Why should you use email marketing? Well, for starters, email marketing reigns supreme for ROI with a 3,800 percent return on investment, with $38 for every $1 spent.
Through the years, email has received a bad rap because of many sleazy sales business buying unsolicited email address and sending out salesy spam garbage. But even with all the misguided businesses doing email wrong, email marketing when done right can more than double your business. The key is to continue building your email list with quality, targeted personas. Social media, websites, video marketing, etc., is all well and good, but you must grow and activate your email list to reap the rewards it can bring.
So, let’s breakdown email marketing into two categories: the things you should stop doing and email best practices that you must incorporate to be successful.
Email Marketing Don’ts
- Never buy lists! You can’t buy love, and unwanted email is a quick way to make a few enemies.
- Stop sending out salesy emails that have no value added information. You must add value before you extract value!
- Don’t collect email addresses and then go off into hibernation for six months. The sales cycle can move rather quickly, and it's crucial to follow-up within three to eight days after someone contacts your business.
Email Marketing Do’s
- Make the email mobile friendly. 64 percent of decision makers read emails via mobile device. (EmailExpert)
- Keep it short. Emails between 50 and 125 words had the best response rates at just above 50 percent
- Add in visuals. Researchers found that colored visuals increase people's willingness to read a piece of content by 80 percent
- Make it personal. Personalized emails deliver 6 times higher transaction rates – Experian
- Follow up instantly after someone fills out a form or reaches out
- Keep it helpful and add value then proceed with your offer. 72 percent of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media – MarketingSherpa
- Choose your subject line thoughtfully. The two biggest factors influencing open rates are the organization the email is from (64%) and the subject line (47%). (Chadwick Martin Bailey)
- Check grammar and proper spelling of your personas name and email address. If an email does not display correctly, 71.2 percent will delete it immediately. (BlueHornet)
Give before you get by building a know, like, and trust relationship
When using email marketing, you first have to grow your email list by earning trust. Exchange something of value for the email addresses you want, so you earn the trust of your leads. Using soft call to actions on your website, offer something that is relevant and valuable, such as a resource, e-book, or guide. People don’t want more spam emails in their mailbox. When you earn their trust, you’ll get their email address because they know you won’t send them junk mail.
Think about what they will get once they give you their email address. What kinds of email marketing campaigns will you send out and how will they get to know you more through them? What information does your audience need to know? Contact them only as often as is needed. Depending on what you offer, this could mean once a week or once a month. Test what works best. It’s important to evaluate your success and failures so you can figure out that sweet spot of just enough communication.
Best Practices for making email personal:
- Figure out what audience needs what type of emails sent to them depending on where they are at during the buying process. Segmenting your audience will increase your revenue by over 12% on average.
- Personalize who it’s to and who it’s from
- People do business with people, which is all about trust
- Subject line should be specific
- Subject line should be the outcome you are trying to get
- Make your email clear and simple, do not list a bunch of other ways to get in contact with you
- Include a next step or action you wish them to take
Stay clear of:
- Just asking for the email address without offering value
- Poor follow up: they provide you their email address, but the person does not hear back from you
- Old school email newsletters that aren’t mobile friendly and are jampacked of different sections all screaming for your attention.
Several tools can help you set up a smart drip campaign to help you funnel your audiences. Check out:
- HubSpot
- InfusionSoft
- Marketo
- SharpSpring
Test different things when emailing such as the subject line or the call to action button color. You can also ask people for their feedback. Run A/B split test on your emails. Maybe send one email to 10 people and send a different email to 10 other people. Which once was more successful?
While you don’t want to send the same email over and over, you do want to make sure your message is getting out there. Use different ways to say the same message so your audience is reminded about your business.
It can also be valuable to include pictures. 65 percent of people prefer emails that have images in them while only 35 percent prefer mostly text. Where does your audience fall?
The best time to send out emails is on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, early in the morning.
Pay attention to the bounce back rate. Some servers may reject an email if there is an image in it, so you may have to send text alone emails to certain servers. Always include your social share links and a link back to your landing pages so that readers can find more information.
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