Which of these sums up where you’re at:
- You don’t collect email addresses, let alone send newsletters
- You collect emails but not sent any regular mailshots yet
- You send regular emails but without a strategy
- You’ve got an audience, send regular emails with a strategy, you trial new things and delve into your analytics..
Emails have been around for many years. Fun fact, the first email was sent in 1971! Much of the development of emails as we know them today happened from around 1993 onwards.
Are you still using your first Yahoo or Hotmail account? It’s mad when you transition into creating an email account for your children! How funny that they may still be using that email address in 20+ years time..
Here’s another mind-blowing fact for you – every £1 invested in email marketing gives a £36 return.
It’s easy to spend a lot of time focusing on social media content and engaging with followers, but your email list is the backbone that supports all of your combined marketing efforts. How much time/money did you invest in email marketing last year?
I could do a whole blog on the value of email marketing for your business (watch this space) but here’s a quick summary.
- Drives traffic to your website
- Improve your brand recognition
- Cost-effective marketing
- Increased sales
- Retains customers
For each email marketing client, I start with the strategy, plan the funnels and set up templates; all before we send out an email. Once all of this is agreed we start to design, test, and analyze the impact of the emails. From my years of experience, I want to share my 9 top tips that will save you time, money, and frustrations.
Lead with Value
Everyone’s time is precious; the content you share in your newsletter needs to be valuable enough to warrant their time. When your email lands in their inbox, make it so they want to read it. This will mean when your email lands, they know they’re going to get value and it’s worth their time.
They should come away from the up-to-5 minutes it takes with a handy nugget of information.
Templates
I know you will want to dive straight into it, create an email and get it sent out, but if you can hold fire and do this first, it will save you time in the long run. “If you’re going to do something, do it right the first time”! All newsletter platforms will have a template function; start here. Set up at least three templates; sales, updates, and sharing a story. The templates hold all your branding information; your fonts, colours, social media links, etc. Each time you are ready to send out a newsletter, select the most appropriate template, add your content, and it’s ready to go.
Subject Line
Bring all the jazz! You have 8 words (or less) to entice them to open your email. “How to . . . .” “11 ways to . . . “”Thank me later!” “Your free . . .” Get creative, run some tests, and see what works best for your audience.
Consider basing your subject line on a benefit statement:
[The thing you’re bringing] so you can [the pain your relieving] – you know?
EXAMPLE: Increase your productivity so you can find more time in your day
Effective, right?
Repurpose
As I said at the beginning, your email newsletter is the backbone of your marketing; use it to showcase the content you’ve shared that month. Spotlight your blog, link to that funny reel you made – share top tips, whilst signposting your audience to the content you’ve already produced and published elsewhere.
Including, signposting to your Google Business Profile to showcase your business as a whole.
A/B testing
This is one of the most ignored areas, A/B testing. In short, create one email but two subject lines. You send the email out to half of your list with one subject line and the other half with a second subject line. Then you take a look at your analytics to see which one had the most views or click-throughs. It won’t double your work, it does add a few minutes on, but it is important to test so that you can get to know your audience more.
Organic growth
Focus on quality, not quantity. There’s no point in having an audience list of 1,000 if they never open your email. Instead, focus on getting the right people in; it’s better to have an email list of 100 people and maintain a great open rate.
I often feedback and share great news of open and click rates with clients, to which I’m often met with “really? Is that good?” – YEP! Check out 2022’s Email Marketing benchmark report for the inside goss – depending on your industry, around a 20%-ish open rate is fab!
Why then, you might think, should we invest time and money into this gig, if only 1 in 5 people are opening? Because my friend, it’s a numbers game. You’ve got to be in it to win it, and the fact is this audience is filled with warm leads as they’ve taken the action themselves to subscribe to your list. So stick with me, and believe that this is a great strategy for improving sales and nurturing your audience.
Here are a few ways to organically grow your email list:
- Promote a free lead magnet – signing up subscribes the audience member to your list
- Have a pop-up subscribe box on your website
- Have a subscribe box in the footer of your website
- Use a “subscribe to my interesting/thought-provoking/worth-your-time-to-read-it newsletter!” as a call to action in social media posts
- Encourage readers to subscribe at the end of your blog
Let unengaged subscribers go
Much like having a cull of your social media audience, on email marketing platforms you can filter your audience to check on the activity per user.
A lot of the marketing platforms charge per audience size, not subscribers, so you could end up paying for a service that you do not need.
Person A could be a member of your audience, BUT has unsubscribed, so they’re taking up a seat but won’t ever receive your emails..
My advice is every 3-6 months have an audit of your audience; use the segmentation filters to identify those that have:
- Unsubscribed
- Hard-bounced
- Not opened an email in the last 12 months
Any other triggers that you feel are relevant; archive these audience members from your list.
Not only will this have a positive impact on the audience count and then potentially the cost of your platform, but it will also give you a more accurate reflection of your analytics.
Example:
100 subscribers > 10 people open your email > 10% open rate
Audit your list, 20 of those are unsubscribed.. turns into:
80 subscribers > 10 people open your email > 12.5% open rate
Whoop! You’ve sent the same email, but to your homed in and engaged audience, and this has improved your metrics. WIN.
Write like a human
Let your personality shine through! People buy from people; they want to know you. Allow them into your life a little bit – let them get to know you as you want to get to know them, too.
Write your emails how you would chat over a coffee. It helps to read aloud what you’ve written, to check the flow and ensure it makes sense. This will make your writing easy and fun to read – if you use words like gotta, hell yehhh, and JAZZ in your everyday speech, weave them into your copy too!
It’s all about connecting with your audience whilst being true to yourself.
Include a CTA (call to action)
Click rate is a really useful measure. It’s great that your subscriber has opened your email, but are they engaged enough to do what you’ve asked them to do? The call to action could be something like:
- Check out my latest reel
- Read more over on the blog
- Look at the updates via the services page
- Download my freebie here!
You’ve then got their attention for a few moments longer! AND, they’ve likely ended up on your website, or your socials platform.. which is fab.
Have I inspired you to set up your monthly email system? I know it’s a lot to learn, and each email platform takes some getting used to, but when you jump in and get cracking, you’ll find your business will feel the positive impact quickly.
It’s all about setting up the foundations, so you’re ready to fly – (here comes my CTA 😉)…
If you need help starting from the ground up, I offer a range of services to support you –
From done for you set up, which will do all the back end setting up of your platform for you, including templates, branding, sign up forms AND a tutorial to keep to support you in your email marketing journey..
To ongoing email marketing support – doing the doing for you, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly – taking the stress out and putting the rewards back in –
I’m here for it all!
If you’d like a chat to see how email marketing could benefit and enhance your business – get in touch – it all starts with a conversation (and a cuppa).