Most companies make a massive mistake. They have no strategy for email marketing.
All they do is send out one email after another to their list wishing for a sale.
But that doesn’t work…
That’s why in this astonishing article I’m going to show you the best strategy for email marketing.
So, let’s begin!
Why Is Email Marketing Important?
You have probably heard that email marketing has a 4,200% ROI…but you are not going to get that just by sending out emails.
But I don’t want to make email marketing look any less important than it is by saying that.
Through the power of email you can easily recover 80% of potentially lost sales because email gives you the power to do 4 things:
- Follow up with people who don’t buy.
- Turn cold strangers into hot leads that want to buy.
- Generate traffic for your sales funnel just by hitting the “send” button and make a to of sales.
- If your social media marketing goes down because Instagram bans you, Zuckerberg starts to hate you or something else, you still can stay in touch with your leads because of the power of email that NOBODY can take away from you.
It will save you when you need it, get you new customers, when you want, and help you increase your sales in every funnel that you create.
It is just awesome!
5 Best Email Marketing Practices To Follow
To be successful with your email marketing, there are some best email practices that you want to follow to be successful…
Segment Your Audience
Segmentation is the most important part of the whole email marketing. Nothing brings bigger results than segmented email marketing campaigns.
Why is that? You see, to be successful at email marketing there is a necessary formula to follow:
- Send A Right Message
- To The Right Person
- At The Right Time
And the only way you can do that is by segmenting your audience. If you have all contacts in one big “package” you will have a damn big problem with sending your marketing email to the right person.
But, if you are still on the fence, and you need to see numbers to believe in what I have to say…
Here are some statistics that you are going to find useful (and motivating):
Well, after seeing the numbers you finally understand how powerful it is. The problem you may be facing now is, “How do I segment my audience?”.
There are many ways you can segment your audience, but the most important one is segmenting based on their interests so that you can send them relevant marketing emails.
But there are also other factors that matter. Some of them are segmenting them based on their position in the buyer’s journey, age, and the landing page they used to opt-in.
Only when you are going to do this, you can send the right marketing email to the right person at the right time.
Well, the next step is to check how you are going to gather all the data for your email marketing.
The first and the easiest thing is to ask them for it directly in the opt-in. The problem is that the more questions you ask, the lower amount of people who are going to give you their information.
That’s why the juicy carrot must be absolutely irresistible. If they see that the reward is worth giving you more than just the email address and the first name, they will do it.
Here is an example of an opt-in from HubSpot:
Here you can see what an opt-in that gathers more data looks like. HubSpot also asks for website URL, phone number, company name, and the number of employees that work there.
With that info, they can make the email marketing campaigns extremely personalized as they can add additional data based on these things.
However, asking for so much stuff extremely reduces the opt-in rate. Especially the phone number.
But if you want extremely high-quality leads, you can do that.
The second, much harder thing to do is to investigate every single contact in your email list.
Check where they are from, which page they used to opt-in, see if they are opening your marketing emails, etc.
This one is a bit harder, but it is definitely worth it. In short, you just have to segment your audience before even thinking of clicking on the “send” button.
Nothing is worse than sending a wrong marketing email to the wrong person at the wrong time. Doing it instantly means zero results and a high unsubscribe rate from the followers side.
Send Your Email From A Real Person, Not Your Company (Unless Its Name Is Similar To Yours)
As you already know, the more personal the marketing email is, the better. And your FROM name can mean a difference between a success and a failure.
People hate when the marketing email that you send to them looks like a bulk email. They want a personal experience.
Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates!
When your marketing emails are personalized to each user, they’ll be more likely to take action and engage with your emails. But more on that later.
Now we want to take a look at the “from” field. The biggest mistake that you can do is to put your company name here (unless the name is similar to yours.)
For example, Dan Lok has built a personal brand and his company is named Dan Lok. That is why he can use the name Dan Lok in his “from” field. It’s his name and people can imagine him writing the marketing email. That way it is personal.
But if you’re not in a similar situation as Dan Lok is you never want to use your company name.
Use your own name instead. That is much more personal.
For example, instead of [Company name] use [Rebecca from “Company name”]. It is way more powerful.
Or even better use your name only.
It is essential for your email marketing success.
Include One Call-To-Action Button Per Email
Why it is so necessary to do this?
Well, you don’t want to confuse the reader about what action they should take. Confusion leads to inaction.
That means if you are going to ask for more than one thing they should do, they won’t do anything.
First, you want to set a goal for your marketing email. To be able to do that and make sure you lead down the readers towards your goal, you have to make sure you know what your goal is.
I know, this may seem like a no-brainer to you. The problem is that an incredible amount of marketers still neglect this step. And that is why they fail.
They write about something, and they don’t even know why.
You want to be different. You want to be the marketer that asks “Why am I writing this email in the first place?”.
Only when you have answered this question you can write a marketing email that converts. (And that will have only one call-to-action button.)
Second, tell them what they should do and include the CTA button. That’s it. But again, make sure that you are leading them towards only one action they should take.
Do not tell them to click a second link that will redirect them to another page in the P.S. section.
ONE CTA is the key!
Make Sure You Use A Mobile-Friendly Template
Devices like smartphones and tablets make it super easy for users to check their inboxes on the go, which is probably why mobile devices accounted for at least 50% of all read emails.
Checking emails on mobile is especially common with younger crowds. 40% of people 18 years old and under will always open an email on their mobile first.
That means if your emails are going to look broken on mobile devices, you just lost half of the potential conversions.
And usually, it is even more. It all depends on your audience.
But, how are you going to make sure that this won’t happen? It all starts with your ESP or Email Service Provider.
When writing a marketing email you want to make sure that you’ve chosen the right template that is going to customize for each device.
If you don’t have the option, you should seriously consider changing your ESP. If you can’t make your emails customized for mobile devices, you are losing an incredible amount of money.
That is the reality.
The next thing you want to pay attention to is your email image size. Is your email going to look good if the images are not going to load?
Is it going to hurt my conversion rates?
To prevent this you want to make sure that you are using .jpg images with extremely low file sizes. Also, make sure that the images are sized properly. Don’t use images larger than 1200×600 pixels.
Sticking with these tips will help you optimize your marketing emails for mobile devices and make sure that you will make the most out of every email marketing campaign you create.
Use Personalization
I already talked about this earlier. Consumers love getting messages and offers that are personalized to their needs and interests.
In fact, 74% of people hate being shown irrelevant content, which makes personalization incredibly important to a great email marketing strategy.
You can personalize your emails in a number of ways. For instance, many marketers personalize emails based on their demographics like gender and age; 66% of marketers personalize their emails based on age data.
This is exactly the point when segmentation kicks in. If you haven’t segmented your audience, you will never be able to make your emails personal.
So, if you haven’t started segmenting your audience yet, go back to that step and make sure that you have done so.
Now let’s take a look at what exactly personalization means.
Personalization is making your emails a one-to-one conversation, talking about a topic that is of interest to them, and including personalization.
The very first step is to write about a topic they are interested in.
Nobody gives a damn if you are writing a personal email to them if it is about something they don’t care about.
It must be of importance to them.
If you are writing to vegans, talk about how to prepare vegan breakfast. If you are writing to runners, talk about how to run faster and longer distances.
That is absolutely necessary. And it is one of the main reasons why segmentation is so important.
Second, you want to make it a one-to-one conversation.
Make sure that you write the way you talk. You want to be authentic, and you want to write directly to them.
Imagine that you are writing to a family member or to a friend that you know for a long time. You will see how communicative you will be.
And the third step is to include personalization.
“What the hell Filip? That’s what you’re talking about the whole time!”
Well, no. Including personalization means including their name inside the email, or subject line and using other information about your reader in the message.
You do that by using merge tags that your ESP is supporting. For example, in Mailchimp *|FNAME|* means including their first name instead of the tag. So the final message would look like this…
“Hi *|FNAME|*,” would be turned into “Hi Filip,”.
And that is much more personal than just the classic “Hi…”
But you have to make sure that you collect their name in your opt-in offer. The other side of this is that you don’t want to overuse it.
Using their name too much in the copy will make it sound like a message from a robot instead of a human. I suggest not using their name more than 2-3 times in the copy.
But now, let’s move on to the email marketing strategy itself…
Email Marketing Strategy Part #1: Soap Opera Sequences
Have you ever watched a soap opera? It never concludes, and that is exactly what these sequences are designed to do.
They are designed to quickly establish a relationship between you and your dream customer and also to sell the first thing you want to sell in just a few emails after people join your email list.
The most basic soap opera sequence consists of 5 emails, and it goes like this…
Email #1 – Set a stage – where you want to tell them who you are and set a stage for the next emails to come.
Email #2 – The backstory + a wall – In this email, you are going to start telling your story related to the product or service that you are going to sell. You will tell them your backstory, and the point of your journey when you hit a wall, couldn’t move further, and looked for a solution to that problem (which is the point where they are now.)
Then you are going to end that email with a cliffhanger like this, “But then I found something out. Something that blew my socks off every time I looked at it. Do would want to find out what it is? Then look for tomorrow’s email.”
And you are going to continue the story in email #3.
Email #3 – The Epiphany – Here you are going to reveal the big epiphany that you had. The big “light bulb moment” that has revealed the solution to you (which is of course going to be related to your product or service.) And of course, you are going to include a call to action to find out more about it at the end of the email.
You can probably notice that the person who reads those emails is no longer a cold lead, but they literally DESIRE what you sell as they can relate to the story and they are looking for the solution that you have created. They literally sell themselves when they make their own conclusions based on the story you told and that is going to get you to the bank.
Again, you are going to end this email with a cliffhanger looking like this, “In the next email I would love to show you some hidden benefits of_______ that you never thought existed. Make sure you read it when it comes tomorrow.”
Email #4 – The Hidden Benefits – This is the email where you are going to show them some hidden benefits of the result they will experience when they buy your product or service. Those benefits are not obvious at first, so you want to tell it in a story format to make sure they resonate with it and take action when you ask them to find out more about your offer at the end of the email.
And now, let’s move on to the last email…
Email #5 – Urgency/CTA – This is the email where you are going to make your offer a “now or never” option. They either take action or they will lose the chance. That is going to give the final push to those who didn’t buy your stuff yet. It is super important and you must be honest with the urgency. If it is fake, you are going to lose your credibility.
Whoa! That is a great sequence, wouldn’t you agree?
You can literally use it to sell anything you want. Once it ends, you will move the recipient to the daily email list.
So, let’s take a look at how it works…
Email Marketing Strategy Part #2 – Daily Email List
The next part of this amazing strategy is the Daily Email list. Here you are going to send an email to your audience every single day that has the entire story and offer within itself.
That means you will create emotion, and make them act in every email that you send out.
Make sure that you switch formats and sometimes you educate, sometimes tell a good story, sometimes you can be funny.
But you must keep a good relationship with your email list. Nothing is more important than that for the success of your email marketing.
Filip Konecny 