Once you’ve set up your product and sales letter, you then need to move on to creating your marketing materials.
These are materials which will help you promote your launch and get sales from your followers. While you could run the gamut of marketing materials, there are two types of marketing materials which you should pay very close attention to; promotional e-mails and web banners.
Promotional E-mails
Promotional e-mails are what you use to promote your launch to your mailing list. It’s the easiest way to tap into your leads and get sales, provided that your list has already been effectively built up.
You should start sending out these e-mails out a couple of weeks or at least a week before your projected launch date.
Expect to be sending out anywhere between 2 and 6 e-mails to your list during your pre-launch and launch period. This is so that you can steadily build hype with your prospects and start getting them interested.
While you can come up with the content for your e-mails from scratch, there are some e-mails which have proven to be very successful at enticing readers.
The Teaser
Teaser e-mails are usually the first promotional e-mails that you will send out to your list. Teaser e-mails are there to create curiosity and to hint at your newest product. The way you craft this e-mail is very important as you want to let them know that something big is coming, without saying what it is.
The point here is to not reveal too much – you want to tell them that you have something new coming up, something which you’ve been working on and are excited to share with them, but you don’t want to mention specifics. Some people choose to send out two or three teaser e-mails during the pre-launch period.
Product Introduction
This is the e-mail that you will send out on your launch day. Let your prospects know that the product is now available online.
You can enclose the highlights of your product and its unique features. You should also include a link to the product’s sales page and you can even state the price of your product but remember – this e-mail is NOT meant for you to start selling to them. It is for you to introduce the product and get their interest.
Benefits
This e-mail focuses on highlighting the benefits of your product. You want to tell your prospects what’s in it for them if they purchase your product.
Benefits are usually paired with features, but for the purpose of this e-mail, make the benefits the champion. You need to make these benefits compelling to your prospects – focus on how they can greatly improve their lives and help them reach end-goals. Sell the dream.
Additional Bonuses
The additional bonuses e-mail is a promotional e-mail which helps promote your other bonuses. As mentioned in previous modules, the bulk of profit from your launch will come from the sales you make via your sales funnel. Because of this, you should have a promotional e-mail dedicated to talking about your bonuses.
This e-mail doesn’t just have to be about the expansion to your front-end product – it can also be about subscriber-only discounts. You want to let your prospects know that they have access to bonuses if and when they choose to get in on the bandwagon.
Bypassing Spam Filters
As with any form of writing, promotional e-mails require carefully curated information. However, the stakes are somewhat high with promotional e-mails – seeing as you will be sending them en masse to your mailing list, if your e-mails aren’t done right, they will just be flagged as spam by e-mail service providers.
To ensure that your promotional e-mails don’t immediately end up in the junk folder, you should:
Have a Plain Text version if you’re sending HTML e-mails
If you are using HTML for your promotional e-mails, ensure that you enclose a plain text version of your e-mail. This is a very effective way to prevent your e-mail from ending up in the junk folder. Also, some of your recipients may not be able to open HTML e-mails so this offers a solution to that problem, too.
Have a balance between graphics, links and text
Firstly: NEVER send graphic-only or link-only e-mails. You should always try to strike a balance between your graphics, links and text. While this is really up to your own discretion, you should try to avoid including graphics in your body copy altogether. But if you must, then ensure that the accompanying body copy text make ups at least 70% of your includinge-mail content. And as for links, you want to keep them minimal. Try only having between 2-4 links in your e-mail’s body copy.
Pick attachments wisely
As a general rule, you want to avoid sending any executable attachments (.exe, .zip, .swf, etc.) as these will likely cause your e-mail to go straight into the junk folder. JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs & PDFs are attachments which work best, as long as your e-mail body copy has text to back it up.
Subject Lines
Getting past the spam filters is one thing – getting sales with your promotional e-mails is a whole different ball game. In truth, the only way your promotional e-mails are going to be have a high open rate is if they are crafted with a strong subject line. You could have e-mailed thousands of leads in your list but if your subject line doesn’t grab their attention and entice them to click on your e-mail, then all your work would be for naught.
Here are some easy tips which you can apply to your subject line to ensure your promotional e-mails get opened and make conversions!
Stay Away from Overused Sales Jargon
People never want to be sold to. They may like purchasing, but they hate being sold to. Try staying away from words like “discount”, “deal”, “learn”, “act now”, “report” – the common words that are usually associated with sales and content marketing.
There’s a very high chance that your prospects are subscribed to other mailing lists as well so your promotional e-mails aren’t the only ones they receive. Imagine getting three e-mails in the same week (or day!) and all of them having the same sales jargon subject line.
Keep Subject Lines Short
Your subject lines should be short and crisp. When people open their e-mail inbox, they usually just scan through subject lines before deciding if an e-mail is worth reading. If your subject line has over 10 words, you need to chop it down. You could even use the popular 50 characters or less as a pointer. The easier it is for your prospects to read your subject line, the likelier they are to click “open”.
Include an Action Word
An e-mail subject line should also act as a call-to-action. Including action words or verbs in your subject line tells your prospect that there’s something for them to do. Most e-mails only require the recipient to read through copy – having an actionable subject line is way more exciting and creates a sense of urgency. It also sets them up for taking action later on – whether it’s clicking on a link in your e-mail or downloading a file.
Banner Ads
Promotional e-mails help you spread word of your launch to your list but how about the people who aren’t on your list? If you have an active website or other webpages, there’s a stream of traffic that you can tap into. All you need are banner ads.
Banner ads are a form of online advertising. Web banners are embedded into a web page and serve as advertisements. They are intended to divert traffic to a specific website. When it comes to product launches, banner ads are usually linked to your sales page or sales letter.
You can also share your banners with your affiliates, so that they can use it on their sites and landing pages, as tools to promote your product launch. With banner ads, you get to make the most out of the web traffic that you and your joint venture partners receive on a daily basis.
Banner Elements
What elements should you include in your banner? Well, you should definitely display your product name – have it bolded or use a larger font size to help it stand out.
If you have a product photo, put that in there as well as visuals tend to attract more clicks. If you don’t have a product photo, a logo will do. Just make sure that it is displayed in full view without any obstructions.
If your banner size allows it, you can even have a sentence in the banner highlighting a strong benefit that your product offers. However, you don’t want to cramp your banner ad with too much text. So, you should only include this when you have the space to accommodate it.
Another very vital element that you need to have is a Call to Action button. This should be a clickable button that links to your product’s sales page. The text on the button can read “Buy Now” or “Get it now” or “Learn More” – it’s completely up to you.
Banner Design
As for the overall design, we would recommend that your banner ads follow the color scheme of your product’s sales page or whatever page your Call To Action button links to. There’s nothing more off-putting than clicking on a link that directs you to a page that looks completely different from what you had in mind.
Keep the layout clean and uncluttered, with a flat design. Flat designs are more appealing nowadays and a loud, flashy banner ad is now seen as unappealing to the general masses.
Banner Sizes
Now that you know the important elements of a successful banner ad, it’s time to choose your banner sizes. Generally, you want to have at least 3 to 5 different-sized banner ads designed. Because you’ll be sharing these banners with your affiliate network, you never know which sizes of banners would work best on their own websites, so it’s good to offer variation.
If you’re unsure of what banner sizes to choose, here are some common banner sizes which you may want to look into. You can also look online for the list of standard banner sizes to find the ones which suit you and your affiliate network best.
- 250×250 pixel banners are sometimes referred as “square pop-ups”. Banners of this size are great for pop ups.
- 728×90 pixel banners are known as “leaderboards”. These work best when they are placed at the top of a webpage. It offers lots of usable space.
- 160×600 pixel banners or, “wide skyscrapers”, work best when they are placed along the sidebars of webpages. These types of banners are good at accommodating product images.
- 336×280 pixel banners are also called “large rectangles”. You can usually use these ate the bottom corners of webpages or at the end of articles.
- 300×600 pixel banners are known as “half page”. Gives you lots of space to play around with. Usually placed along the edges of webpages.
