening or not clicking through at all, etc. Some people are going back to plain text emails because they appear to be more personalized.
Ask for more information from responders and you will get more information allowing you to get more personal on the next mailing.

Mobile messaging is becoming more important. Mobile messages have a higher open rate and responses are much faster and easier. You can also use more casual language and people search differently when looking for information. Often in sentences rather than keywords. Lots of people are moving away from typing.

To be more effective, try to integrate your email marketing with other marketing efforts so prospects are getting a consistent message from the phone, email, website, and social media. Build a relationship with your target prospects. Show them content that tells them you are an expert and understand the challenges they are facing.

And finally, test and test again including subject lines, time of mailing, different calls to action, using emojis in subject lines (some people get much higher open rates with emojis), embedded video and graphics. You have your lists and you are continuing to add to these lists, so now is the time to experiment especially when the cost to do direct response marketing is so inexpensive. It’s a great way to build a pipeline of prospects.

 How To Tell Your Company’s Full Story, To A Stranger, In Seconds

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

 How To Tell Your Company’s Full Story, To A Stranger, In Seconds

 

The Full Story….. In Seconds?  Sounds Impossible, But It’s Not, And It’s Painless

Potential customers want to know what your product is and how it solves their problems, and you only have a minute or two to convince them that finding out will be well worth their time.

Explainer Videos

Here’s how. Explainer videos are an extremely effective way to tell your overall story, from problem to solution in condensed time and in a special format that captures and holds their attention until they have heard your full story.  

Plus, if your company could benefit from this powerful marketing tool, you can now get one produced for a few hundred vs a few thousand dollars.

Potential customers want to know what your product is and how it solves their problems, and you only have a minute or two to convince them that finding out will be well worth their time.

Explainer videos are an extremely effective way to tell your overall story, from problem to solution in condensed time and in a special format that captures and holds their attention until they have heard your full story.  

Plus, if your company could benefit from one of these powerful marketing tools, you can now produce one for a few hundred vs a few thousand dollars.

Whiteboard Animation

By definition, whiteboard animation is a video that shows the process of physically drawing a story using marker pens on a whiteboard (or whiteboard-like surfaces). While the objects are still images and often attached to texts, diagrams, or additional items, the drawing process itself is recorded (animated). The result is a series of drawings displayed in sequence and added with narration.

Whiteboard animation is similar to a video explainer. Think of them as a bridge between traditional videos featuring real-life objects and a conventional slideshow presentation. It is more sophisticated than the latter but it offers more or less the same visual effects as the former.

Conclusion

If you want to tell your story in just a minute or two, videos are a good way to do it. You don’t even have to be there to do it. Also, the person viewing the video can also forward it to others. They can also be very cost-effective. You know your story. Think about writing it in 100 to 200 words. You can start with your value proposition.

 

 

 

 

Why Create A Whiteboard Animated Video

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

Whiteboard animation is a fantastic way to introduce your company, brands, and products to the audience at large. It is less expensive than conventional videos yet more effective to keep viewers attentive and engaged. Production is also easier because the animation is almost entirely made on computers; the characters are drawn and the narration (voice-over) can be added later approaching the final production step.

If your goal is to find the best format to deliver your message, online video is certainly the best format to deliver your message. People are more attracted to multimedia content and inclined to share them on their social circles as well, especially when the video provides valuable honest information and answers their problems. Whiteboard animation offers the affordability of every startup’s needs and the promise of ROI by generating more sales.

There are DIY programs available to create whiteboard animation so you can distribute them to your YouTube channel and social media accounts. When it comes to online marketing, however, DIY whiteboard animations will most likely fail due to their poor production quality and the lack of optimization (making sure they fit all platforms).

Although you can create the animation using specialized software to save even more money, hiring a professional video company is always the better option. Now, with our global Staff-on-Demand program, you can get a professional whiteboard animation created at a fraction of the cost charged by most video studios. You can also get a fixed cost based on your requirements.  In addition, you also get:

Quality

The most obvious advantage is quality. They have all the talent and the tools to produce high-quality whiteboard animation and offer their expertise for the entire process. Since you intend to use the video as a marketing tool for your business, you want it to be enjoyable, easy to understand, and on point. The video is also a representative of your company, so you should aim for the best possible quality.

Efficiency

Without helps from professionals, you have to handle all the works yourself. Even with pre-made templates available from popular software, it would take hours (if not days) to get the job done. Also, some templates are just too common – they are used by thousands of others – when what you need is something authentic and unique to stand out from the crowd. A professional video company is filled with trained scriptwriters, illustrators, music engineers, animators, and voice-over talents to name a few. In other words, the company can handle the entire production process.  

Online Visibility

You should also make sure the bundled package consists of not only the whiteboard animation video but online visibility optimization. This means the final video is constantly monitored to generate data including views, conversion, and basically whether or not it is effective in many different platforms. Adjustments and optimizations are made accordingly based on the data.

What’s The Shape Of Your Pipeline?

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

 

Jeff Hoffman wrote an article where he talks about the shape of your pipeline. Individual salespeople generally have a good handle on their pipeline. But management does not, Management needs to keep watching the shape of the sales funnel as a metric in order to get a better understanding of the pipeline and the status of the people in that pipeline, 

What is the shape of your pipeline? 

Do you use the traditional funnel, broad at the top and then gets continuously more narrow as it gets closer to closing? Let’s say there is a  statistical relationship of 3x the number of leads to closes. Therefore, salespeople need to get 3x the number of leads to closes if they are going to meet their quota.  

However, a better-looking funnel is shaped like a  champaign glass, which is wide at the top and narrows quickly down the stem to the base. Thie idea, of course, is to qualify prospects quickly so you can get rid of poor-prospects and have more time to work on real prospects. Naturally, this requires a well-designed qualifying system, But, it would be well worth the time an effort it takes to get that qualifying system. Then multiply that by the amount of  quality sales time gained,

The real prospects are in the stem of the champagne glass. These prospects have a 1.25 statistical probability of closing. Therefore, in the lower stem, you need 1.25 real pre-close prospects to meet a closing sale. And, much more time for the salesman to work on these potential prospects to meet his quota.  

Make an illustration of your pipeline because it’s an easy way to see where you are, and then keep track of the numbers (leads vs. closes) over time so you can plan your sales forecast more accurately and with less consternation.

If you know someone who needs to change the shape of their funnel, forward this post to them. Maybe it will help. 

 

 

Maybe Your Product Is Great

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

Maybe your product is excellent, but your message is not. Instead of focusing on features and functions, focus on what the customer wants.  

If you are talking to people who are interested in listening to you, Maybe you should stop selling and start giving information that will help the customer do his job, solve his problem, fulfill his “want”.

Most buyers have a budget. Maybe they don’t want to spend their budget on your product, but the result of buying your product?

If you know someone with a flat sales curve, tell them about his blog. Maybe it will help.