According to the Direct Marketing Association, the return on investment for a well-run email marketing campaign is more than 38 dollars for every dollar spent. When you consider this type of return on investment, it becomes clear that you can and should use email marketing to get more prospects and sales. I know people regularly declare email marketing dead, but they do this for your attention and to sell you a non-email marketing product. This article will go over the basics of email marketing and you can visualise how it will work for your business.
Let’s go through some tips and ideas to improve your email marketing techniques so you get more prospects and make more sales. After all, you’re not going to get a 38 to 1 return on investment without using the right methods which include choosing the right audience, the right products, crafting the right messages, and sending them in the right way at the right time.
Create an Audience Avatar
Naturally, you need to know who you’re talking to as well as what excites and motivates them. Creating a customer/audience profile and general image, sometimes called an avatar, can help you focus on the overall audience’s needs. You can also create a profile for different segments of your audience based on a variety of their demographics. For example, where they are in your marketing funnel and their buying cycle might be one type of profile.
You want to know who they are, what keeps them up at night, how much money they earn, as well as how they spend their extra money. The more you know about the person the easier it will be to create messages, select and create products to sell to them, and personalize each message that you send.
To study your audience, join groups they’re taking part in, join the competition’s email lists, and read as much as you can about the audience you want to work with that you can. The more you know the audience the more effective any type of content marketing, including email marketing, will work. The reason is that it’s much easier to create messages for an audience you understand.
Know Your Products & Services
The other thing you need to do to get more prospects is to know how and why your products and services appeal to your target market. This doesn’t just apply to ones that you create, but to everything that you promote, such as affiliate items. Promoting anything that isn’t suited to your audience’s problems, needs, or related topics makes them lose trust in your judgment and expertise.
Try out products you recommend so that you can be honest in your assessment of whether it’s right for your audience or not. Get to know the product creators that you plan to promote via affiliate marketing. It’s your reputation on the line. When you send an email recommending something, they’re going to remember that you told them about it. You’ll either develop trust with your audience or you will have wasted a little time.
Keep Building Your List
Even if you have a responsive list now, it’s important that you use the information you know about your audience and products to keep building your list. The more list members you have that need and want what you offer them the more profitable you’re going to become. However, it’s imperative that you learn to target who you want on your list better. The more targeted your list members are the better results you’re going to get in terms of email opens and actions taken on your CTAs.
There are many ways to build your list faster. One way that works very well right now is content upgrades. A content upgrade could be a PDF checklist, a white paper, or other information that helps make the content the viewer is reading on your blog more useful and valuable but requires the reader to sign up for your list to get on the item. This type of lead magnet is much more successful since it’s super targeted to what your audience is currently reading making them automatically more responsive list members.
Use the Right Email Marketing Software
Don’t try to skimp on the software that you use to create your autoresponder, landing pages, forms, and shopping cart. Use software that is designed for your industry. For example, if you’re going to promote items that offer an affiliate link that you did not create yourself make sure you use an autoresponder that permits affiliate marketing as some of them, such as MailChimp.com do not.
We recommend and use Active Campaign. However, there are many other choices out there. The best way to pick the right one is to decide what type of features you need not just today, but as your business grows. At the very least you need analytics, forms, automation, segmentation, integration with other software like landing page software, and the ability to perform A/B testing.
Understand the Value of Your List
Your email list is better than, and worth more than your Facebook Group, more than your LinkedIn Group, more than your YouTube Channel, and even more than your blog alone. The reason is that even your target audience often needs to get to know you better before buying your offerings or taking you up on your recommendations.
Email marketing is a simple and effective way to do all that. Plus, when these other platforms die, you will still always have your email list because you can download it from your chosen platform to use on other platforms such as through creating “look-a-like” audiences for Facebook Ads.
Ensure Your Email Can Be Read & Responded to On Any Device
Regardless of which software you choose to use, it’s important to make sure that your audience can not only read your email messages, but they need to be able to respond as well using the same service. The main reason is that no one is going to check your messages on their phone, then transfer to their PC to finalize their order.
Your audience needs to be able to easily read and respond on every platform. The only way to ensure that happens is to pick the right service, templates, and test every message. Don’t make it too complicated for them to take advantage of your offer. When people make a buying decision, they don’t want to go through a ten-minute process of accepting the offer. For example, if you don’t need their snail mail address, don’t ask for it.
Know Which Email Format Works Best for Your Audience
There are many fancy email templates available through autoresponder software. However, depending on your audience, it may not be wise to use the templates. In some cases, regular text-based email messages will outperform HTML-based messages; but keep in mind that it totally depends on your audience.
For example, if you have an artistic audience they are more likely to appreciate HTML-based messages with beautiful images, specialized fonts, and so forth. Other audiences may prefer text-based messages without a lot of extras inside, such as images. Sometimes image-based emails just don’t look right on all platforms.
There are still people, for instance, who cannot watch videos using their internet due to where they live. This is important information to study for your audience and test. Try testing them first. Send both types and allow your audience to choose what they prefer if your autoresponder allows it.
Develop Targeted and Timely Content
The best way to ensure that you always send the right content to your email list is to plan. When you plan your content; also, plan to use your email list to promote your blog posts, social media updates, webinars, and more. Your email marketing messages are informed by who your audience is, what their pain points are, and the solutions that you want to offer to them.
Each time you create or find a product you want to promote, create an educational email series of 7 to 10 emails that describes the problem and the solution. To keep emails short, link to details provided on the blog post. Email readers will go to your blog to read more. Hint: Don’t forget to create matching social media messages too.
Develop Effective Subject Lines
If you want your audience to open your email messages, it’s imperative that you learn how to create subject lines that get your subscriber's attention. Not only do you have to get them on your list, but you must also get them to open and read your messages. Then, you have to inspire or intrigue them enough in your message to take action.
One way to get them to open your messages is to provide a reason to open them via the subject line. Subject lines should be clear, to the point, and use the type of keywords that trigger your audience to want to see what’s inside the email. Subject lines should not be tricky, clever, or puns. They should state directly what the reader will get inside to be most effective and when appropriate, personalized to grab their attention.
Email Messages of Value Regularly
Once you get people on your email list, it’s important not to ignore them. Send messages that are full of value regularly. Your email messages can be even more valuable than your blog posts in some ways because they are more direct and personal in nature even if they are usually shorter messages.
When someone first joins your list, they should receive a welcome message that explains what to expect from being a list member. Congratulate them for joining and being part of your exclusive list. To qualify them, further, send an upsell one-time offer on the following message based on how they got on your list. This type of segmentation will help improve your ROI exponentially by helping to weed out freebie seekers.
Test Messages to Ensure They Look Right & Work as Intended
Even if you’ve used your autoresponder numerous times, don’t get lazy. Always test every new message to ensure that the formatting is correct, that the links work, you send it to the right segment, and that the message works on the device or software that your audience uses.
Taking the extra step to test the messages will increase your ROI too. Other types of testing can include sending the exact same message to your list but sending half the message with one subject line and half with a different subject line. Also, remember that important messages shouldn’t only be sent one time. Send them to people who did not open them again with new subject lines so that you’ll get more opens and sales.
Remember the Reaction
Always include some call to action (CTA) within your email messages. There are many ways to do this and different industries suggest different methods. One way to ensure that your messages have a CTA is to identify why you’re sending the message to start with. What do you want your audience to do after they read the message? There should be no confusion about what your readers should do next, which should be the CTA.
When writing CTAs describe the value of the offer or what the results of the offer will be for the person who is smart enough to take advantage of it. For example, “Yes! I want more freedom now.” Another option might be, “Help Me Be Successful!” or something like that. Don’t just say “buy now” or “sign up.” Reiterate the benefits of taking action. If you use images in your emails make the CTA button stand out. Add your CTA above the fold, in the middle, and at the end of the email message.
Check Your Analytics, Tweak, & Repeat
The fact of the matter is that you cannot succeed on a regular basis if you don’t know why you succeeded to start with. Anyone can accidentally make a lot of money online without a plan, but the trick is being able to repeat it month after month. The thing is it’s not even a trick. With sound planning, testing, and data you can improve your email marketing continuously so that you get more prospects and more sales on a consistent and regular basis.
As you learn more about what makes your audience respond take note of it so that you can improve each future promotion effort. When you look at the analytics, depending on what it shows, you should be able to determine what the problems are and what the successes are. For example, suppose you sent an email message for a one-time offer (OTO), and 80 percent of your audience clicked through but no one took the offer. What does that tell you?
That tells you that something is wrong with the sales page or that what you said the offer was about within the email is so different from what they see on the sales page that they feel tricked. Alternatively, what if you send out an email and no one opens it? Does that mean it was a horrible email? Nope. It means that you need to improve the subject line, assuming that it is something of interest to your audience, and send it out again.
Ready to start with creating your email list the right way? Or contact us to talk through doing it for you.
