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3 Copywriting Secrets For Enticing Customers

July 17, 2015 By Heather 2 Comments

Does your copy capture your prospects’ attention?  Do you know to the difference between writing for a blog and writing web page copy?

These costly writing mistakes will cause your  readers to totally ignore or quickly click out of your copy.

So how do you transform your writing from bland to laser-targeted content that sparkles?

Join me as I interview copywriter extraordinaire Henneke Duistermaat, writing instructor and CEO of Enchanting Marketing, as we discuss some of the inside secrets of copywriting.

Henneke Duistermaat is an “irreverent copywriter and marketer” on a mission to “stamp out gobbledygook” in writing.  She’s written two (5-star rated) books on writing and blogging, and has been an influence in the way I write.

Covered in this interview:

  • 00:30  how to write engaging headlines that will increase conversions
  • 02:36  why different kinds of content requires different writing styles
  • 06:54  where to find specific ideas for enticing your prospects
  • 09:45  a best practice for visualizing your audience as you write (this is an often-skipped step that will make a BIG difference in your writing)
  • 22:27  an important editing secret that makes the difference between whether your copy is gold or garbage
  • 23:27  best practices for final edits
  • 30:50  my three ingredients for delicious and enticing copy
  • ..and more! Watch it!


Books Mentioned in this Video:

  • Blog to Win Business by Henneke Duistermaat
  • How to Write Seductive Web Copy by Henneke Duistermaat
  • Resonate by Nancy Duarte
  • Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

Examples of Sparkling Copy:

  1. J Peterman
  2. ManCrates
  3. Apple
  4. Dropbox
  5. Evernote

For more copywriting advice for improving your cold emails, check out Copywriting Secrets for Crafting Seductive Cold Emails.

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Filed Under: Interviews, Persuasive Writing Tagged With: content marketing, how to write an email, sales content, sales copywriting secrets

3 Copywriting Mistakes Which Alienate Customers

May 5, 2015 By Heather 2 Comments

How can you make even the most unsexy product irresistible and tantalizing to accountants, plumbers or lawyers?

What do seasoned copywriters think about when they start a new project or campaign, and how do they start their research?

What are the 3 copywriting mistakes you must avoid if you don’t want your prospects and customers to hate your copy?

In my interview with Copyblogger’s Senior Copyeditor Demian Farnworth, we discuss these questions and much more, including how exercise can spark creativity.

Demian has a wealth of experience as a copywriter and creative thinker, and has created awesome pieces of content for Salesforce, Hubspot, CrazyEgg, KISSmetrics, and many more companies.

This video is somewhat lengthy, but if you care about customers, copywriting, sales or marketing, you’ll enjoy the conversation.

If you don’t have time to watch everything, here’s a guide that can help you speed through the interview to some of the best parts:

  • 6:07 How to thoroughly research your buyer persona/audience
  • 7:02 Where to look for your copywriting “hook”
  • 8:20 How to ramp up and systemize your copywriting process 
  • 10:00 Ways to be more creative with exercise
  • 14:48  Copywriting Mistakes that can alienate your customers
  • 18:30 How to make Unsexy Products Sexy
  • 22:59 Our Favorite Hooks and Headlines
  • 28:00 How Timing & Economics Affect Your Copywriting
  • 28:40 Lessons from the Best Copywriters
  • 34:10 Why You Need to Think About Personality & Psychology Whenever You Write

View the video below to watch the interview:

Be sure to check out Demian 4 days a week on his new podcast on Copyblogger. It’s called “Rough Draft.”

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Filed Under: Persuasive Writing Tagged With: account based marketing, content marketing, copywriting best practices, personalization at scale, sales content

How to Create Enchanting Content with Moz’s Rand Fishkin

January 18, 2015 By Heather 3 Comments

how to create content

Recently I spoke with Rand Fishkin, the content king and founder of Moz, to pick his brains on content marketing, startups, and SEO.

In my interview with Rand, you can learn:

  • the best SEO strategy for startup founders
  • how to avoid common content marketing & SEO mistakes
  • how Rand tests his content and plans ideas for his own articles
  • why it’s crucial to think about content amplification early on
  • why incentives can make or break your content marketing plan
  • the most important lessons Rand learned as the founder of Moz

…and more! Watch the rest of the video here to get the full interview.

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Filed Under: Interviews, Persuasive Writing Tagged With: AB testing your content, buyer persona research, content marketing, Rand Fishkin, sales value proposition, SEO Moz

Don’t Wait for Inbound to Deliver Your Leads

June 26, 2014 By Heather Leave a Comment

waiting for leads

I’ve seen too many new companies believing “Build it and they will come” over the last 6 years with the startup “Gold Rush,” but no matter how awesome their product is, companies begin to question and regret this philosophy after sales numbers continue to fall flat after 6 months of their product launch. While creating a product people actually want is important for finding product market fit, you won’t be selling much if no one knows your product even exists.

Why Inbound Marketing isn’t Enough

Sharing great content is a great way to strengthen and expand your audience, but what do you do if you don’t have an audience at all?

Some people may discover your awesome blog posts and videos on the internet organically if your content has good SEO, but in today’s ocean of content that’s getting harder and harder to even get noticed. Unfortunately it usually takes between 6 months and 2 years for most blogs to take off and give the company the ROI they’ve put into their blog. Whether your company hires writers or it’s just the opportunity cost of the founders’ time to write articles, creating content is never free. Today having a successful and widely read company blog often requires using advertising spend to promote content on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

Like SaaStr‘s Jason Lemkin and Hubspot’s Mark Roberge I agree that every company should be creating useful and interesting content for their customers and prospects to consume (which is why I’m writing this blog post for you!), but that doesn’t mean you should put all your eggs in one basket. Even Hubspot, the creator of the inbound movement,  uses outbound sales and marketing to help them get enough extra leads in their sales pipeline to meet their high-pressure growth targets.

Using inbound As Predictable Revenue‘s Aaron Ross says,

“Inbound & Outbound go best together, like peanut butter and chocolate.”

Outbound Email Still Reigns King

Few people see cold email as sexy, but even with the popularity and hype around social media, it’s still a powerful force to be reckoned with. Recent white papers and articles from Ken Krogue, Aaron Ross and MarketingProfs all conclude that in 2014 nothing besides expensive executive seminars can beat sending outbound emails.

Reasons Outbound Emails Beat Inbound & Cold Calling:

  1. Email is incredibly scalable. Mail merge templates, custom inserts, and automation software make it easy for you to create mass cold emails that feel personal enough for them to seem like individual emails. Once you have great email templates with high response rates it’s easy to scale your sales pipeline by just adding more contacts to your list.
  2. Better and more affordable data. We have so much information at our fingertips today and have great apps like Rapportive that make it too easy to research your prospects that you have no excuse not to. Likewise, scraping tools and outsourced prospecting research makes it affordable to get the contact information for the decision makers you need to reach, along with the everything you need to know about them and their company to get a conversation going.
  3. Unlike inbound, you control the volume. Unlike blog posts, events and white papers, which leaves you waiting for responses from your prospects, you get to make the first move with email. Want more people in your pipeline? After you’ve figured out the right messaging for your cold emails, all you have to do is increase the size of your contact list.

lots of B2B customers

The Winning Sales & Marketing Strategy: Inbound + Outbound

I would never tell you to quit doing inbound marketing.

You do need to be realistic about the results it will bring you and consider its costs though. Inbound marketing is a great strategy for building an online following and getting more customers in your pipeline, but it’s a longterm strategy that takes time. If you don’t have that time to keep spending on marketing without selling a lot (and who does?!), you should consider doing outbound emails while your inbound is still ramping up. Because once it does, you’ll have a killer sales and marketing strategy that you can continue to scale.

aint-nobody-got-time-for-that

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Filed Under: Outbound Sales Tagged With: content marketing, inbound leads, inside sales, predictable revenue, why content marketing doesn't work

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