Who is email for?
One of the answers you always get is ‘it’s for everyone’. Yes, that’s boring and everone says it, but e-mail actually is for everyone. For every business type and industry, including yours. The difference comes in how effective it is which varies by industry and your individual use case.
Email is great for:
Fulfilling orders
Delivering offers
Customer retention
Audience education
Community engagement
Cold outreach
Integrated strategy with cold calls and event marketing
Crafting an email is all abut creating a story arc for your readers. Take them on a journey that ends with them taking their desired action which will ultimately help you hit your sales targets. let’s take a look at the aspects of email marketing that impact its effectiveness.
Segmentation
– this first because although it may be the last thing you think to do, it should actually be the first and informs every other aspect of your email marketing. Your segments answer the all important ‘who’, what,’ ‘when’ and ‘why’ questions.
Why?
There is definitely a reason your customers buy from you and it’s probably not what you think. We’re talking about the absolute basic reason your customer buys ffrom you. Your first instinct may be to think they buy on price, but that’s not always the deciding factor.
You can learn more about finding your customer’s why.
find the real, base reason that solves your customers underlying frustrations and ask the question to get their brains working.
Copywriting
Subject line
this is the only thing that actually counts. Well, perhaps excluding the ‘from’ or sender. This is because it’s the only thing your prospective customers see before they open your email. Your subject line is often the reason they open your email, choose to ignore it, or send it straight to spam.
Because of just how important your subject lines, you should consider taking a few extra minutes to think it through. Practice writing subject lines as much as you can. There are suggestions that you should write up to 21 subject lines before settling on the best one. We’d recommend doing that as much as possible as it will help you craft better subject lines in a much shorter period
Body
in the body, you re-enforce the message you gave in the subject line. The first title they see should follow on from the subject line so they know they’re in the right place.
At the top of the email, there is often space to write a preamble which is in smaller text and before the introductory image. This is useful text to provide a little more context and some extra text if a user hovers over your email and can get a preview. However, I’d shy away from using that nowadays and instead have a concise subject line and jump straight into the meat of the email.
Once you’ve got them inside the email, really sow them the potential benefits they’re going to get. Spell them out quickly and simply so the reader knows exactly what they’re going to get if they follow your call to action (CTA).
CTA
Your call to action can be as simple as ‘buy now’, ‘get yours’, ‘how you can help’. We’ve all seen ‘click here’, but that’s a little dry. ‘Order now’ works for repeat customers especially.
There’s no need to complicate things here, but it should tell the reader exactly*bold* what they are going to do next.
Design
Your design choices should be based on what your target audience want and what they need to see for you to make a strong impact on them.
I’ve noticed that a lot of sales to sales emails are in plain text which indicates the message they’re trying to send. Of course, fashion and sports brands will use a lot more images and colours in their emails.
It’s a clear strategy by the sales professionals that they want to appear to cut through all the superfluous colours and pretty images seen everywhere else. They’re giving off a professional , work feel and trying to be down to earth. “We’re not trying to sell you anything”, they say before slapping you with the chance to purchase consultancy hours from them for the low, low, low price of just £8,000 an hour.
In general, design is not only about pictures and images, but layout also. Even if you have an email that looks like plain text, you can have columns written into the HTML code your users don’t see.
Html
Plain
Design
Send rates – what is it, how to choose
So exactly how often should you send emails out to your prospects. That certainly depends on your industry, the reason you’re contacting your customers and your list.
Depends on industry – explain why and reasons for the below send rates
in your industry, there may be different customer expectations. Using the above examples of sales and sports brand, let’s think about how often we can reasonably send an email. For sales, you could have a weekly digest about changes specific to an industry you work with. If you work with sales teams but in any industry, you might have a daily tips email. In both you’d put a CTA telling the reader how you can help them overcome the challenges you presented in the email.
For your sports brand, you might send emails without a fixed schedule. Sure, you’d make sure prospects and current customers alike hear from you at least once per week, but if you’re a larger organisation, once per day you’ll probably have some new stock or a discount to announce. The fequency comes in if you would rather wait until you get in new orders or the specific time you can offer them.
Hourly / daily / weekly / monthly
if you are communicating with current customers, you could publish your newsletter once a month, then have a weekly email to prospects, then notifications about issues with your service like delivery, or outages if you provide a digital service.
List
Combine these three factors to make an informed decision about how often you should send out emails to your prospects.
Growing your email list
the life of your campaigns is your email list, so guard it with your life. Store it securely in comliance with GDPR and keep it up-to-date. Treat it like a Tamagochi you nurture and grow, feeding it just enough to help it grow.
There are a few ways you can grow your email marketing list.
Buying
Yes, you can buy lists of just email addresses, lists of email addresses with names, or even email addresses including names, job titles, telephone numbers and physical addresses. Some lists you buy wil be amazing and everyone on it has opted in. Other lists you buy could have been sold on and pounded several times by many other email marketers. Perhaps the lists were constructed without explicit consent or even with no consent at all. It depends on how reputable the source of the list is.
Trade shows / event marketing / event marketing at events like trade shows
actual physical, in-person events are great for building your email marketing list. It’s more likely that people you actually meet in person and voluntarily give you their email address will want to hear from your company, making the list a warm one. They may all have different intentions behind signing up. Some just want tome information about your business, others will be ready to buy.
Website forms
Constructing forms on your website is a great way to grow your list. It may come as a landing page after a pay per click advert, so you will know they’ve definitely interested in your products or services at that exact time. Add signs ups for specific forms to segmented lists and send them messages only related to the purpose they gave up their email address.
Website pop-ups
Website pop-ups are a generic way to grow your list. They’re definitely people who have some interest in your business, but how invested are they? Offering x% off is a very common offer we see on website pop-ups, but exactly how invested such sign-ups are is questionable and something only you can answer. But if your company has a target of gathering email addresses, then as an email marketer, this tactic will be important to you. Just be careful how you use sign-ups from these pop-ups as you may find a lot of them are only lukewarm and turn cold very quickly.
Regulations and Compliance – the potentially boring, yet of paramount importance stuff you need to know and adhere to. Don’t forget you also need to remove people from your list. Remember, they’re real people who may no longer want to receive your messages and opt-out actively, or they may no longer be opening your messages after being on your list for several years. At this point, it may be in your best interests to remove them from your email marketing list.
GDPR
California / can spam
The basics of online privacy are that you only contact people who want to hear from you, who have previously given their consent. You should always give them the opportunity to unsubscribe from your lists and honour those requests. Also consider how long is a reasonable amount of time to retain their email address and other personally identifiable information. If you haven’t provided a service to them for two years and they’ve never opened one of your emails, it may be time to remove them from your sales list. If they have purchased a product from you that you have a tree year warranty on, it’s not unreasonable to keep their details for at least three years, perhaps even four? That’s a call you have o make on a case-by-case basis.
