Traditonal Email Marketing Is Dead.
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How To Make Email Marketing 2.0 Work For You
Many people think email marketing has been ruined – and they’re not wrong – but only to some extent.
With all the email scams, (I see you African prince who wants to send me millions!) we constantly have our guard up when we open our inboxes. That makes it so much harder for our prospects to notice the emails we’re sending.
So we need to think about email marketing in a slightly different way.
What’s The Goal Of Email Marketing?
Ultimately, you want your prospect to open your email, read it and click on the link to visit your website. It’s that simple.
The website is the end-all, be-all goal and once they’re on your site, you want them to read your content, learn more about your services and convert into a lead.
But first, you have to get them there. So how do you make that happen? It all starts with your email.
So What Makes A Good Email, Anyway?
How hard can it be to write an email? You throw together some copy and a call to action, put a short, sweet subject line on it and push send, right? Wrong.
The old days when you could do that are over. Today’s prospects are savvy, super busy and looking to be educated.
So how do you grab their attention? Your email needs to tell a story.
It All Starts With The Subject Line
If you really want to get noticed, you need to stop spending hours picking out an image for your email and instead spend that time writing a subject line that plays off of your target markets curiosity.
When writing your subject line, you want to avoid words like “free,” “buy now,” “be your own boss,” “free offer” or similar phrases. Also, never use the “[Re:]” to try to make it look like a fake reply.
Free is one example of a trigger word. And these trigger words are called that because they trigger your email client to dump them into the spam folder.
This doesn’t mean you should never offer a free eBook or a giveaway, but you have to be a little more creative.
Want an example of how this works? Instead of saying free, say “Receive 100% off.”
Now, What About The Email?
Once you have your subject line, you need to think about what your email will say. The best emails tell a story.
Let’s use a trade show as an example. You want to tell your prospects you’re going to be there, what your booth number is and then two to three things about what you’ll be doing while you’re there. This could be a giveaway, a free eBook, a demo or a Facebook Live event.
We’ve seen great results using visuals like animated gifs and making that gif clickable. Once they click it, it goes to a landing page where they can sign up for a demo or register for the raffle.
How Does This Work For E-commerce?
While you can do educational emails for e-commerce, you also want to think about the buying process. If you’re a landscape equipment and services company, you may want to promote leaf removal and mulch in the fall or new plants and greener grass solutions in the spring. Just remember these product-based emails don’t usually convert as well as educational emails.
You can also use emails to help recoup shopping cart bounces. We all have those customers that go all the way through the process, put a bunch of stuff in their cart and then never click the buy button.
You can set it up to email them two days later and remind them about their cart full of great products and offer them a 10% discount to come back and complete their order. Careful though, savvy online buyers know businesses will send a discount if they don’t buy, so be sure to offer a friendly email before the discount reminding them their products are patiently waiting for you to take them home!
Get More From Your Blogs
Another easy way to create emails for your business is to send out a “Best of the Blog” email. It’s one email with short summaries from your last four blogs. This is great because you don’t have to write an email from scratch and you give your prospects four potential topics that may interest them enough to visit your blog to learn more.
So you’re probably thinking, if one blog email is good, four must be better? Nope. You don’t want to send so many emails that you burn out your list and have your prospects start ignoring all your emails. Each business’s email list should be treated like gold. Send relevant emails that speak to the customers needs or pain, track the data to see when people are opening and which emails they really loved. Analytics are a marketers best friend!
One Last Piece Of Advice
We know it takes a while to build your email list and it’s really, really tempting to just buy a list. But. Don’t. Do. It. Ever.
Buying a list of people who don’t know you and haven’t signed up to learn more about your product is a bad idea. So bad, it can get your company blacklisted and keep your prospects from doing business with you.
Like all things in life, there is one tiny exception – trade shows. If you’re going to a trade show, you can usually buy an email list of all the participants. For the most part, people who have signed up for the trade show know they’re going to get emails from companies who are going to be there. So they expect these emails and are usually pretty open to reading them.
Remember, email isn’t the end-all, be-all. It’s another tactic in your Authentic Marketing Ecosystem™, and if used with other parts of your marketing ecosystem like videos, blogs, case studies and social media campaigns, it will deliver real leads for your company.
Ready to get your marketing started? Learn how to put together a comprehensive marketing program now! We give honest and valuable marketing evaluations because we believe when you’re being honest and authentic with your customers, they will never be disappointed.
July 13, 2018
