One thing that is commonly misunderstood in the Internet marketing industry is the phrase, “The money is in the list.” This is a true statement, but it is misconstrued because many people read it in terms of the volume of subscribers rather than quality of the relationship.
If you want to have an edge over the competition, email marketing is one tool that will allow you to shut out the static and noise online and foster a close relationship with the people who have decided you are trustworthy enough to give their contact information to.
There is a right and a wrong way to engage in email marketing campaigns. It doesn’t matter that many unethical spammers have seen short-term success with their poor quality emails. What matters is that you enjoy a long term, mutually beneficial interaction with your target audience.
Many spammers ruin their reputation and have to start over and scam people from new accounts. You want to do better – to be better – and give yourself a competitive edge by giving your readers what they signed up for!
Below, you’ll discover the many ways you can outperform other marketers in your niche using email marketing strategies that people respond best to. You’ll learn what to do (and what not to do, too) to increase your conversions and profits.
Get Personal with Your Communications
Personalization is a seemingly small touch, but it goes a long way in making subscribers receive your message more smoothly. In fact, many will come to view you as a friend and they will enjoy seeing your email in their inbox, even if it’s daily.
You might discover they reach out if there’s a day where you haven’t contacted them – just because they’re worried about you. This is a loyalty that many marketers would love to have, but they don’t know where to begin.
You can start by using their name in the emails. Your autoresponder system probably allows you to select an option to use their first name. It may look like this: {!firstname_fix}.
Many non-marketers don’t know this is a script and they will assume you’re emailing them with true personalization, which you would if you could remember thousands of individuals personally on each email.
Next, you want to decide what kind of tone and style you want to use. You definitely want it to be conversational in nature. Make sure you use contractions like “I’ll” instead of “I will” so that it doesn’t sound so robotic.
As for tone, you can have any type of persona you want, but try to be consistent with it. You might use a motivational, uplifting tone or one that’s hyped up. Your tone may be humorous, but always friendly.
You may or may not want to use emojis (like a smiley face) in your emails and subject lines. Some people respond really well to these because it’s how they interact with their own friends and family.
Make sure you’re using storytelling. Give them some anecdotes about your own experiences and share stories that make them relate to your message personally. If you’re always just spouting facts and figures, it can be like reading an encyclopedia rather than an email.
Another thing you can do to personalize your emails is ask questions of your subscribers. The communications should be a two-way street for as long as you can handle the volume.
Eventually, if your list grows to hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of people, it might not be feasible to personally reply to every email. But you can take a few responses and create an email or video about the kinds of replies you got back, reassuring them that you read every one, etc.
Motivate Them to Better Their Lives
No matter which niche you’re in, your subscribers have signed up to your email list in the hopes that your communications will somehow improve their life. Whether it’s helping them make money, lose weight, communicate better with their spouse or grow a garden, it’s all something they want to combat what they feel is going wrong or lacking in their life currently.
So part of your job, and part of what will keep them on your list and responsive to your emails, is to motivate them to take the information you send and apply it in a series of steps that will bring those improvements to fruition.
How do you motivate people you’ve never met? First you have to understand their needs and goals. What’s driving them? You might know some just through common sense, but sometimes, it can help to survey people and pay attention to what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.
Many of your subscribers are going to need help setting goals for themselves regarding your niche. They’ll want clues as to how to create mini milestone, and you’ll want to cheer them on along the way.
You never just want to share your own success in the niche, but highlight some of your subscribers’ success stories, too (with their permission, of course). This kind of shout out is inspiring to others on your list.
Be sure to celebrate small goals and not just those who climb the highest mountains. For example, if you’re in the weight loss niche, you don’t only want to talk about someone losing 100 pounds, but those who fit into a new size clothing or someone who finally feels at peace leaving food on their plate.
Another good way to motivate people is to showcase tools and other resources besides you that can benefit them. There might be an app they can download or a printable tracker that can help.
Sometimes, motivation is about showing how you have struggled. By highlighting your own failures, you make people less afraid of reaching out to you and less ashamed of where they are now, motivating them to keep pushing toward success.
Whenever someone reaches out to you, really pay attention to the emotion behind their words. Sometimes, they’ll tell you they feel like breaking down, and other times, you’ll see a hint of desperation in their urgency for an answer, giving you the opportunity to step up and serve them in a moment of need.
Make sure you not only discuss the products and struggles, but what life is like on the other side of success. Some may not even be able to imagine it, so you’ll want to paint a picture of some of the lesser-known perks that can drive them.
For example, with the work at home or make money online niche, most marketers tout the unlimited earnings, ability to work from anywhere, and be your own boss slant. But sometimes it’s the little things, like being able to show up for your child’s school play at two in the afternoon that makes someone work for their success.
Don’t forget that motivation isn’t just about rosy images and future benefits. It’s teaching them to have accountability and to be able to reflect upon their efforts and improve on any weaknesses they have.
Pay Attention to What They Respond to
Finding out what’s resonating with your subscribers (and what’s repelling them) is a great way to edge out the competition in your niche. You’ll be able to do more of what they want, and eliminate ineffective marketing messages.
Many online entrepreneurs simply do what they want to do, never considering how their readers will respond. You want each message going out to be targeted and for the reader to feel as if it’s relevant to their life.
There are data tools that are built into your autoresponder system that can help you discover how your email messages were received. For example, by looking at your open rate, you’ll know if the subject line was effective or not.
The conversion and click-through rates that tell you how many people take action on your email will see if your messaging is on point or if you need to switch gears to convince people with a different take on the information or a new call to action.
You want to see, after sending a message, how many people unsubscribe – and how many hit the spam complaint link. This can be a direct indicator to you that your emails are being considered unwanted and a waste of their time.
It can also be a sign that you’re emailing too much. Or, if you’ve let your list grow cold, that they no longer remember who you are or why you’re contacting them. Either way, pay attention and try to keep those numbers down.
It might help you learn which emails (and frequency) work best with your subscribers if you implement a split testing campaign. This is also known as A/B testing, and it allows you to send two emails out (some people get one version and some get the other) and see which one performs better.
Emails Are Not a One-Size Fits All
Sometimes, even though you’re leading a generally similar group in a niche, there will be slight differences or reasons why you won’t want to send an email out to all of them. For this, you can use email segmentation that lets you send a message to some of your subscribers based on a behavior or demographic that you feel is important.
Segmenting lets you divvy up your list into smaller groups. You can still send out one mass email if you have something relevant for all of your subscribers, too. But when you segment your list, it lets you tailor your messages a bit better.
There are different ways to segment a list. You can segment them based on characteristics like their age, gender or income level. You might segment them based on which country or region they’re from, too.
If you have something relevant to women only, or those over 50 – or people living in America only, then segmenting your list will help you keep those who fall outside of those parameters on your list without risking them unsubscribing because the email wasn’t relevant to them.
You can also segment your list based on their interests. You might have some people who have expressed interest in a specific topic, like the keto diet – but others are not interested in that, so you can segment your emails about that topic to go only to those individuals.
You can segment your list based on prior behaviors. If someone is in your database having purchased a course on search engine optimization, then you might want to send more of the same or related topics to that individual.
You can even segment a list based on who has not engaged with your emails. If you send out an email and emphasize that a sale is ending, and you see that some people have not opened the email, you can send another email to that segment only later in the day with an urgent email.
You can re-engage a segment of your list of subscribers based on time periods of engagement, too. So if it’s January, you might send an email to those who haven’t opened an email from you since October to see if they’re still responsive.
This can not only help you tailor your email messages better, but if you find people who got on your list and never open or engage, you can remove them from your list if it’s been half a year or a full year because you’re paying for the number of subscribers that you have.
Make Sure You Spoil Your Subscribers
Someone found your landing page and you offered a free gift in exchange for their contact information. You may be thinking that your time of giving is done, but that was an equal exchange.
Now, you have to learn how to overdeliver. If you’re not continually delivering value in different ways, which can mean many things, then they won’t feel as if you appreciate them and they will unsubscribe and find a leader who does.
Periodically sending them an unexpected freebie is a nice touch that will show you’re still interested in catering to their needs and going above and beyond. But it doesn’t always have to be a free gift, either.
You might be able to arrange exclusive deals and discounts for them – either by yourself or by contacting another vendor and seeing they can do something special for your list.
You might set up a coupon code that can be used on your products that non-subscribers don’t get to use. If you’re doing a launch, you might give your list access a few hours or days before everyone else can get access to the product.
You can also create extra value for your subscribers that isn’t accessible to the general public. Set up gated content on your blog and only give your subscribers the password to access it.
Or host a live event on a social media platform – or a webinar that only subscribers can attend where they can interact with you one-on-one and get answers to their questions immediately.
If you’re promoting something, have a subscriber-only bonus that goes along with it if and when they buy through your link. You can still have a separate bonus for others who see your blog reviews or posts on social media, but do a little extra for subscribers.
Be Timely with Your Communications
Timing your emails right means one thing to marketers and another to subscribers. Marketers want to send out emails at a time when most people are likely to open and engage with it.
Many send their emails out at 11 A.M. EST. Some have certain days of the week they like to email out on. Some refuse to email out on the weekends or on holidays. It’s different for everyone, and you’ll discover what your subscribers respond best to and you can split test and watch your data, too.
There are other time issues that the consumer is more concerned about. When your email hits their inbox isn’t one of them – because they can open it whenever they feel like it.
But some things they appreciate include giving them a heads up about when something is happening. For example, some people have a budget and will appreciate knowing if you’ll be emailing out about something exclusive or limited that they will have a short window of time to purchase.
Don’t make them lag behind others – if there’s a discount or earlybird offer like an added bonus for someone else’s launch that you’re promoting as an affiliate, be sure to announce it to them in the beginning and not when it’s too late to claim any of these perks.
For your subscribers, customer service issues should be put to the front of the line and your replies should be done in a timely manner. You want to give them VIP service for being on your list – even if it’s something minor they’re dealing with.
Don’t Let Your List Grow Cold
When a list has grown cold, it means the subscriber and list owner have not engaged with one another for a long period of time, if ever. There are different reasons it can be a cold list.
For example, you may have suffered a setback and kept your list, but not emailed anything to them in months. Or, you may have purchased a list from someone else, so you’ll be cold emailing (like cold calling) the subscribers.
This can be considered very spammy unless you’re upfront and honest and deliver a ton of value to the people who are now on your list without signing up for it of their own accord.
If you have purchased a list from someone else, you want to email the recipients and let them know that you are the new owner of the list, and give them a chance to confirm their subscription.
If you are the one who owned the list from the very beginning, but you had something happened to make you fail to communicate with them for a long period of time, you need to recommit to consistency in your schedule.
Some marketers find that it helps to be upfront and honest with their subscribers about why they disappeared. Yes, you will have many people who unsubscribe at that time – but it will also show you who is still loyal and interested in hearing from you in the future.
Everyone is human, and they can relate to things going wrong in life, whether you had a health setback or simply needed to find your direction in business before you re-engage with them.
Have a purpose for emailing your list. Some marketers are so desperate to make sure they keep up with a consistent email schedule after they have reengaged their list that they began sending anything, just to have something hit their inbox.
But you don’t want to make the mistake of diminishing the quality of the emails that you are sending just to keep a good schedule. It’s more important for them to find value in the emails that do come to their inbox than it is to be consistent.
If you need help managing and maintaining a schedule so that your list does not grow cold, you can always use a variety of tools to help you be more consistent with your communications.
For example, you can queue up emails for many months ahead of time so that if you are going through something harrowing, the email will be sent out automatically on your behalf.
Another thing you can do is either hire a ghostwriter to develop emails for you or you can purchase private label rights content that is pre-made for this use. This will cut down on the time required by you to handle your email tasks, and if you need to, you can even hire a virtual assistant to queue them up for you.
Keep in mind that dealing with a cold list is something that you shouldn’t be doing on a regular basis. If you are constantly flaking out on your subscribers and disappearing off the radar, they will grow tired of your antics and unsubscribe.
Master Your Subjects and Call to Action Statements
If you are not crafting good subject lines, chances are your emails will not even be opened by the recipients. So it’s important that you learn how to write good subjects that grab their attention and get them to click and open the email.
Try to keep your subject lines to approximately 50 characters so that the entire thing is visible whenever someone is viewing their inbox. If you go over 50 characters, it will often get abbreviated, and they won’t know what’s at the end of the message.
You don’t want to be using vague wording for your subject lines, but you can entice them to open by using certain power words like exclusive, limited time, new and more. These will create a sense of urgency and interest.
You can download free and paid swipe files that people have gathered with examples of subject lines that were converting well for others. That way, you can tweak it for yourself and use it in your business with their permission.
Split test subject lines to your list to see how they perform with your subscribers. What works well for one marketer may not work identically with your list of subscribers. They will begin to recognize the tone and style of your emails when they hit their inbox, so you may not want to deviate too much from that.
Once they have clicked through on the subject and are reading your e-mail, you want to make sure that you convey your information and then deliver a strong call to action (CTA).
This helps drive engagement in your business because many readers won’t take action unless specifically instructed to do so. Your call to action needs to be clear and concise. These are not usually one or more paragraphs long, but instead, a short and punchy sentence.
For example, you might use phrases like:
* Download now
* Get signed up today
* Save your spot
* Grab it at a discount here…and so on
Certain phrases can tip the scales in your favor whenever someone is reading who doesn’t necessarily feel as if they want to take action, but the phrase you used gives them that extra nudge they need.
For example, if you say something like, “Don’t miss out,” they may not be thinking of it too much, but it does make them feel a twinge of urgency because they don’t want to have any regrets later.
Remember that you can split test your emails where the only thing you are testing is the call to action that you are using. You can take an email promotion that you are sending out to your entire list and pit two phrases against one another to see which one comes out on top.
Weed Out Your Non-Audience
While many email marketers like to brag about the number of subscribers they have on their list, you really don’t want people on your list who are not your target audience. The people who are not good candidates for what you have to offer in terms of information and products will drag your list down.
The conversion rate will be low, the open rate will be dismal, and you will have many emails bouncing and being deemed to be spam by people who are not interested in what you have to say.
Anytime you have bounced email addresses, you want to clean those up because it will help improve the deliverability rate for your list. If someone is interested in your list, but their email has bounced, they can always go resubscribe and possibly use a new email address.
One thing that may help is by forcing a double opt in whenever possible. This helps prevent people from being added to your list by others, and they will receive a confirmation email to verify that they want to hear from you.
You want to make sure that you are not holding any subscriber’s hostage on your list. This is a big complaint in the Internet marketing industry because there are many people whose list you may accidentally get on or be put on when purchasing a product, and it is impossible to escape.
You want to honor any unsubscribe requests that come in. Keeping them on your list is only additional money that you have to pay for those subscribers, and they will ruin your statistics and data anyway.
Weekly digest emails are an option for those who may not want to hear from you on a more frequent basis. For example, if you are typically emailing out once a day or three to four times per week, you might want to offer a weekly digest option for those who want to get one email that has a copy of each email that was sent out to the daily subscribers the previous week.
Optimize Your Emails for All Readers
Whenever people are opening your emails, you never know which gadget or browser they are on. Therefore, you have to make sure that your emails are optimized for everyone, whether they are on a personal computer or a mobile device.
You want to make sure that your email is simple and easy to load. You can use a responsive design that will adjust to the size of your subscriber screen, regardless of what device they are using.
If you flood your email with too many images or make it too long to read, chances are they will delete it or think they will come back later, and then forget about it. If you do use images, make sure you have compressed them and are using the correct file types so that they load quickly and are easily seen by your recipient.
Think of it in terms of what they will be seeing and how you can cater to their needs technically. For example, a single column layout in the email is much easier to read if they are using a smartphone then a multi column layout.
Likewise, you want to make sure that you are not using some sort of crazy font or font size that is too small. The best thing you can do is test your emails out on a variety of devices.
If you don’t happen to own one type of device, try to find someone who does and send them a copy of the email so that they can check it for you. You also want to make sure that you are using the brand or name that your subscribers will recognize, and not altering that in a way that will cause them to send the email to spam.
Another thing you might want to consider is using pre header text. This is a little summary description that they can see in their inbox preview. Some people call this snippet text, and it shows up right below or beside the subject line.
You may only have 100 characters or less, so use your words carefully and make sure you position the most important words at the very beginning of your pre header text or snippet.
Using certain call to action words or words that reflect urgency can help ensure that your email is prioritized whenever they are going through their inbox. Email marketing is more than a tool that you can use to keep track of and communicate with your prospective buyers.
It is a way for you to gauge the needs of your subscribers and show that you are willing to forge a strong relationship with them by delivering information that they need and value on a regular basis.
By using the information above, you will ensure that your email campaigns are outperforming those of your competitors. There have been many instances where a marker with a small list dominates a leaderboard for an affiliate competition over a marketer who has 10 times the subscribers, but who lacks the connection with them.
Good Post. Email Marketing does need to be used by all businesess