A recent email technique product prompted me to divulge some of my own best email marketing tips, so here goes…
Collect emails
This is very important because you need to stay in touch with your client base. Just like postal addresses, SMS, RSS and phone numbers, email addresses are very effective touch point in the marketing cycle. The sooner you decide to build emails in your business the better.
Build a list of buyers
It is easy to give stuff away to build an email list. Make sure you monetize that by offering really cool stuff from time to time. If you build the relationship you will be in a trusted position to make useful recommendations. This is where your profit opportunity exists. I also target people who have already bought something. To collect a list of those buyers offer them something for free that goes with a popular product that is already in the marketplace.
Test and measure
Once you are sending emails you should track your metrics. If you are split testing (testing version A against version B) you will improve your sales conversions much faster than guessing. Testing is really where much of the money is to be made online. If you refine your sales process over a number of tests you will have a profitable campaign fast.
Subject lines
If nobody is opening your emails then you have little chance of people clicking on the links inside. The ‘open rate’ is one of THE easiest things to measure. Most professional email services will have these statistics for you. Make sure you write subject lines that make someone have to open the email. Make sure you are keeping the content consistent with the message contained in the body of the email!
Headlines I have tested and got great results from:
– get this…
– bad news…
– totally unfair..
– warning:
– what would you do if you were me?
– expires in 48 hours… (urgent!)
– Some News For {first name}
– I was totally wrong…
– can you guess?
Structure
The way you layout your email is important. It helps to wrap lines to a certain width. Keeping emails narrow helps people read them more easily. I still use plain text for my emails because the plain text is very easy to read and renders the same in different email clients. If you use images make sure they are clickable. People love to click on images.
Landing page
Your landing page should be tightly crafted to match the traffic source. If you are using PPC traffic then you may wish to use a landing page with the same bid keywords in the headline. If your traffic is from videos or social media you may want to use multimedia like a video to match the theme. These things help conversions thus increasing the number of opt-ins you get.
Sell the Opt-In
It is no longer enough just to give a great freebie. You need to really sell it as if it were a paid product. if you do this you will increase your opt-in rate. Anything above 30% is ok and anything above 50% opt-in rates are excellent.
Frequency and timing matter
If you were to send your email list complete junk every time they will leave your list. At the same time, if you never send emails your list will probably forget who you are and you are unlikely to sell anything as well! Most marketers report improved profits AND client satisfaction with a more frequent mailing schedule. Test this with your audience and see the results.
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