Now that you have mastered the basics of email marketing let’s take things further.
Below you will find every email marketing strategy that I have come across and used in the past years condensed in just one lesson.
Let’s go!
1. Ask people to reply to your emails
Getting a reply from your contacts, especially soon after they have subscribed and are more engaged has multiple advantages.
Email is a two-way street. When you create a conversation with your audience you build a better connection and will increase overall engagement.
Getting replies to your emails will tell the ISPs that you are sending good content and they will give a higher priority to your emails in the future.
The easiest way to send good content is to ask people to reply to you in the subscription confirmation email and tell you what they are struggling with. When you ask them to tell you what they are struggling with you will also get to know their problems which will help you when creating products or producing content. Do you remember lesson #2?
2. Custom confirmation page
Most people will rely on the default confirmation page from their email marketing provider.
Instead, I would recommend creating a custom confirmation page where you can redirect people after they submit the form where they subscribed to your email list.
On the confirmation page it’s important to add the following information:
- Thank your contacts for subscribing, obviously.
- Ask them to check their email and look for a message from you. Remember to include your FROM name and subject line.
- Advise clicking the link in the email to confirm your subscription.
- Suggest checking the spam/junk folder if they do not see the email in 10-20 minutes.
- Suggest adding your email address to the list of “safe senders” in their email program.
- Advise moving the confirmation email from Promotions/Updates to the Primary tab if using Gmail.
3. Custom “Thank You” page
Once they click the confirmation link, they will be redirected to an URL.
For better engagement that URL should be a custom page on your site where you can welcome your contacts and introduce yourself.
You can add more details about you and what they will get from their email subscription, give them a call to action or even suggest to follow you on social media.
4. Educate contacts to click on links
I’ve always been an advocate of moving people from their email inbox to my website.
If you make people click on links in your emails, they won’t be bored and go to the next email. Instead, they may find something else to read on your site.
You should never post the entire blog post in an email. Post just an introduction with a link to read the full article on the site.
Educating people to click on links will pay off when you have something to sell because they will go and check out your sales page instead of just reading the email and not taking any action.
5. Be personal
Don’t be afraid to share some things from your life once in awhile so that you become more personal and real for your contacts.
You do not have to share every detail, but share significant milestones in your business and life. For example, share how the weather is where you live or where you are going to holiday this year.
6. Stay in touch
When you feel like you do not have something to share come up with ideas about what valuable content you can send to your audience.
If you stop emailing them and come back months or even years later people won’t remember you and think you are spamming them.
Trust me; I have this happening to me, right now, when sending these emails.
7. Email more often
As long as you are delivering good value for your audience email them as often as you can.
People subscribed to learn something from you and as long as you keep delivering on your promises they will appreciate you sending them emails.
8. Use an email course or free software as opt-in incentives
Instead of ebooks try building an email course delivered as an email series or hire someone to do a small app, plugin or browser extension that you can offer for free.
Ebooks are so obsolete right now and no one reads them.
Email courses, on the other hand, will get much more engagement.
9. Revive old email lists
If you have an email list to which you haven’t sent emails in a while, then it’s time to revive it. Here’s how:
1. Create or update a highly valuable resource on your site (eBook, free course, free software)
2. Write an article that is valuable for your readers. Maybe something along the lines that you are coming back to publishing and emailing.
3. Send an email campaign to your list. Make sure that you remember your contacts, why they subscribed and when they subscribed to your newsletter.
4. In your email campaign offer them 3 options:
- To get the new/updated resource
- Check out the latest article
- Update their subscription or unsubscribe
10. Prune your email list
When people no longer use an email address or they add you to a filter which will stop them from seeing your emails, there is no point in continuing to email them.
Emailing people that haven’t opened or clicked your recent email campaigns will both lower your morale because you will have such low open and click-through rates and decrease your deliverability because ISPs can tell when a domain is sending emails with low engagement.
That is why you need to segment those people, send them a campaign to ask them if they still want to be on your list (in case their opens are missed by your email marketing service provider) and if not finally remove them.
Here’s what you have to do.
1. Segment people who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in the past 6 months.
2. Send them a final notice email. It can look like this:
Subject: Looks like you are slipping away!
Email:
Hey there,Elevatr, my email marketing system, tells me that it’s been a while since you opened my emails.
Maybe you can’t keep up with the email volume (I know I am overwhelmed), moved in a different direction or simply lost interest in receiving emails from me.
I totally get that and because I hate spam as much as you do, I will remove your email address from my email marketing system and you will no longer receive my newsletter.
If you do not want to be removed just click on this link and I will keep you in.
3. Segment again the people who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in the past 6 months and remove them now.
11. Review your list building strategy
There are people who recommend adding as many opt-in forms as you can on your website, but I would recommend against that.
You need to make sure that you do not annoy everyone who visits your website with all the bells and whistles you use to increase the number of contacts on your email list.
If you use popups, check if you have more than one for a page or even for a visit and stick with just one.
For regular forms try to keep only one or two on a page/post.
Having more forms does not necessarily mean that people will notice them. In time they will simply ignore them just like they ignore advertising, so try to trim them down.
12. Sign up for your newsletter or email series
Go signup for your newsletter to see how the emails look when they arrive in your inbox.
If you offer people an email series (short course delivered over time), sign up to that to see what their experience is like.
Are emails coming too often? Is there too much of a pause between emails? Testing your email series will tell you this.
13. Test if your emails are going to spam
Use Mail Tester and Litmus to see if the campaigns you are sending are going to spam.
In addition to this get different email inboxes on Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook and send the email there first, before you send it to your contacts to see exactly how they will look.
14. Test another email provider
Take between 1,000 and 3,000 people on your email list and send them the same email from a different service provider to see if anything changes.
Sometimes you may find that you have outgrown your existing email provider or that they just have a lower deliverability.
15. Review new contacts open rates and activity
Have a look at your most recent contacts and see how your open rates and click-throughs look.
See how many emails they receive after they subscribe. Is your email series sending too many emails? Are you sending them both an email series and regular campaigns at the same time?
You can also review your demographics and see if your audience is who you think it is.
Check out if your target audience is opening your emails or if someone else is doing that.
If you are using advertising to build your email list view if paid channels work. Analyze if the contacts that you get via paid channels are engaged with your emails and if not stop paying for them.
16. Know your audience
Use Facebook Audience Insights to get more details about your audience.
You can use these insights to discover who your audience is if you do not know already, and who to target in your advertising campaigns.
Here’s how to do it:
- Export your email list to a CSV file.
- Upload your email list inside Facebook Audience.
Once the data is processed look at the demographics. Do you have more men or women in your audience? Where do they live? What are their interests?
You can use this data to see who you should target on ads and better understand your audience.
When you understand your audience you will be able to figure out where they hang out and how to get them to your site.
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