Last week we began exploring the importance of a brilliant email marketing strategy.
Email marketing is the most potent form of marketing there is, and NONE of my private clients get away without doing it. But simply having an email strategy is only the first piece of the pie. If you want your email marketing program to resonate with your readers—and deliver a high return on investment—then it’s crucial to go above and beyond.
Maximize your email marketing success and get more out of your limited time and energy with these five easy tips to an email marketing program that works:
This is my number one piece of advice:
Before you get started with anything else, it is absolutely crucial to commit to a CONSISTENT email marketing strategy.
Decide a schedule for your email marketing and stick with it. It doesn’t matter if you’re too “busy” or timid or stuck with what you should say—a consistent email marketing strategy is the only way you will see serious results. No excuses allowed.
I recommend emailing your tribe once a week. For most businesses, this is a great routine as it enables you to nurture relationships and stay in your subscribers’ heads without overdoing it. However, depending on your market and how much content you are producing, you might find weekly emails to be too much or too little. Sites like the Huffington Post and the Skim send daily emails, and they are great at it. Alternatively, you can start small and send out emails only once or twice a month. Play around with it to see what works for you and your audience.
Once you have decided the regularity with which you will send out emails, pick a day and time your correspondence will go out.
Consistency is what builds credibility and reliability. Your subscribers will begin to look forward to and expect your content, and eventually, they will look forward to loving and sharing it, too!
The most challenging part of any successful email marketing strategy is getting your readers to OPEN your emails. Think about your personal inbox. How many emails do you get every single day? Which ones do you open—and why?
You must entice your readers. Your subject line is the first impression you make, and if it’s not a good one, it will be the only impression. Make your subscribers NEED to know what is in your email. Once your readers become avid fans, then they will start to look forward to your emails and (ideally) open them based on your name alone.
According to MailChimp, “The best email subject lines are short, descriptive and provide the reader with a reason to explore your message further.”
This is a great guideline to follow, but it’s not the rule of law for everyone. We’ll talk more about this below, but don’t be afraid to experiment while learning what resonates with your readers. If you’re just getting started, try these free email subject line templates that are proven to increase email open rates.
I recommend avoiding words like ‘free’ and ‘percent off’ as they have been overused by spammers. And whatever you do, don’t offer false promises just to get people to open your email. This will very quickly lead to lots of unsubscribes, and it’s just not good business.
Extra Tip: Your subject line can be the most fantastic in the world, but it won’t do you any good if your email lands in the recipient’s spam folder. When you send out your first email to your readers, ask them to add you to their address book so that none of your juicy tips and tricks go unnoticed. If you’re using Gmail, then you can also request your readers to drag and drop your emails from the Promotions folder to their Primary folder. Don’t assume that they will know to do this without your guidance.
We touched on this last week, but I want to mention it again because it is so vital to your email marketing success.
If you want to build and nurture valuable relationships with your tribe—the kind of relationships that lead to lifetime customers and clients—then over-deliver on useful content. Put regular awesomeness in their inbox, along with personal emails and other things your readers love. The more epic, the better.
To do this well, you need to know your target audience. If you intimately understand their pain points—their deepest needs and desires—then you will know what information will be valuable to them.
As a general guideline, your emails should follow the 90/10 rule. 90% of the information you are providing your readers should be educational, entertaining or informative. Only 10% should be promotional.
I recommend subscribing to a bunch of other emails from similar businesses in your niche. Analyze their subject lines, their format, the content that they are providing. Notice what you love about them, but also take note of the things that don’t resonate with you. Subscribing to other emails will also help you notice if there is a gap in the market waiting for your unique spin or brilliant offerings.
There’s no right or wrong answer for how long the bodies of your emails should be. However, you should keep your emails on topic and to-the-point. Your readers should never be thinking “What’s the point?” or “Why do I care?”
If you are writing out a lengthy email, make it easy to scan by incorporating a lot of white space, bullet points and headlines, just as you would in a blog post. We’re all busy, and if your reader cannot scan your email to discover the major points quickly, then they will likely delete the email without giving it a second thought.
Finally, always ensure that you have a clear Call To Action. This is where I see many entrepreneurs go wrong. They don’t want their emails to be viewed as promotional, so they leave out any explicit Calls To Action that the reader can take. But every piece of content that you create should have a goal in mind—even if that goal is just getting the user to click through to read a blog post or download a free white paper. Don’t overdo it by overwhelming the reader with multiple calls to action. When we’re confused or overwhelmed, then we do nothing. Focus on one Call To Action, and incorporate it into the email multiple times.
If you receive Neil Patel’s emails, then you know he is great at this. His emails are short, crisp and clean—yet he still manages to link to his blog posts three times in the body of the email.
Test everything. Explore and evaluate the results. See what works and what doesn’t work for your particular business, niche and audience. This is the action step so few of us want to take, but it’s what will elevate a regular email marketing strategy to an absolutely brilliant one.
Test the day and time you send your emails. Test the subject lines. Test the design and the content. Then keep testing regularly. Hubspot has a fantastic article about the eight big tests you should run in your email marketing program; I recommend reading it for further steps on this subject.
Whose emails do you subscribe to that you simply LOVE? Share any and all inspiration in the comments below so we can all grow your email marketing programs together!
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Consistency, one of the most important parts for email marketing or I can say for any forms of marketing but this is the area where most of the marketer struggles, even I did. At the beginning of the campaign it seems very easy to be consistent, but with the time people discovers how tough it is. But by having a proper plan at initial stage can help them being more consistent. Thanks a lot Lynan for this killer post.
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