Yesterday's Daily Gold Nugget concluded with the statement that the better targeted your emails are, the more frequently you can send them out. Today we will expand on this idea.
According to Ted Nicholas (a very well known sales and copy writer) every ad or email you create should have enough ROI to at least pay for the cost to create it. If not, then throw it out and start over.
Ted also explains that you should test your message on small groups before sending it to your entire list of customers. Here are some strategies so you can put this into direct practice using the Facebook Update feature we explained yesterday.
We have a few assumptions here.
1. We assume you have more than a few hundred Facebook Fans that like your Business Page.
2. We assume that a good percentage of your fans are actually customers within reasonable driving distance from your store.
3. We assume that you also have a list of the towns near you, including demographic information about each town, as well as the number of your customers who live in each of those towns.
4. We assume your Facebook Fans have a somewhat similar distribution within your local towns as your real customer base.
5. And finally, we assume you have not taken the time to manually track the Current Towns of all your Facebook Fans.
Every message you ever write should have some built-in ability to track the recipient. We suggest that you use the trackable bit.ly URL shortner. This tracking is the only way to really know if your message is effective.
Strategic Facebook Update Steps:
1. Compose the body of your message. Use your bit.ly tracking URL in the message.
2. Write the Subject of your message after you write the body. Make it interesting, but not tricky or misleading.
3. Follow the steps from yesterday's Nugget and target your Update to an individual city near you.
4. Send the message.
5. Go back and rewrite your subject. It could be a small change, or totally different.
6. Change the bit.ly URL in the body of the message so you can track this unique Update.
7. Send the same message with the modified subject to a different city.
Wait a predetermined amount of time (how long is up to you) and check in on your tracking. Did anyone click any of the 2 different bit.ly links? If not, then wait a little longer. If you don't have any click-throughs after 24 hours then most likely both of your messages are failures. At this point you would need to rewrite the body of the message and try again using 2 more local towns.
But let's say that you did get clicks. You need to know which message had more clicks, and that's our winner.
Take the winning message and send it out to all the rest of your local towns, excluding the 2 test towns.
What you just read through is a standard strategy for sending emails out to a large list of people. You never simply send a message to everyone and hope it works. With proper planning you could test your message to a smaller group before spending your entire advertising budget on a message that might just be a failure to begin with.
There is one word of caution in this strategy. You will need multiple bit.ly accounts to make this work. We will explain why multiple accounts are needed in tomorrow's Daily Nugget.
