Let me say this first…
Email Marketing is not dead!
A lot of business use email for customer retention and increasing their chances for sales while you’re reading this. If you aren’t using email marketing you’re probably missing out on some huge profit margins.
Email Marketing till this day is very valuable but can be a waste of time and money if you aren’t using an effective email marketing strategy. This is why I thought I’d make a list with email marketing tips consisting of some do’s and don’ts that can make or break your email marketing campaign.
so here are my…
2019 Email Marketing Tips —Do’s & Dont’s For An Effective Email Marketing Strategy!
1. Have a welcome page
The moment people sign up for your email list you should build context for what they should be able to expect now that they’re part of your email list. Give them multiple reasons to open your emails. Exclusive content, occasional giveaways, free courses, weekly digest and more.
An effective welcome post can get people to anticipate your emails instead of throwing them in the trash.
2. Make your list niche specific
As I’ve said before email marketing can drastically improve your chances of making more sales but you need to get people on the list first. By making your email list niche specific its easier to position yourself as an authority because you can go deeper into content related to that specific niche.
Your impact will be a lot less when you just post content about everything.
3. Clean your email list from non-openers
People often underestimate how important it is to clean your email list from non-openers. Your open-rate is directly connected to your mail being blocked or seen as spam. ISP’s ( inboxes such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo ) look at the history of your IP and domain reputation.
The moment you have a history of low open rates the ISP’s will put you in a category of emails that should be blocked. This is why the moment you notice specific people not opening your emails consistently its time to remove them from your list.
3. Create goals for your email list
Having a huge list of email subscribers is great but if you don’t know what to do with that list you might as well not have a list. It’s important before you start your list to set out a few goals for your email list. This way you can guide your subscribers to the place you want them to go effectively.
4. Send emails based on time zones
Honestly… I’m in a few email lists of people I find really interesting but I never get to read their emails purely because of timing. When I get an email at 3 AM and 7 hours later I go through my mail there’s a high possibility it could get lost between all the other emails that are sent to my inbox. This is why I’d advise you to take time zones into account when you start sending your emails.
5. Use lead magnets to grow your list
There are so many people that take advantage of email addresses by spamming them with offers that a lot of people nowadays hesitate to give away their email address. That’s why you should give them a reason upfront to do it. This reason is what we often call a lead magnet. It can be anything that might be of value to leads.
Lead magnets that are often used are:
- Ebooks
- Free courses
- PDF’s
- Discounts
- Exclusive content
6. Segment your list
The ideal scenario is to have your email subscribers anticipating every email you send. This can only be done when you consistently give them what they want. You can’t do this by sending everybody the same emails so you’re going to segment your subscribers in different groups and send different emails to them.
Examples you can segment groups by:
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Occupation
- and more.
7. Copy should be personal
How you’re saying something is just as important as what you’re saying in the emails you send out. The goal of these emails is to create a relationship with your subscribers. When you sound like a rocket scientist talking to another rocket scientist you won’t achieve that goal because most people don’t talk like that.
In email marketing, we got something called “the granny rule”. Write personal emails the way your grandma would write letters. The more you sound like an actual human being, the more success you’ll have with email marketing.
8. Take some time to come up with a headline
Headlines are really important because they can make or break your entire email marketing campaign. The quality of the headline decides whether a person is going to open your email or not so you can’t treat headlines as an afterthought. I know a lot of people that would spend more time crafting a good headline than writing the actual email.
Explaining what content is in the email isn’t good enough. You’re going to have to find out what kind of emotions you need the reader experience to open the email and then create a message that stimulates those emotions.
9. Build context by creating email sequences
Have you ever heard of a great relationship that has been built just by talking one time? …Me neither. It often takes time to see what someone is about before you get to that point. Just like in real life sending one separate email will not result in sales most of the time.
This is why you should try to create email sequences that seamlessly fit together and all are helping to get your readers to a certain goal. This way you’ll build a relationship with your readers over a period of time and guide them towards a potential sale without it feeling like spam.
The Dont’s Of Email Marketing
There’s a lot of things you should do to have an effective email marketing campaign but there are also somethings that you shouldn’t do because they can have a huge effect on your success. I’ve listed a few of these donts. Of course these aren’t all of them but these are the ones that immediately came to mind when I was writing this.
1. Buying email lists
I know it takes a lot of time and effort to build an email list and buying one might seem attractive but trust me…
Don’t do it!
There are just too many unknown factors that you’ll have to deal with if you buy an email list. Email lists you create yourself contain a lot of information about your subscribers that you’ve obtained through segmenting them into groups. When you buy a list you don’t have that information and that makes personalizing your emails to cater your subscribers that much harder.
You also don’t know if the email were obtained legally which means using that list might get you into trouble with the law. Instead of risking these things why not make your own list and maximize the value you receive from email marketing.
2. Sending duplicate emails to the same email
Earlier in this post, I talked about how ISP’s such as Outlook and Gmail will block your emails based on the reputation of your domain and IP. Sending duplicate emails is a great way to ruin your reputation. This increases the chances that the emails will not be opened and it’s basically spamming.
3. Not testing with multiple inboxes
Before you send your emails it’s important to test them with multiple inboxes. You don’t know what your reputation is with ISP’s till you test it out. I’d create emails at multiple services and send the emails to them and see if they end up in the inbox or under spam. This way if they end up in the spam section you can still open them without hurting your IP and domain reputation.
4. Ignoring email analytics
No matter what form of marketing you do there will be analytics and testing involved. There’s no such thing as a one fits all marketing campaign so during your campaigns you have to keep a close eye on your analytics and see what’s working and what’s not. Keep going the same way and before you know it you ruin your entire entrepreneurial endeavor.
That’s all I have to say for today. I hope this was of value for you if you’re interested in creating an email marketing campaign. If you have any questions or you just want to show some love leave a comment and I’ll reply as soon as possible.
See you at my next post!