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email marketing strategy
How To Sell Via Email
How To Sell Via Email
Building a mailing list is a fantastic way to make your audience feel as though they are on-board with your message and to gain more trust and more authority within your niche. But while building relationships with your fans or customers is important, what’s also highly important is that you make a profit in the short term!
Most of us can’t afford to wait months or years until we start selling and so sooner or later, you will need to try promoting something that people will want to buy.
The way you go about this is different for emails though as compared with other forms of marketing. Read on and discover how to best go about selling through email marketing and making as many conversions as possible!
The Structure
A good structure that you can use in order to hype and then sell a product over a series of messages is referred to as AIDA. This stands for:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
The key thing to recognize is that when you first contact your new subscribers, they will have no awareness of your products or services and no reason to be interested. You ned to start here then before you try and get them to really want whatever it is that you’re selling.
This allows you to focus on providing value and building that trust initially, while simply mentioning your product in a very subtle way.
This is the same strategy that many film studios will use when they release ‘teaser trailers’. We often don’t see enough to be excited by the film yet, but we’ve seen just enough to be aware that it exists.
Interest comes through repeated mention and desire then comes when you start to describe the way in which your product can make your audience’s lives better. It’s when you start describing what it is like to hold your product or to use it and how it will inherently raise the status of the people using it.
The best thing about this stage is that the readers now have to wait until your next message before they can buy. Waiting is a great way to build more anticipation because we always want what we can’t have!
Finally, the action email will be the one where you ‘seal the deal’. This is where you will close and get the audience to act as quickly as possible by clicking and buying. Make sure to incentivize a raid decision, whether with a limited discount or limited stock!
Using Value Proposition And More Techniques To Promote Your Mailing List
Email marketing can be used to do a lot of things from building trust and authority in your niche to helping you to make more direct sales.
Whatever you end up using your mailing list for though, you first need to encourage people to sign up in the first place. This can be easier said than done, especially as most people are dubious about giving out their personal details.
After all, most of us get enough spam as it is!
Here is some advice that can help you to get around that objection and grow your list nevertheless.
Sell The Value Proposition
The value proposition is the thing that makes your list worthwhile and the thing that will make it stand out. This is not simply the sum of its parts. A value proposition cannot be ‘getting lots of free emails’ but rather it is what those emails do for the reader.
For example, if your mailing list is about fitness, then the value proposition comes from the fact that your messages will help the readers to lose weight and build muscle, thereby becoming more attractive, more confident and more successful.
Value propositions work because they are what provide the ‘emotional drive’ behind your product. This is the hook and it’s what will get your potential buyers daydreaming about what life could be like when they sign up.
So, sell this vision in your copywriting and make sure that your audience knows just what an exciting opportunity this is and how it is going to improve their lives.
Use The Right Incentive
An incentive is a freebie that you will give away in exchange for people signing up to your mailing list. Very often, this will be something like an ebook or a report.
What’s important here, is to make sure that your incentive is something that will attract people and get them to sign up when they were otherwise on the fence – but not something that will be too valuable and encourage people to sign up who otherwise wouldn’t have been interested at all.
Otherwise, you will end up with subscribers who are only there to get the free gift. Not only that, but if you give away something like an ebook or online course entirely for free, then you will actually undermine the value of the things you sell later on.
Top 4 Ways To Improve Your Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation is a little like a credit rating. This is a score that will be shared between the different email providers and that will be tied to your IP address and domain.
Things that can hurt your sender reputation include having lots of emails that bounce, lots of complaints from contacts and a low open rate.
If your sender reputation gets too bad, then you risk becoming blacklisted and the number of messages that will get through to your audience will go down significantly.
So how do you prevent this from happening? How do you keep your sender reputation in the black? Here are some powerful strategies:
‘Warm Up’ Your Ip
One advanced technique that many people aren’t aware of, is to ‘warm up’ their IP address.
This means that you’re going to give your emails the best start possible and the way you’ll do that, is by starting out with a very small mailing list that is filled with only your most engaged fans (and maybe even some friends and family!).
When you do this, you’ll build up some positive ‘credit’ as it were, and this will then help make your address more resilient against future negative influences.
Keep Friends And Family Involved
This is one reason it can be a good idea to invite your friends and family onto your mailing list.
What’s more is that if you keep them there subsequently, you’ll then have at least a few opens and reads guaranteed.
This is a good way to avoid a scenario where you get zero opens and every little bit helps!
List Hygiene
List hygiene simply means that you are looking after your mailing list by removing the contacts that never read a single one of your messages or that always bounce.
This is a simple matter of logging into your Autoresponder and deleting those users, but it will make a big difference.
Double Opt-In
Finally, it is crucial that every single email list these days use a double opt in.
This means that your new subscribers will need to confirm their email address via a confirmation message and that in turn ensures that the email address is real and also that the recipient checks it often and that they really are interested in signing up.
These small changes can make a massive difference to your deliverability, so get started right away!
And, if you want to know more about nurturing your list, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊
How To Write Emails That Get Read
How To Write Emails That Get Read
Want to write the perfect email for your list?
There is no such thing of course, and the ideal message is going to vary from person to person and brand to brand.
That said though, there are certainly some ‘best practices’ to keep in mind when you are coming up with your emails and that can help you to get a better response.
Let’s take a look at some of them…
Write A Story
I once heard the expression that ‘storytelling is SEO for the human mind’. This is incredibly true, and the fact is that the human psyche loves stories.
We have evolved over thousands of years with a culture of storytelling, and we find it very engaging and very persuasive.
So instead of writing about how X technique is highly effective generally, instead frame this discussion as your own personal account.
How has it helped you? Or how has it helped someone you know? How did you feel during that process?
Set the scene and get people engaged – this is far less dry than simply talking in facts and figures.
Be Personal
It’s important that the tone of your messages match the tone and the nature of your business. However, it should also match the medium – which in this case is the email of course.
Emails are inherently more personal and less formal than other forms of marketing because they’re being read in a personal inbox.
At the same time, by writing a more personal message (using the recipient’s name, making sure to use a regular letter structure), you’ll be more likely to reach the primary inbox and therefore to actually get read!
Try not to put any distance between yourself and your audience; make them feel as though you are speaking with them directly.
Provide Value
The objective of any good email should be to provide value. That might be in the form of a tip, or it might mean that you are providing entertainment.
Either way, you need to make sure that your audience feel glad that they took the time to open your message and read it.
That way, they’ll be more likely to do the same again next time!
As well as providing value though, you should also seek to make sure you are providing value in the shortest space of time.
In other words, your messages should be efficient and to the point – you don’t want to take up your audience’s time!
If you want to learn more about writing emails that make money, check out this post here.
OK, now you’ve crafted an email that people will want to read. The next hurdle is to actually to get your email into the Inbox and specifically their Primary Inbox. Let’s look at some ways to help you to do that…
How To Avoid The Spam Filter And Get Into The Primary Inbox
One of the biggest challenges for email marketers over the years has always been beating the spam filter.
The job of the spam filter on most email providers is to prevent unwanted messages from getting in – especially those that might contain viruses, phishing scams or other harmful types of content.
Today this has become even harder though. Now we not only have spam boxes but also ‘social’ and ‘promotional’ boxes that further segregate our messages and make it hard for any of our messages to gain attention.
The good news is that there are strategies you can use to combat both these issues. Read on…
Language
One of the first and most important tips for avoiding the spam box is to make sure you avoid using the kinds of words and phrases that computers associate with spam.
This is similar to the way that Google looks for keywords, except this time the keywords are a bad thing. Examples of words to avoid include things like ‘buy’, ‘free’, ‘discount’, ‘hurry’ and ‘Viagra’.
Hopefully that last one isn’t something you would be writing about anyway!
Many email autoresponders will have a built-in check and will give your email a spam score before you add it to your automation or broadcast list so make use of it. I use Active Campaign and know this definitely has this useful feature.
Structure
If you want to get into the main inbox, then it is not enough to ‘not look like spam’ – you now need to also ‘look like a personal message’.
To do this, you should take advantage of the feature in your autoresponder that allows you to use the recipient’s name in the message.
Likewise, try to structure your message more like a conventional email. That means saying ‘Dear [Name],’ and ending with ‘Best regards,’.
Plus, you also need to avoid including elements that a client will associate with a promotional image or that will make you look less like a genuine correspondence.
That means avoiding using too many hyperlinks – keep it to just one – and it means avoiding using big images.
Sender Reputation
The most important thing to do though, is to make sure that you are focussing on delivering great value over time. If you do this, then people will open your messages and they will actually read them.
This will help to improve your ‘sender reputation’, which in turn will mean you don’t get blacklisted.
And while you’re at it, why not ask your readers to ‘whitelist’ your messages and add them to the main inbox? Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones! You should ask them this in the very beginning of your first email to them and hopefully they will do this.
Your reputation isn’t just your own, but also the email autoresponder service you use, and this is why it is probably best to stay away from most self-hosted solutions.
By using a reliable email autoresponder, you are much more likely to hit the Inbox. Yes, you have to abide by their rules and many platforms frown on affiliate marketing, but as long as you are primarily focused on providing value to your readers, you should be fine.
Don’t be pushy and try to hard sell in every email or you could find yourself in hot water with your provider.
But there is nothing wrong with providing good value and then recommending something that can help them to implement what you have taught them.
I find this soft sell much more compelling in the long run and it shows that you are trying to provide something that genuinely helps your readers and that is the key to any good business. If you want to know more about writing good email copy, check out this post.
And, if you want to know more about nurturing your list, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊
How To Write Effective Emails That Make Money
Email marketing has been a part of business since the early days of the internet. Many businesses fail to implement its effectiveness in making sales.
Creating an effective and impactful copy for your emails is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan.
If you’re trying to decide if you should spend time creating all those emails, consider this:
- The number of people using email is set to grow to 319.6 billion by the end of 2021, according to The Eradicate Group.
- HubSpot reports that people with active email accounts had grown to 5.6 billion by the end of 2019.
- 9 out of 10 marketing professions say email is important or very important to their own business, according to a study by the Direct Marketing Association.
- Forbes reports that emails produce 50% more sales as compared to other marketing practices.
As these figures clearly show, email is essential and to be expected in your marketing plan. But with the abundance of businesses sending emails, your content needs to be of the best quality and impactful to get conversions.
Of course, the first step is to create a compelling and irresistible free offer to get people on your list. Then you need to create emails that will be effective in bringing in the money from your offers.
There are different types of emails for different situations. There are welcome emails, promotional emails, new customer emails, client or lead engagement, cold list re-engagement, emotional trigger emails, special offer emails, new product or launch emails and many other types.
How do you know where to begin or what type of email to send?
In this post, we’ll show you where to begin with the basics of creating high converting emails.
Let’s get started.
Setting The Email Goal
Now that you know the importance of marketing with email, you might be at a loss as to where to begin. Like almost everything in business, it begins with a goal of what you want to achieve.
First, we’re going to assume you’ve created your lead generation materials and have started gaining a targeted list of subscribers. If not that’s the first step. Here’s a quick list of the steps you need to take.
Create a freebie for people to receive when they sign up. Have a way for subscribers to sign up. This can be an exit popup on your website, a static landing page or any number of ways to for subscribers to sign up. You also need some sort of email service such as Active Campaign or Aweber.
Now let’s begin creating our goal for the emails.
Before you send out just any old email, first determine what the end result is you want the email to achieve. Is it to get someone to purchase something or to open the email and connect with you? Is the goal of your email to create better click-through rates?
Typical goals for an email might include:
- Getting freebie seekers to become first-time buyers your service or products.
- Increase conversions by a certain amount in a specific amount of time.
- Getting cross-sells and upsells from current purchases.
- Increase click-through rates.
- Building more engagement from current clients or customers.
- Build more relationships for your community.
- Getting feedback about your business to make improvements.
For each email, understand who’s going to receive your emails and what they want to get out of it from you.
Ask yourself these questions to define your email goals:
- Where are you right now? Check your open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, conversion rates or your spam rates.
- What action do you want the reader to take? This helps you tailor your content to get them to take the action you want. If it’s to read an article, for example, then let them know why the article will help them.
- Who will be receiving the email? Know which segment of your list will be receiving the email, so that your copy, images and everything in the email speaks directly to that potential group.
- How will you get them to say “yes”? Decide what you are going to promise the readers so that your email helps them be the best version of themselves with your service, product, or information.
Think about why your reader initially signed up. Ask yourself these questions:
- How can you over deliver on that?
- What do they want from you? From your business?
- What questions do they have about your niche?
- When do they need to hear from you?
- What emotions can you evoke in them?
- What are the next steps for them as your subscriber?
Now create a plan around the answers. Include the topics you’ll regularly write emails about, schedule email blasts in your calendar, and what areas people need support, guidance or encouragement.
When you know what you want to achieve with the email you can determine what type of email you want to send out and when it needs to go out. Spend the time setting your marketing and conversion goals before you begin the writing process.
When And Why Use Email
It’s a good idea to know when and why you are sending out an email. Most people who sign up for your list do so for a specific reason. And those who have been on your list for a while fall into different stages of interaction with you.
Some subscribers are loyal and open all your emails. Others have gone cold and need persuasion to begin engaging with your emails again. Some have joined you for a specific product or service you offer and only want to know about those.
You can tell what type of emails your subscriber wants by who they are and what they do when they come to your site. This can also help you understand when to send specific emails.
Maybe they:
- Browse around, add some things to their cart, then leave: The Abandoned Cart email is triggered.
- Enthusiastically subscribed to your list: Perfect time for the Welcome email.
- Are a long-time loyal customer: Reward them with an anniversary email. These can be Milestone emails or Special offer emails.
- Post Purchase emails to new buyers who have purchased something form you. These Confirmation emails are the first ones your new subscriber gets from you. It tells them about your business and your values, helping you begin building a relationship with them. It’s also a great time to give them options to see your other products.
- Emails to boost engagement with your business and content. These can be Promotional emails that try to make an initial sale or promotes your new webinar.
- Re-engaging cold subscribers. This email tries to get subscribers who haven’t been active to take some sort of action. These can be Review Request emails or Persuasion emails.
- Nurturing your existing subscribers. These emails are the relationship builders. They provide value to the subscriber. Use Nurture emails to keep in contact and build communication with your loyal subscribers. These can be Newsletters or Curated content emails.
- They are interested in a specific subject or product you offer. Here you would be segmenting your subscribers with targeted emails. Segmenting allows you to send emails that specifically target a group of subscribers. These can be New Product Announcement emails, Nurturing or Promotional emails.
Sending emails at the right time and for the right reason keeps your list engaged and converting.
For example, if you’re promoting a sale or affiliate product that ends soon, send out an initial email a day or two before the sale starts, then one every day or two and finally send one in the morning and one in the evening the day the sale ends.
This keeps you in front of them and helps remind them to take action.
If you want to know more about building and nurturing your email list, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊