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Welcome To The Raine Report
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become
so absolutely free that your very existence is an
act of rebellion”. - Albert Camus
Yesterday an entire country committed economic suicide. In one fell swoop
billions were wiped off the stock markets, it’s currency fell to it’s lowest value
in 31 years, and 41.8% of its population just became very angry.
Of course I am talking about my beloved country The United Kingdom.
But it was democratic. Our nation has spoken, they would rather have
recession than immigrants.
This doesn't gel well with my beliefs or a lot of my fellow countrymen, and
Facebook is full angry people today.
Angry people who have to suck it up because they have no choice.
I have for a long time followed the five flag theory of the PT lifestyle (perpetual
traveller, prior tax payer, permanent tourist).
At the moment though I am a UK citizen. I only have a British passport, and in
two years time I will no longer be free to travel or live anywhere in Europe.
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That for me, sucks.
I need to leave, get citizenship in another country, and say goodbye.
The thing is, I can do this, I can do what I do from anywhere in the world, and
that separates me from the majority of the population who voted to stay but
now remain stuck.
I want you to have that same freedom and that is why I write this newsletter
and do what I do, and I will step up my efforts over the coming months.
But enough of the gloom, here are the highlights of this newsletter.
Silver members get my advanced guide to profiling your customers so you can
target and market to them effectively. I am also sharing a technique I released
to gold members in issue one which I use to profile people based on their
email addresses.
Gold members are in for another packed issue with over 40 extra pages of
content including my 10 killer copy rules which is an essential guide to writing
amazing emails and sales copy that converts. This advice alone is priceless,
but this month you are also getting my number one powerful weapon for
doubling your profit overnight.
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Every time we have implemented this we have seen sales increase by 42%+,
and this is with the same traffic, same everything - an instant boost to your
current income just by making this one single change.
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Selling More Easily By Targeting The Right People
“Be sure you positively identify your target before
you pull the trigger.” - Tom Flynn
What you are about to discover is possibly one of the most important and
potentially lucrative things that most people don’t even consider, which can
have far reaching consequences for your business and your income.
Building up a profile of the customer in your niche is a crucial task, it’s simple
to do, and if done properly it can allow you to really target and pitch your
products and services to much better effect, increasing your conversions
and income in the process.
This is a task that you should complete before you write a single word of your
sales letter, emails, or any promotional advertising, and it should also be
something you do well before you even think about putting together any types
of products.
That said, don’t worry if you already have existing products or services though,
because what I’m about to show you will also give you a great starting point for
positioning and promoting your existing products to new audiences, giving
you a wider customer base to target and benefit from.
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In this article I’m not just going to show you how to do some basic research on
the customers in your niche, I’m also going to reveal to you my 2 secret
weapons that will allow you to get your customer’s age, income, gender,
occupation, hobbies, education level, the products they buy, and much more
just from their email address.
Using all of this data we can build up the customer avatar so that we can not
only appeal directly to that type of person, but we can also use it to create
segments later on down the line in order to laser target your promotions,
products, and services to the right people, which in turn will increase your
chances of conversions and generate even more sales because you’ll only be
sending them to the people who are interested in what you have to offer
them.
Trust me when I say that by doing this you will be putting yourself ahead of
95% of your competitors, because virtually no one does this process, and the
majority end up making incorrect assumptions about what their niche wants
based on their own ‘gut feelings’ (which are almost always wrong - remember,
you are not your customer!)
So, let’s start off with the basics of building up your customer profile.
To begin with you should make a list of the top 10 websites, blogs, and forums
in your niche. We’ll then take a look at the demographics of these websites
using a couple of online tools.
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However, before we crack on, it’s important to remember that these tools only
give an overview of the demographics, and that they are mainly assumptions
based on the site usage from data gathered from cookies and browsing habits.
We’re using this data to give us an idea of the people in the niche, and
alongside these tools you should also think about the people you know in your
niche: what age ranges they are; whether they’re male or female; what level of
education they have; what type of job and average income they have; whether
or not they’re likely to think about their purchases carefully; or whether
they’re happy to make quick purchases with their disposable income; and so
on.
What we’re trying to do with all this information is build up our customer
avatar so that we can actually describe them. For example, if we were to look at
one of our niches around the topic of owning your own business, we would
end up with something like this:
“James is from the USA, he works full time, is married, has two
children, has a higher than average income, a college education, and
falls into one of two age groups (36-45 or 56-65).
James typically wears a shirt and tie to work, his job pays the bills but
he gets no satisfaction from it, and he’s looking for new ideas to free
himself from the corporate world and take control of his own destiny.
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James doesn’t necessarily want to be rich, but rather he wants to have
a lifestyle business that allows him to maintain a great work / life
balance and give him more freedom.
James buys lots of products, but rarely implements many of the ideas
due to a lack of belief in his own ability and focus.”
So that’s what we’re aiming to put together, and as you can see it’s quite
descriptive and really gives a flavour of the customer. You might actually find
you have more than one customer avatar, and that’s completely fine.
For example, let’s say you own a local gym and you’re going to be producing a
newsletter which is going to be a lead generator that provides fitness and
nutritional tips, but the core focus of the newsletter is actually to get more
members through the doors.
In this scenario you may come up with a number of different customer
avatars, with each one based on a different customer type - so you might have
one aimed at new mums wanting to get back in shape, you might have one
aimed at the older generation who want to remain mobile in their later years,
you might have one aimed at middle-aged men who want to lose those love
handles and get the six-pack back, you might have one aimed at the younger
students who want membership to look hot for the beach etc.
This doesn’t mean you have different newsletters for each customer avatar, but
it will help you put together a newsletter with different sections aimed at the
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different customers, and also help you target and focus your advertising to
each separate group.
So that’s what we’re aiming for, and if you’ve been hanging around all the
popular forums, FB pages, groups, etc., in your niche then you’ve probably got
a good feel for some of this information already.
Let’s now look at a couple of tools we can use to identify some demographics,
and you’ll ideally want to put in the URL’s of your top 10 sites in these tools to
get a good idea of the overall demographics.
First of all we’re going to head on over to Quantcast, and for this example I’m
going to look at the niche of ‘New Mums’ and use the website babycenter.com
as the URL. So, over at Quantcast you just paste in the URL of your first
website and click on the search icon:
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You’ll then get back a bunch of data we can work with, starting with a chart
that gives us an idea of the site’s traffic, and a few options here to see the data
for uniques, visits, and views, and also change the data ranges:
This is all good data, but it’s the next section we’re more interested in because
it covers all of the key demographics which will help us build up our customer
avatar.
You’ll see from the screenshot below that there is some good data here around
gender, age, kids, income, education, and ethnicity, and you’ll also notice that
there’s a button in the bottom left corner that says ‘View Details’:
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If you click on that ‘View Details’ button you get a breakdown of each of the
demographic sections, and it’s this information that we’re most interested in:
As this site is predominantly female, our avatar should also be female.
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If we look at the age range you’ll see I’ve clicked on the ‘Female’ link (just
below the title) so that I can see the age ranges of the female visitors:
I’ve chosen to go the the female subset here because the overwhelming
majority of visitors to this site are female. So with this in mind my customer
avatar will be a woman, and she will be aged between 25-34, and I’ve decided
that I’m going to call her Sarah.
Looking at the next stat I can see that Sarah already has kids:
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And Sarah’s household income is mainly in the $0-50k bracket:
And that Sarah is a white lady who most likely went to college:
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Hopefully you can see how easy it is to use this kind of data to start building up
a customer profile.
Moving down the page you’ll see that in the next section Sarah access the site
mostly using a mobile device:
Now this is important data, not necessarily for your customer avatar, but for
how you are going to approach selling your products and services, because
you need to be able to target ‘Sarah’ and sell to her on mobile because that’s
what she predominantly uses to access the web.
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For a good way to sell on mobile you need to read The Ultimate Checkout
article in this month’s Raine Report Gold edition - I even give you a full
template file to start selling quickly ;)
As you move down the page you’ll see there are sections for the shopping
habits, which TV shows they watch, what occupations they hold, and then you
get to this section about ‘General Interests’:
If you click the ‘View Details’ button here you get another overlay, and then if
you click on the ‘Interests’ link under the title you get an option to select ‘Sites’:
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You now get a list of all the other popular sites that people like ‘Sarah’
frequently visit:
What you should be doing here is adding all of the popular sites to a list, then
going to look at the Quantcast demographics for these as well to help you
further round your customer avatar.
Now that was just one site we looked at, but as I said at the beginning, you
should be taking your top 10 sites in your niche and reviewing each of them,
and you’ll notice as you work through all ten sites that there will be elements
that really stand out and make you more accurately define your avatar.
As you go through these ten sites you’ll also end up with a decent list of the
frequently visited sites (that we’ve just looked at above), and after you’ve done
the same process on these sites you’ll end up with a good customer profile for
you to use as your target customer.
So that was Quantcast, and now I want to move on to the second service I use,
which is called Alexa.
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On the Alexa homepage you’ll need to scroll down to the section where you
can paste in your URL and then click on the ‘Find’ button:
Now the information we get from Alexa is quite basic (there is a paid version
which contains more data), but really we’re using this as an additional tool to
try and verify all of the data we’ve already gathered from Quantcast.
If we now scroll down the page to the demographics section, we can see that
Alexa also give us an overview of the gender split, education level, and
browsing location:
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You can also see the general overview of where in the world the visitors are:
There’s also a section which gives you links to sites related to the one you’re
looking at, which again is good information to go and further research:
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Alexa also contains some other useful information about the popular search
keywords, which can again be very helpful for your overall traffic and
promotion activities:
As I said a moment ago, when you’ve done this for all of your top 10 sites you’ll
definitely see a pattern emerge, and from that data you'll be able to put
together your ideal customer profile and avatar.
Don’t underestimate how powerful this basic research can be, because if you
can put together an accurate customer profile then it will help you not only
with your targeting, but it will also help you decide on your writing style.
For example, you might write slightly differently for a 25 year old American
than you would for a 50 year old person from England, and you might include
different ‘pop culture’ references depending on their age and location.
OK, now we’ve got the basics down I now want to reveal to you my 2 secret
weapons.
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The following is an article from the first edition of my Raine Report Gold
Newsletter, and it outlines how I use a couple of tools to do some advanced
profiling of your customers just from their email address.
Although the article is all about list profiling, the process itself is all about
profiling the customer.
Now, in order to do this you first of all need the customers email address, so if
you have existing lists then that’s great, if not then this will be an advanced
tool for when you’re ready and are actively list building.
To begin with you’ll want to use the Tower Data service which I discuss in the
article, and this will help with building out the customer profile and avatar.
The other service, Full Contact, will give you details on their social profiles.
However, for market research purposes you most likely won’t want to sign up
to the full Full Contact service just to get this information at this stage, but
what you can do is take a random selection of your customers email addresses
(maybe 20-30), add them into your contacts list in Gmail, and then go to the
Full Contact website and sign up for their free address book management
service, and this will build out a full social profile for everybody in your
address book and update their contact record with that information.
You can then go and browse their social profiles to help you build up a better
customer profile / avatar based on their real-life profiles.
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Either way, do not underestimate the power that is available to you, because
using this data in the right way can seriously skyrocket your conversions and
income.
So, the next article will outline my advanced list profiling techniques, and if
you use these in conjunction with your customer avatar and customer profile
then you really can laser target the right people, and make selling a much
easier job to get more cash.
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Advanced List Profiling: Discover How You Can Find Out Everything
About Your Subscribers Just By Knowing Their Email Address
"For knowledge itself is power.” - Francis Bacon
The single most easiest way you can make more money from your email list
today is to profile them, segment them, then customize the email that you are
sending them based on that information.
For example, in the subject lines article you have probably just read earlier in
this report I told you about an email campaign I launched to people who were
65 and older on my list.
It was one of my most successful campaigns I have ever sent (in fact, it’s
possibly still the most successful). The open rate was amazing but more
importantly the actual sales I made were staggering.
But here’s the thing: I have never collected the age of any person on my list.
To be fair I rarely collect anything for any of my lists beyond the basic First
Name and Email Address, but I know everything about my subscribers (yes
even you).
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Here is the kind of data I have:
Demographic Information
Age Gender
City State
Country ZIP Code
Household Data
Household Income Marital Status
Children Home Owner Status
Home Market Value Years They Have Lived There
Are They High Net Worth Ocupation
Education Level
Interests
Arts & crafts Blogging
Books Business
Health & Wellness News & Current Affairs
What They Purchase
Automotive Baby Products
Beauty Charitable Giving
Cooking Discount Shopper
High End Brands Home & Garden
Home Improvement Luxury Goods & Jewellery
Magazines Outdoors & Adventure
Pets Sports
Technology Travel
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Scary yes, and to be fair a little creepy especially when all I need to get this
kind of information on you is your email address... But when it comes to
advanced marketing and really building out segments of your list this is killer
information to have, and the kicker is, it is really simple to get your hands on.
Let me show you how...
Media Preferences
Internet Connection Speed Internet Provider
Do They Watch Videos Browser Or Reader
Social Media Data
Facebook Profile Twitter ID
Number Of Followers Do They Follow Me
Pinterest Account Google+ Account
Websites They Own Organizations They Work For
Klout Score LinkedIn Profile
Profile Pictures
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Collecting The Data
I get all my data from just a couple of sources, and like I said a moment ago, all
I need to get access to this is an email address. The primary services I use to
gather this information are Full Contact and Tower Data.
Tower Data provide all the demographic profiling information such as your
income, interests, and type of purchases you make, whilst Full Contact allows
you to build a full social media profile just from an email address.
Tower Data only provide information on US citizens due to the databases they
have access to, but Full Contact works worldwide.
For both of these services I use their API to automatically gather the
information when a new contact is added to my email system. To implement
this you would have to get a programmer to build an interface between your
mail system (such as AWeber) and the two services, but this it really simple to
implement and shouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred bucks.
Alternatively, if you just wanted to split your lists into age groups for example,
or profile your list to get a better understanding of them, then Tower Data
allows you to bulk process your list and returns a spreadsheet of all the data
they have on your subscribers.
Cost wise you can either pay a monthly subscription which gives you a certain
number of credits to use on their service, or like I mentioned above you can
just pay a one off fee and process your list in bulk on demand.
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For example, to get the Age, Gender, and Household Income for 5,000 email
addresses would cost you $83.00 (which is 0.017c per address), but the value
you add to your existing list can be phenomenal.
Let's have a look at how you can take this information and tailor email content
to key segments.
Price Segmenting
Everyone likes to get the most revenue out of a single piece of marketing, but
in the current economic climate we have to offer payment plans and other
discounts to get our lists to buy. The trouble with split payments is that there
is a higher than normal chance that the customer will default on the second or
third payment, or even request a refund.
This is just natural human behaviour, they have paid first time around and
taken a look at the content you are providing, download everything if they can,
and if they haven't used it before the next re-bill date, there is an increased
chance of them asking for a refund.
Or they just max out the card they were using to make the payment so the next
charge gets declined. Either way, whenever you have split billing there is
always the risk of not getting paid in full.
The solution to this is simple, if you segment your list into household income
(and preferably age), then you can offer payment plans to certain segments as
you know they might not be able to cover the full amount in one charge. And
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for those that are older and on a higher household income you would just
offer them the single payment option.
Traditionally older people have more lines of credit available to them which
also have higher limits than a typical 25 - 35 year old, and even though the
older customer would typically be more reliable at making the monthly
payments it is always better for cashflow to get as much money upfront as
possible.
Using Emotional Triggers
The key to any email campaign is to tell a good story, one which resonates
with the circumstances of the reader. For example: using the data you could
target low income, blue collar workers and use the 'dead end job...' angle.
Or a friend of mine has a list which primarily consists of women, she uses
segmentation to personalize her emails depending on whether they have
children and also send custom emails to older women who have had children
but there is a good chance they have left home.
The potential here is endless, it is all about building avatars for your customers
and writing emails that focus on them and not just a general group of people. I
will discuss that in a minute.
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The High Net Worth Individual
Any list you build will contain a percentage of ‘whales’. These are high net
worth individuals who have disposable income, and they are happy to spend
their money on products that will make them more money, improve their skill
at a hobby etc.
If you are just building a list in your niche it is often difficult to spot these
people unless you have previously sold high ticket items to them before, but
by using the data available you can build very specific campaigns just for
them.
Courting these high net worth individuals is the best way to make a lot of
money with a lot less work overall, and that is a strategy I will be sharing with
you in the future.
Building Your Customer’s Avatars
To make the most out of your data gathering you really need to build up
several profiles of the different type of people on your list. Give each of them a
real name and describe their lifestyle and activities. Where do they work?
What kind of house do they live in? Are they into social media? Do they eat
out often? Are they married? Do they have kids?
By building several distinct profiles you really get to understand your list, and
when it comes to writing a series of emails you can pull out their profiles and
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ask yourself ‘Does this email I am writing really target that person?’ If not, then
make sure to write an email just for them.
The extra effort you put in to bonding with your reader will pay dividends. Yes
it is a bit of a pain in the ass in the beginning (and I still do it way less than I
should), but as you get into the swing of it you will find it easier to get into
their heads and write content just for them.
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Keeping On Top Of The New Bot Revolution
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” - Obi Wan Kenobi
I covered how bots are going to be big this year in my prediction piece inside
Issue #10, and then in last month’s edition I did an update piece on how things
have leapt forwards in the world of the chat bot, and how it’s moving quicker
than I initially thought.
But speed, and all these new bots on different platforms, brings with it a very
real problem which we’re about to face.
The main issue we’re going to have is that there are so many platforms out
there who are integrating bots, it’s going to be hard to keep a track of the latest
ones coming out.
Which brings me on point for this very quick article...
I’ve found this nifty website which is doing a pretty decent job of collating a list
of a bunch of bots which you can narrow down by platform, and it’s totally
free.
The site is called BotList and it can be found here: https://botlist.co/
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As well as being able to do a search for bots, there are category and platform
specific links down the left hand side to narrow down your search:
This is a super helpful resource, there are hundreds of bots on there at the
moment, and that figure is getting bigger by the day.
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When you click into one of the bots on the site you get a page which outlines
what the bot does, the platform it’s available on, and links through to the
relevant website so you can find out more:
There’s loads of bots already listed, and you should definitely take a browse
around to see if there are any which will make your life easier.
Bot discovery is going to be one of the most important things going forwards, I
hope that it doesn’t become as muddled as the app store has with it’s pitiful
search and discovery, and sites like this one are a step in the right direction
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Are You Ready For Google’s Brand New Eye Grabbing Search Results?
“The future of mobile is the future of online. It is how people
access online content now” - David Murphy
If you’ve been reading The Raine Report for a while you’ll know that I’ve been
coving the massive shift over to mobile quite heavily, and Google have just
announced another change to bring the rich snippets into line with their new
style of mobile display.
Google have just announced the start of moving across rich snippet results
into much larger and appealing ‘Rich Cards’ format, and if you take a look at
this image we can see how the new changes will look:
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That image is a little small, so let me zoom in to how the rich snippet results
look now (on the left) to how they will look in the new rich card format:
As you can see, they take up to entire top half of the screen and grab
attention much more easily with their larger image format.
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At the moment Google is only starting to show the new rich cards for the
movies and recipes content categories in the google.com English results
pages, but I imagine this will start to roll out across all the rich snippet
categories in the next few months so that they start to fall in line with the new
look and layout that Google are pushing in mobile search.
If you’ve not yet implemented the rich snippet markup on your sites then you
should go back and read ‘The One Crucial Thing To Stand Out From The
Crowd’ article inside Issue #6 of The Raine Report where I covered how to
implement rich snippets, and inside that article you can also access two free
WordPress plugins so you can do it all easily.
I’ve been saying it for well over a year that the future is on mobile, so you need
to make sure you’re all over this right now.
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