Here's an email marketing checklist worth following. Every email marketer should follow a checklist to make sure they are following best practices. Don't miss this email marketing checklist so you know you'll have your bases covered.
The post 17 Point Email Marketing Checklist appeared first on mailfloss.
You need to use an email marketing checklist. No matter what anyone says, email marketing is still one of the most successful ways to reach your audience. Email brings in $38 for every dollar spent. That means you have a 3,800% ROI, which is what makes email marketing so attractive.
The problem is, you can’t hide with your email marketing. If you make a mistake, you may have just sent that mistake out to hundreds or thousands of people. And there's no undo.
Having an easy-to-follow email marketing checklist is a great way to make sure you limit your mistakes and show your subscribers your best self.
Let’s get to it!
Before you start putting your fingers to the keyboard, there’s a bit of preparation work you need to put in. These steps will save you a lot of time in the long run because you’ll be better prepared to write converting emails.
You should always have an intention for the emails you send. What goal are you looking to achieve with your email marketing?
Are you trying to sell a virtual product? Are you trying to raise awareness of something? Maybe you’re trying to drive traffic to an eCommerce website.
Regardless of your goal, you need to have that goal in your head at all times when you’re crafting your campaign. It is an important point of your email marketing checklist.
Part of having a goal is having an audience. You never want to send the same email to everyone. You should have a clear cut audience in mind before you hit that send button.
When each person subscribes to your list, you should track the referrer, how they opted in, and what the goal is for that individual.
When you’re determining your audience, you want to segment each subscriber into a specific list so you can send them the best emails. Think about it this way. Let's say you published a blog post about vegan recipes and got some new subscribers from it. You wouldn’t want to send them a bunch of emails regarding steaks and burgers, right?
Keep track of each subscriber on a micro basis so you can market to them in the most effective way possible.
Now that you have a bunch of lists with the best possible audience in each, it’s time to start working on your email. Before you go and send anything out, there is some backend work you want to do to position yourself for success.
Yes, I’m talking to all of you still using your @aol.com emails. It’s time for a change!
You need to have a professional email that you use for business purposes. Make sure it’s a @yourwebsite.com email. Doing this will make you look like a professional, and people will be more likely to open their eyes and ears for you.
Going along with the professional email is your photo. When someone receives an email from you, they don’t want to see you holding a bottle of tequila from your trip to Mexico. Make sure you have a professional photo that screams, “I am awesome at what I do!”
Email signatures are essential to any email marketing checklist for a few reasons. First, the best signatures help drive conversions. We’re putting emphasis on “best.” A lousy email signature will hurt you more than not having one at all.
The best email signature will do a few things. It will personalize the email and show people that you’re a real person. It will help keep you out of the spam folder because you need to input a physical address. Your email signature will also provide an opportunity for you to use a call to action.
In your email signature, you can put a link where people can schedule a call, shop, or whatever it is you’re looking to accomplish.
Even though you're emailing to subscribers, you still need to watch out for rules and regulations. Make sure you have a clear “unsubscribe” button that provides people with an easy way to opt-out.
Do not make any lofty promises in your emails, either. If you’re selling coaching or services, don’t try to bait your subscribers into doing anything. That can get you in hot water quickly if your call to action doesn’t line up with what you’re saying in your email. Keep it clean.
We cannot stress this enough. You should spend more time on your subject line than the body of your email. It doesn’t matter what you put in your email if it never gets opened. Make sure you’re testing plenty of subject lines and spending a lot of time on the psychology of the subject line.
In our experience, we’ve learned that short subjects do the trick. Avoid spammy language here and don’t use emojis or capital letters unless you want to end up in spam.
Finally, we can talk about building an email that will make a difference in your campaign. By now, we’ve set the stage, and you should have an email account that is built to convert subscribers. Let’s talk about some of the finer details you need to know to get people to click through.
Depending on what email service you use, you might be able to buy high converting email templates from them. If you don’t have that luxury, you could always design it yourself (like a real marketer!), just kidding.
Or maybe not.
Anyway, it’s essential to test your email templates and don’t let them become your religion. If something isn’t working, know enough to change it.
When you’re sending emails at scale, you’ll need to template them to some extent. But make sure that it’s converting before you start using it for all of your emails.
The key to success with email marketing is your ability to show your subscribers how much you care. If you don’t personalize the email, you’ll have a hard time doing that.
Gone are the days when you could send out a “to whom it may concern” email and get an 80% conversion rate. You’ve got to put in a little more effort than that.
Make sure you’re using variables that include personal information like their name. If you want to go the extra mile, you could even have specific points based on how they initially subscribed to you. That goes back to the segmentation section we discussed earlier.
There are a million and one different studies done of the highest converting length for an email. That said, there isn’t a right or wrong way to fill in the blank space in your email. We would suggest keeping it as long as it is necessary to convey the message. Brevity and clarity are key.
The reason you want to keep the email short is that people have a short attention span. If you want people to download an ebook, you should say so within the first few lines. That way they know the purpose of the email.
We see so many people write novels that hide the actual intention of the email. Not only does that not work, but it’s also a tremendous waste of time.
Your subscribers don’t care that you were at Yosemite National Park and had an epiphany. Then you decided to write an ebook while sitting next to a waterfall. No one cares.
They want to know why you’re emailing them, what you have to offer, and what it will do for them. That’s it.
You need to focus on how your offer will change their life. Once again, they don’t care about you as much as you think. They don’t care that you have 15 years of experience, a Ph.D., a TedX talk, and two million subscribers on Youtube.
All they want to know is, “what do you have for me?”
Spend less time talking about yourself in your email body and more time talking about the benefits for the sub.
Besides your subject line, your call to action is the next most important string of words or buttons. You need to think a lot about what you’re asking and how you plan to do it.
It’s funny, but most people make the mistake of having a soft call to action or none at all. Imagine reading through an email about a bunch of fantastic stuff but not knowing what to do next. Many marketers do this, and it’s crippling to your success.
Don’t be afraid to be blunt and straightforward with your audience. Tell the people directly what they need to do and how fast they need to do it. You’ll be surprised to find that people respond more to this strategy.
Now that you’ve got yourself a great looking email, it’s time to tweak it to make it perfect. Remember, you’re on a first draft right now, you can do better than that!
It’s no secret that mobile optimization is critically important right now. In 2019, mobile accounted for 43% of email opens. You don’t want to miss out on that audience by having email copy they can’t read, links they can’t click, and images they can’t see.
After you have your email template created and ready to go, check it on all your available devices. If you’re using a reputable email service provider, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem with this.
The last thing you want is for someone to send you an email back saying that one of your links doesn't work. This is where panic starts to set in. You’re thinking about the fact that you sent 30000 emails out, and each of them contains a broken link.
You start to question your ability to be a business owner; you’re rethinking your life choices, you're eating an entire tub of ice cream. We know how it goes.
All jokes aside, you obviously don’t want any broken links, and mistakes happen. Make sure you go through and check each link before hitting send.
Here are some personal tricks that we’ve learned over the years. If you end up in the spam folder or even the “promotions” tab on Gmail, you’ll experience a tremendous drop in open rates. Your goal should be to stay out of the spam folder, and here’s how you can do it.
Google made an algorithm update in January 2019. For this update, it changed the way that they categorize something as spam. Basically, they cracked down on a lot of spammy looking emails and made it much more difficult for them to have success.
One way to get flagged as spam is to have too many links in your email. Every email you sent gets scanned by Google for certain triggers that make the algorithm think it's spam. Links are one of those. Limit yourself to two or three links per email. That includes your signature, as well.
Let’s be clear here. If you put free, sale, offer, 50% off, buy this, or anything similar to that in your subject line. You’re screwed. Your email will go right to spam, and no one will ever see what amazing content your email holds.
You need to warm up your leads first by drawing them in with an intriguing subject line rather than a straightforward salesy one.
This tip goes for the people who are buying lists for their email marketing. We’re not saying don’t buy lists but beware of the consequences. If you get a list of 1000 emails and 200 of them bounce. Not only will you get flagged for spam, but you might also lose your domain email.
If you bounce too many emails that tells Google that you’re a spammer because you don’t know who you’re sending emails to. Be careful with buying lists.
Whew, you made it! Feel free to take this email marketing checklist and use it next time you fire up a campaign.
Looking for a holiday email marketing guide? Well, you're in luck. Look no further because our holiday email marketing guide covers everything you need to know about holiday email marketing. You'll be able to implement actionable advice right into your own holiday email marketing campaigns, just in time for the big one.
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The holidays are here, and you’re ready to cash in on some serious online sales. We’re with you on this. Your holiday email marketing efforts might go unnoticed without the right strategy. You’ll want to start ramping up your holiday email marketing before the snow starts falling!
Nothing gives you that warm and cozy feeling like a holiday newsletter (that might be a bit of a stretch).
And that’s the point. When you send out your holiday emails, they should make your subscribers feel something. It’s like when you walk into the grocery store and smell those cinnamon pine cones they always have right at the door. It provokes a feeling of family and togetherness.
Your holiday email marketing should do the same. Let’s see if we can fill your stocking full of sales this year!
How many times have you asked someone what they want for Christmas and they give you a canned answer like, “oh, I don’t know”. Or “get me whatever, I don’t care?”. A great holiday email marketing idea is to provide gift ideas to people who might not know what to get someone in their life.
A holiday gift guide is a great way to do this. Showcase some of your most popular items or some new stuff you’ve released for the holidays. Send out a newsletter to your subscribers, highlighting relevant products you think they might want.
Here is where the segmentation of your list comes into play. If you’ve split your subscriber list up the right way, you should have large groups of certain people who are interested in certain things. This is where you can come in and send the exact ideas to the right people.
For example, you might have a certain list for parents. You might want to send this list some great gift ideas for their kids.
If you have another list of people who are shopping for pets, you’ll know what to do there. Create a collage of your greatest gift ideas and blast it out to everyone on your list. We recommend linking to the gift guide in every email you send. The earlier you start getting into their heads, the higher chance you have of securing some sales as a result of your efforts.
This idea will hit home with a lot of people. So many shoppers procrastinate and wait until the last minute to do their holiday shopping. As a result, they have to scramble at the last minute to get everything done.
When consumers shop online, a concern is how quickly they will receive their order. So why not take the time to remind your subscriber list that they have time to get their shopping done before Christmas?
Consider sending out an email with the subject line “Free overnight shipping” or something related to that.
You can send this email out a week before Christmas or even a few days before the big day. When you combine this point with the previous one, you have a recipe for success. Now, the person on the other end can fill in some of the blanks on their holiday shopping list.
Maybe they weren’t sure about what to get their Great Aunt Isabell from Virginia. Now you send them an email explaining how they can get free overnight shipping, and here's a list of great gift ideas. Boom, you’ve got yourself a handful of last-minute sales.
It’s easy to only think about the big shopping holidays this time of year. We always think about Christmas, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. We spend all our resources building campaigns around these three days, but what about the other holidays and events? They might not be as popular, but they are essential opportunities for you to squeeze a few bucks out of your list.
Here’s an excellent example from Casper Mattresses. They used daylight savings time as their reason for sending you an email, and they threw in a 10% off code. This strategy is so brilliant being that they’re basically selling you more sleep.
They go on to show how you’ll be spending more time in the dark, so why not do it on a comfortable mattress. While I’m sure you don’t all sell sleeping related items, you could use some of these smaller holidays to your advantage.
What about Small Business Saturday? People love to support causes they can understand, and this is one of them. While you might not have a brick and mortar location, many online retailers are small businesses run by individuals or small groups of people. Take a minute to pull back the curtain and show your subscribers that you’re a real person and not just a store.
You have a great opportunity to write some succulent subject lines with the right strategy. You’ll want to make your subject lines more irresistible than the bread put on the table before the rest of your Christmas dinner comes.
A great way to do this is with words that draw attention. Words like:
Since we’re talking about holiday email marketing, we also don’t want to forget the important holiday-related buzzwords. You’ll want to come up with holiday-related phrases like:
...or something else that’s not as cheesy, but you get the point.
It’s important to draw attention using your email subject line because this is what will get your email opened. You could have the best offer in the world, but it’s hidden by that dreaded email open button. Until you get past that stage, it doesn’t matter what you have inside.
Emails with personalization components are 26% more likely to get opened. If you write an email address to everyone, it’ll reach no one. It’s incredibly important to include the subscriber's name somewhere in the subject line or in the first sentence of the email.
Another personalization idea could be to have your subscribers properly segmented. Maybe you know that a certain list celebrates Hanukkah, and you want to go that direction. It would be a shame for you to send a ton of Christmas related content to people who don’t celebrate the holiday.
Although you want to assure your audience that they have enough time to shop before the holidays you still want them to take action. Makes sense, right? Having urgency is a necessary part of almost all digital marketing. If people think they can sit on an offer for too long, they’ll never buy from you.
You’ll want to encourage your audience to take action right away; otherwise, they’ll miss out on the offer. A great way to do this is with an “Early Shoppers Bonus” or “Early Bird Special.”
Offer a special discounted price for people who are willing to take action before the holiday rush sets in. If you’re creating campaigns around Christmas, maybe you start pushing this offer right after Halloween? Some people are all about getting their shopping done early. They’ll see it as a huge opportunity to save some money and get it done before everyone else.
With all of these offers, you’ll want to attach a specific date and even a countdown timer. We also recommend making these time periods short, so your audience doesn’t think they have enough time. This strategy will push them to pull out their wallet right then and there.
The time management company Noko does this with Freelancember. This idea is brilliant, and it's crazy enough to work. There's the element of surprise and mystery involving this strategy. It’s not as simple as just sending an email and seeing an offer. You get a new offer every day, and you never know what it will be.
A strategy like this is paramount to skyrocketing your open rates. Your subscribers will be excited to see what the offer of the day is. Plus, you get to create so many different offers that you're bound to find some that appeal to your list.
Not to mention, you’re also combining the element of urgency because the offer only lasts for a day. You’ll want to make sure to promote this for a while leading up, so people know what to expect from you.
Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be basic offers on the other end. You can offer more than a simple 15% off or a free gift. Depending on your audience, you can include fun holiday contests, quizzes, and pieces of content, as well.
Next to personalization, exclusivity is an important factor when drawing up your email campaigns. You want the person on the other side of the email to feel so special when they open up your email.
They chose to subscribe to your newsletter and opened up a section of their inbox. Don't waste this opportunity. If you do, you may as well pour them a tall glass of eggnog and then dump it down the drain. Because really, who even drinks that stuff?
Now is the time to remind your audience that you’re not sending them sales and offers all year. You’re here to provide exclusive perks that no one else gets.
In your email copy, you’ll want to include phrases like:
Make sure that the receiver of the email knows that only email subscribers are receiving this special offer. Provide them with an email exclusive promo code and watch the sales go up.
If you want to spice up the deals, even more, do this. Offer early access to new products and additional benefits that are only available through email. Remember that email marketing is often a long-term game with long-term benefits.
Even if they don’t buy from you right now, your subscriber retention is off the charts when you play the long game like this. You’re showing your audience that you care, and it’s bound to come back to you eventually.
Finally, we’re big believers in simplifying rather than complicating. There are many emails floating through the inbox every day, and so few of them ever get opened. Do not overload your list with tons of text and irrelevant content.
If you’re sending out a newsletter promoting some holiday recipes, get to the point. Include a few graphics, a paragraph or two of text, and that’s it. Make the call to action button larger than life and direct them to your website for more content.
You don’t have to sell them on anything in your email! The email is their gateway to the rest of your offers, so treat it that way!
By now, you should have a handful of ideas to get rolling on your holiday email marketing. Remember that there are plenty of holidays out there to create campaigns around. Don’t be afraid to branch out and try something new.
It’s crucial that you test everything and see what works best. That is why we recommend that you don’t go overboard until you know that something works. Don’t spend two months on a campaign that you haven’t at least tested before blasting it out.
Good luck with your holiday email marketing and take some time to spend with friends and family this year! Happy Holidays!
Email marketing psychology is your secret weapon to better emails and more effective email marketing. In this guide we'll teach you 8 email marketing psychology tactics to use in your email marketing campaigns.
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Email marketing psychology is a huge part of selling anything through email. To make sales, we need to appeal to people's senses and make them feel something if we plan on getting them to buy.
Some people buy when they feel inferior. Others buy if they get excited enough. Some consumers are complete impulse buyers and will buy anything if you don’t give them enough time to think about it.
When it comes to email marketing, it’s essential to understand some of the psychology behind converting emails into dollar signs. We put so much emphasis on the subject line and getting the email open that it's easy to ignore the copy we put inside.
Here are eight simple ways to get inside your client's brain and come out with something shiny.
We hear this a lot these days, right? You need to provide value upfront if you expect to get anything on the back end. We hear that we can’t sell to people all the time and expect that they’ll always buy from us.
If you’ve ever heard of the popular Youtuber and Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, you’ll know where I’m coming from. He wrote a book called “Jab Jab Jab Right Hook”. In it, he talks about how you need to slowly introduce your offers to your prospects by offering them free value initially.
After about three free offers (ebooks, swipe files, intro courses, videos, etc.) you can pitch a paid offer. Your audience will feel more compelled to purchase something from you since you’ve provided them so much free value.
Has someone ever done something for you in your life, and you immediately thought, “oh man, I owe this person big time.” You want the people on the other end of your email to say, “Holy crap, I can’t believe they’re giving this away for free!” If you can accomplish that, you’re almost guaranteed to pull in a sale down the road.
We’ve all heard of FOMO (fear of missing out). You want to use this strategy in your emails to deploy the psychological anxiety associated with missing out on a great offer. We see this all the time in digital marketing now.
Someone releases a course at a ridiculously low price and offers that price to only the first ten people who join. Then after that ten join, they extend that price for another few weeks. Then they up the price, and they get all the people who missed out initially. It goes on like that as a smart marketing tactic. They never had a concrete destination with the price all along. Please use this ethically, with a real reason for this style of deadline.
Research company Worchel, Lee, and Adewole offered two groups of students ten cookies in two separate jars. They told the students to rate the value of the jars. Both jars had the same type and amount of cookies, so they had similar values. They then removed eight cookies from one jar, and the students picked the one with only two left.
You can implement this in your emails by putting deadlines and limits on all your offers. You want to combine these first two points for the ultimate psychological smackdown.
Imagine if your potential client says, “Whoa, I can’t believe they’re giving this away for free, but it’s only available today. I better jump on it!”
There are many ways you can add scarcity to your emails. The key is to make your offer so great that they fear missing out on it if they don’t act quick enough.
Giving something away for free in your emails triggers the pleasure centers of the brain for the people who are reading it. We’ll use a great example from another popular digital marketing pro, Grant Cardone. This guy does millions of dollars in sales of his courses by cold calling the heck out of every business in the country.
He has a popular book called the “Millionaire Booklet,” and he gives it away for free but asks you to pay for shipping. Now, he’s not making any money off this book, but it’s a springboard to everything else. He reels you in with his free book, gets you to watch his videos, and eventually gets you to buy some of his merchandise. And maybe a course or two.
The moral of this story is don’t be shy about using free offers in your emails, just make sure you can back it up. You don’t want to mislead people or make an offer that you can’t back up.
Another great example is the whole “free shipping debate.” We feel like anyone who doesn’t offer free shipping at this point is at a huge disadvantage. Free stuff is a powerful psychological tactic and free shipping means there aren't any surprise costs at checkout.
Give free stuff away in your emails frequently. Then make sure you hit your subscribers up with a brilliant offer that makes sense for your audience.
Think about your email marketing like trying to pick someone up at a bar. You wouldn’t go over there and start trying to lock tongues with the person now, would you? You need to set the stage a little. Offer some value, show off your personality, and get them to like you before you get anything in return.
The same goes for your email marketing strategy. We recommend getting your audience's feet wet with a few small but valuable actions. Then once you've introduced yourself, they’ll be more likely to complete a more significant action.
For example, you could ask the subscriber to watch a video or download a PDF file that will help them with something. While you’re not asking for much, you can ensure that this action will trigger them to want more from you. Now, when you come back later with a larger offer, they’ll feel more inclined to open up their virtual door and let you in.
We see this used a lot in email drip campaigns, and you want to keep that image in your head. You’re dripping content to them; you’re not dumping the whole bucket all at once. If you come in too hot with a huge offer right off the bat, you’ll scare them away. And then you’ve lost them for good.
Start small, be patient, and it will pay off.
One of our absolute favorite examples of selling psychology at work takes place with pricing. There are two great ways to use pricing to play with people's heads. Let’s use the movie theater popcorn example first.
You have three sizes of popcorn - small, medium, and large. The small is $2.49, the medium is $5.29, and the large is $5.99. Can you see the psychology at work here?
People will walk up to the counter in a buying mood because they’re out looking to have a good time at the movies. First, they look at the small popcorn. The first thing that runs through their head is, “It’s priced way too low so it must be tiny. I don’t think it’s going to be enough.”
Then they look at the medium and figure that’s the way to go. But then they look at the large and see that it’s only 70 cents more. And they opt for the large because it’s the best deal. Cool, right?
You can make this example work for you in your cold emailing, as well. You want to make sure that you don’t give away the whole boat with your initial upfront offer.
Look at it like this. Your first offer shouldn’t be enough to make your customers feel like they don’t need to come back for more. Course creators are great at this. They’ll offer a free course upfront that only gives you a little information. It makes you excited to think about what you could accomplish if you had the full course. In the end, you buy the full course. Then you get upsold on one-on-one coaching and masterminds.
The free course is the small popcorn. The full course is the medium, and the coaching is the large.
Gone are the days when you could send emails out saying “to whom it may concern” and get a 70% open rate. Those days are over. We need to personalize our emails with the client's name, business name, and some conversation points if we expect to get anything in return.
Everyone knows that few people write every email they send anymore. But, you still want to make the prospect feel like you went the extra mile to send them a personalized email.
Starting with the subject line, you need to make them feel like the email was written specifically for them. Including their name or business name in the subject line is a great way to make this happen.
In the body of the email, you need to use their name. And perhaps talk about some things you noticed on their website or social media.
Following these steps may take much more work. But it will benefit you in the long run with better open and response rates from potential customers.
Many business psychologists believe that colour causes 60% of people to either accept or reject a product or service. Colour may cause someone to experience an emotional response. You want to make sure to choose the right colours for your brand to use in your email. The colour of your CTA button should contrast the rest of the email.
When you think of the colour red, you might think of danger or urgency. When you think of blue, you might think of trustworthiness and security. Attached to each color is a specific emotion, and the only way to figure out which works best is to test everything.
Colour is a great variable to use on a call to action button in your emails. You want the colour to make sense for your branding, and also try to invoke an emotional trigger from your audience.
One of the greatest psychological mistakes you can make is to talk too much about yourself and what you offer. You want to sell the outcome of your product or service rather than all the features you’ve worked so hard on.
It’s important to keep this in mind at all times when writing your copy. Think about it this way; if you offer:
You might want to rephrase that as:
Your client is not trying to get real estate photography; they’re trying to sell their house. They’re thinking about all the great things that will happen when they sell it. Maybe they want to move to the beach, plan on traveling, or are suffering a loss and just want to get out.
Sell your subscribers or prospects on how doing business with you will change their life.
Whew, congratulations on making it this far. By now, you should have a solid understanding of the importance of psychology in email marketing. Since you’re not sitting across a table from the person you’re selling to, you need to ensure they get in their own head. Making them think is the key to closing more deals and making more money with your email efforts.
A few hours ago (November 18, 2019) I was informed of a data leak from a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket by a security researcher at Upguard. That means the file reports we email to users and were housed on Amazon S3 were publicly exposed and readable by anyone with the link. The files contain email […]
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Need Black Friday Email Marketing Ideas? If so, you've come to the right place. Read this article on Black Friday Email Marketing Ideas to get more out of your Black Friday Email Marketing.
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Black Friday falls on November 29th this year, and you don’t want to sleep on this tremendous shopping holiday. If you’re looking for low hanging fruit to kick start your sales you’ll want to take advantage of this day.
The holiday started in Philadelphia, where there was a ton of traffic on the day after Thanksgiving. It had nothing to do with shopping. Retailers started using the term Black Friday because it helped get them out of the red (and into the black).
It’s all about what you know, right? Anyway, enough with the boring history lesson. Let’s talk about some ideas and examples you can use in your business to get some more sales this year.
First things first, let’s talk about why Black Friday is an important day to focus on if you’re in online sales. Whether you sell physical products, digital products, courses, programs, imported cheese, or whatever.
You need to focus a considerable portion of your energy on Black Friday, here’s why.
Online sales are up 23.6% since 2017. The average order value increased by more than 8% as well. Cyber Monday is also one of the biggest online shopping days of the year, with $7.9 billion dollars in revenue.
It’s only getting bigger and bigger folks. 2019 is projected to be the biggest sales year for Black Friday so you’ll want to make the most of these email marketing ideas. Or else you might watch your competitors bask in the glory that is "the holidays".
If you’re anything like me, you love the holidays but hate when people start putting their Christmas lights up in October. That said, it’s never too early to start promoting your deals. You want to be the first in your subscriber's minds and the last that they see before they hit the buy button.
That means you should be sending out awesome emails to your list at the beginning of October. You could even go so far as to push “Early Black Friday Deals.” How many times have you seen that from a retailer?
We see it all the time. Retailers will push deals for people who want to get deals before the deals even start. Did I mention deals?
Start now!
$7.9 billion, yes with a B was spent on Cyber Monday last year. Out of those billions came $2.2 billion from smartphones. You should be creating separate emails to reach your Cyber Monday shoppers. You never want to ignore these people because they might have a bad taste in their mouth over Black Friday.
When you think of Black Friday, you think of some lady drop-kicking an eight-year-old to get the latest and greatest TV.
Cyber Monday has a lot more chill associated with it, so it helps to create separate campaigns for each. Some people will have zero interest in your Black Friday deals simply because you called it that.
Those same people will eat up the same deals if you approach them differently and promote them as “Cyber Monday” deals. We would suggest using different graphics, colors, and copy to push your Cyber Monday deals. Start promoting them as early as possible.
This time of year is your best opportunity to boost your sales and catch a little windfall before the holidays kick in. If you’re not marketing to your audience using the best email templates and CTAs, it won’t matter how great your offer is. Let’s be real for a second, we’ve seen so many bad email templates, and we mean most of them.
Last Black Friday, we saw many people use a circus of colors, fonts, and images without having any rhyme or reason behind them.
Here’s the deal with your email template:
Similar to our last point, you need to stay real with your Black Friday email marketing. Some people have a bad habit of making their deals seem too good to be true. If people don’t believe you, they won’t buy from you.
Don’t just highlight all the deals you’re offering. You want to make sure to show your subscribers some real products. Keep in mind that a lot of these subscribers might not even remember you or when they subscribed. And now you’re hitting their inbox with all these “spammy looking” deals.
Do your best to appear like a real person at all times.
Did we ever say we’re the greatest at creating segways into different paragraphs? Hear us out here. While we don’t mean spam a million deals to every subscriber on your list, there is a right way to do this.
For example, you could start promoting your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals in October. You could tell your list that you have a deal an hour sale on Black Friday. This is a great way to drum up some attention. You’ll separate yourself from people who are simply offering a percentage off their entire store or product.
Offering a deal an hour pushes your list to keep coming back to your store to see what you have going on. In addition to this deal, you’ll want to offer a percentage off the entire store, so it’s like a double whammy. Not only do you get people coming back, you get that high volume you need to cover the price reduction.
Another great example of doing something different with your Black Friday emails is offering a free gift with a purchase. We see this happen a lot during the holidays as well.
For example, you could send out an email to your list suggesting they can swing by the store to claim their free gift. You’ll want to use a product or offering that has free shipping and doesn’t cost you much.
If you’re selling digital products, you could offer an ebook or something like that. If you sell physical products, you could use something with free shipping and give it away for free with a promo code.
A great example that Taco Bell uses is during the Major League Baseball World Series. Have you ever heard of this one? It’s awesome.
If a player steals a base, Taco Bell offers a free taco to anyone who comes into the restaurant. Who in their right mind will walk into a Taco Bell and only eat one taco? Show me this person because they must have more discipline than Mark Wahlberg.
It’s a huge marketing strategy that anyone could see through, but it draws people in. Everyone wants to get their free taco, and they end up buying a few chalupas, some nachos, and a few drinks as well.
Boom, marketing.
If you sell beauty products, you could offer a complimentary item that goes really well with something else in your store. During the checkout process, you could upsell them on a paid product. Your customers will already feel like they’re getting something for free. PLUS, it’s Black Friday, so you’re offering a huge percentage off that paid product anyway.
Trust me, it works.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are great days to start adding in some new products and testing things out. You could send an email out to your list telling them to check out your “Black Friday Exclusive List.” You could even make these special products only available to email subscribers to make it seem even more exclusive.
If you’re re-targeting previous customers (hint: good idea) this is also a great chance to bring them back by giving them new offers.
For digital products, you could tell them that you added some new stuff to a previous course, or you’ve beefed something up.
Regardless of what type of business you’re in, this is an excellent chance for you to tell people to come check you out again.
You could have the greatest deals, have the best offers in the world, and have amazing content and graphics inside the email. All of that doesn’t matter if your target never opens the email.
Think about your subscriber's inbox. Especially around Black Friday, it will be chock fulla retailers and marketers trying to do the same thing as you.
Get the sale.
You need to stand out more than the new kid in class. That’s not easy to do.
Here are a few tips to make sure your email gets opened:
Remember that in most email services like Gmail and Yahoo, the first sentence of your email will display before the target even opens it. You need to make sure you get to the point quickly and don’t miss this opportunity. The key to success with Black Friday email marketing is grabbing attention and holding it long enough to secure the bag.
You need to make sure you’re testing your headlines, graphics, gifs, deals, and everything else. You’ll never know what works best unless you test everything. This reason is why it’s important to start early, so you have time to test before people start shopping.
You’ll want to make sure to A/B test every single aspect and have a tool to use to make this process simple. Most email marketing tools will come with A/B testing capabilities; you’ll need it.
You don’t want to sleep on Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing. This time of year is a great opportunity for you to boost your sales before the holiday shopping season kicks into first gear.
Here are some final points to remember before we go our separate ways:
Good luck!
Looking for some email marketing best practices to help guide you through your email marketing campaigns? We've got 10 tips to share with you to ensure you're following best practices to get the most out of your email marketing.
The post Email Marketing Best Practices: 10 Tips for Success appeared first on mailfloss.
Email marketing is a powerful tool when used correctly. It’s all about giving your audience something different than what everyone else is doing. We live in a world where the consumer is savvier than ever, so you can’t market to them as you’ve done in the past. We need to get more creative and spend more time on our emails.
Here are some email marketing best practices to help you get more out of each email that hits your sent folder.
There is nothing more important to an email marketing strategy than your value proposition. Ask yourself:
If you’re not offering more to them than the other guy, you’re toast. Burnt toast.
What do we mean by more? We mean, you need to give users something extra if you expect to ask them for something. If you want someone to opt-in to a landing page or start a free trial, you need to give them something in return.
We don’t mean a silly PDF swipe file or an ebook you wrote in five minutes (we know who you are, we’re watching you). No, we mean something of serious value that makes the person on the other end say, “Whoa, this is exciting, let’s go!”
Offering someone something awesome through an email is a great way to get them to open more. How many times have you opened an email to find nothing of value on the other side? When that happens, do you think you’ll continue to open emails from that person?
Probably not.
Kevin Lee from Buffer told a great story once. He talked about Dropbox giving him 10x his original storage space for the same price through an email. He got so much incredible value from that email that he’ll probably have butterflies the next time he sees Dropbox in his inbox.
There is nothing worse than an impersonal email. The “to whom this may concern” style of email marketing DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE. Stand up from your couch right now and scream to the world because we all could use a hard lesson on email personalization.
There is a real person on the other side of that email who is likely very busy with their own life. If they’re kind enough to open your darn email, the least you can do is treat them like a human.
Put your research into understanding your audience and having variables in place to make a personal connection with them. Alex Berman from Experiment 27 has a great cold email marketing strategy. It mentions the importance of personalizing your emails and including points that show you know who the person is.
On another note, you want to humanize your emails and show your audience that you’re a real person, as well. It’s so great that we live in a world where brands can share their struggles and triumphs with their viewers. Years ago, a brand was simply a word about a product. But today we see brands connecting with people and stepping out from behind the curtain.
Headspace does a great job of sharing communication with their audience. The meditation tool talks about how they appreciate their customers and how fortunate they are to have them. That type of connection is so valuable to an audience, and it helps with customer retention.
Have you ever received an email that went something like this:
“Hey Mike, I just wanted to reach out today and talk to you about this great offer I have. I’ve been working on this offer for three years now, and I assure you it will change your life once you see it. Before I get to that, let me tell you a little about myself. I’ve worked in the industry for eight years, and I have a ton of experience with email marketing. I’ve helped countless business owners...BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH…………..BLAH.”
Don’t do that! Do not carry on about everything other than what the person is supposed to do with your email. The best way to never convert your emails is to drool over your qualifications and expertise right off the bat.
This person doesn’t care. Unless they are a hot lead, they don’t care about that. All they want to know is what you can do for them. You need to be super clear about it immediately, or else they’ll close the email or even unsubscribe if you piss them off enough.
Another essential thing to remember is that you have to tell your audience what to do. Be as clear as possible about what they need to do if they’re interested. Don’t send them through this endless funnel of pages because they’ll bounce. Make the process from “email open” to “conversion” as seamless as possible.
If we go back to the personalization factor, not everyone wants the same things. Each subscriber won’t want to receive emails twice a day, while others may not mind it. Some might want one email a week. You really need to cater to the specifics of your audience if you expect to have the highest conversion rate.
Hubspot does a great job of this by allowing its subscribers to choose how often they want to receive emails. Subscribers can also pause their subscription without having to unsubscribe.
You should always offer that as an alternative when someone chooses to unsubscribe.
Clickfunnels also has a similar process they follow where they let you freeze your account at a much lower price without losing your funnels. If someone loses their funnels after they’ve spent countless hours on them, the chance of them coming back is slim.
But, if they can save all their work but cut the cost of the subscription down to almost nothing, they’ll likely return.
You need to cater to the individual rather than the audience as a whole. Everyone wants something different.
Let me give you a scenario. You’re sitting and having a nice dinner on a Friday night with your family. You’re unwinding after a long week of work and enjoying yourself.
All of a sudden, your phone starts blowing up with emails reading, “URGENT: OPEN NOW!” You might be thinking, “Holy crap! Is my business collapsing? Have I lost all my money? Are they bringing back the McRib?”
So you open that email to find a slimy sales pitch from that guy you unknowingly subscribed to four months ago and forgot about.
This is a sure-fire way to get yourself thrown into the spam folder for all of eternity, and you don’t want to do this. Sending false alarms, fake urgency, and misleading content is the quickest way to go to spam jail. And once you’re there, your open rates will drop to nearly nothing.
Not to mention the fact that it’s not a cool way to operate your business. If you’re in this for the long-term put the real work in to bring your audience value. That way they will open your emails and connect with you on a personal level.
We’re in the age of “clickbaity” advertisements that draw people in but offer nothing on the back end. Make sure you add a physical address to your email and always give them a way to unsubscribe. Ignoring these two points is against anti-spam laws.
Overall, you should spend more time on your subject line than you do on your email. These headlines are essential to getting people to open your emails, and once you’ve gotten that far, you’re in the clear.
You want to test a variety of subject lines to find the best one for you. Here is a template that works well for most people:
If you can mash these three points into one subject line that is not longer than 50 characters, you’ll be good to go. Something like, “Tom, smash that button for three free days of BLANK.” While that strategy won’t work for everyone, it’s worth testing it against something you’re currently having success with.
Never use spammy words like win or urgent. Do not write your headlines in uppercase letters, and never promise something that you can’t deliver.
Email marketing is all about building trust in your audience. The last thing you want to do is get someone to open your email if you can’t deliver on what you promised.
You want to ensure your first touches on a potential lead are as personal as possible. Once you’ve established that initial trust, you can start to play around with more automation. Drip campaigns are a great way to automate your email marketing without sounding canned.
Start out with a welcome email with an offer. Throw in some additional information later on. Hand out another free offer and repeat this process for every lead that lands in your funnel.
There are many different email marketing software out there that will help with this process. The key is to know and understand your audience before you start automating. If you’re sending the same offers to everyone, you’re not reaching your full potential.
You should have segmented audiences, so you ensure you’re giving the exact person what they need to feel valuable.
Grammarly sends you weekly updates about how much content you’ve written, and they basically tell you how awesome you are. These updates are a great way to remind customers if they’ve fallen off the wagon or haven’t used your service in a while. If you offer SaaS, you should be utilizing this strategy.
From these emails, you can draw people back into the software to get them using it again. For example, you could send an email telling the customer that you’ve made some recent updates regarding an issue. You could also let them know what they’re missing out on by not using your service. Many businesses use this for customer retention and engagement.
The ultimate key to success with all forms of digital marketing is testing. You want to test a variety of email templates, headlines, content, videos, and so on. You’ll never know what can work if you’re not testing it against something else.
Many people enter an email marketing campaign with the intention of getting everything right on the first try. When it doesn’t work, they grumble and grouch about how email marketing is dead, and it doesn’t work.
Email marketing still has the highest rate of engagement, and so many marketers still consider it their most important avenue for reaching their audience.
Don’t sleep on email and make sure you’re testing a variety of different variables to find out what converts the best.
Finally, we’ve come to the last point. Here you have all this data that you’ve built up over time. You have segmented lists of leads. You’re getting conversions, and things seem to be going well so far. What do you do with all this data?
You need to find a way to use it and translate it into dollar signs, right?
Take all of your leads, all your email templates and variables, and all your conversions and see what works best for each particular audience.
When you’ve determined the best action plan for each audience, you can then create robust campaigns that you can scale. Once you start scaling your email marketing efforts, the sky's the limit.
We hope these email marketing best practices were useful for you and you can use them in your business right away. Be sure to understand how to treat your audience the right way and learn who they are before you start throwing yourself onto them.
Email marketing is a lot like picking someone up at the bar. You can’t expect to take them home without wining and dining them a little. Keep that in your mind when you’re creating your email marketing campaigns, and you’ll never have a problem converting!
Should you do social media or email marketing? The answer is both. They complement each other perfectly and are not mutually exclusive. Read on to find out how and why these two make a killer combo.
The post How Email Marketing and Social Media Go Hand in Hand appeared first on mailfloss.
About a decade ago, you could realistically avoid social media and email marketing and still potentially have a healthy demand generation program for your business. Sure enough, many did - they're not the easiest branches of digital marketing to dive into, and many would avoid them for simpler options if they could.
Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. Even more so, one begets the other - there’s no escaping the two because both tactics go hand in hand as crucial components of modern growth marketing strategies.
The fear is unwarranted, however - the beauty of both of these is that they play off each other wonderfully. Social media drives email marketing success, which in turn drives social media engagement. Really, the do-si-do of these 2 modes can scale long-term viral growth.
Email marketing is in broad strokes, a strategy where one sends a group of people, usually subscribers or a customer base, marketing messages via email. Email marketing is quite effective in generating revenue for a simple reason - it's driven by obvious, value-driven and measurable calls to action.
According to the State of Email Marketing Survey Summary Report by Ascend2, email marketing was dominating the digital marketing landscape. They found that both direct sales and other complex sales channels relied on the efficiency of email marketing to reach buyers.
More recently in 2019, Ascend2 has found in their recent Email Marketing Survey Summary report that 64% of marketing influencers find email marketing to be improving, but 21% consider the marketing strategy to be getting worse. In other words, email marketing is in flux for a variety of reasons. Looking at the progression of the two reports, it makes sense why marketing influencers need social media to grow the email list and supplement the effectiveness of email marketing.
When social media is integrated with email marketing, it results in robust end-to-end digital marketing outreach. Social media expands the reach of the brand and ultimately drives traffic to email lists. Part of why it's especially effective is that Social Media is already a communication medium - leads who are receptive to communication on social media are already primed to sign up for further communication via email marketing.
The quickest (but maybe not the best) way to use social media to grow an email list is by including the email sign-up form on the company's various social media channels. Every time a visitor comes on the page, they're invited and encouraged to sign up to the email list - already primed via their interaction on social.
First, offer a freebie, known often as a lead magnet, to visitors coming to the page in exchange for their email address. The lead magnet needs to be a resource that meets the needs of the potential subscriber. It can be an ebook, video, checklist, worksheet, or course, and it needs to be a downloadable asset.
For example, a brand that's targeting a small business owner concerned about using video marketing to grow their business can use a course with tips on how to use video to increase revenue as the lead magnet. The good news is that one can use more than one lead magnet by creating a learning center or resource tab. For example, look at how visual.ly does it.
The second tip is to create a dedicated landing page that features the lead magnet and sign-up form to join the email list. This page is referred to as the squeeze page, and its conversion rates will make or break your email marketing success.
Making content easily shareable means more people will see it. Rely on already existing subscribers on the email list who’ve already received the lead magnet resource like an ebook or checklist to get the word out about the resource. Create a squeeze page that thanks subscribers for using the resource and encourage them to share the landing page where others can get the resources as well.
Configure like buttons for all social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, among others. It’s discussed below how important it is to follow bloggers and influencers in the same space as the brand on Twitter and other channels. Well, this is why. By following them and incentivizing them to follow back and join the email list, they provide access to their audience by advocating the company's products and services - network effects!
Let’s start with the more straightforward tasks that can be done immediately to grow your list. On the Facebook page, you can place the URL for the best lead magnet resource in the main posting field and also in the description box. It’s wise rotating these occasionally.
Facebook experiences traffic from over 2 billion users every month. Using Facebook ads are an inexpensive way to gain high exposure to your lead magnets.
Before setting up the ad, the brand's Facebook business page needs to be connected to their Facebook business manager account. Next, create an Ad account.
Now it is time to create the ad. Click on the Facebook Ad manager and select Conversions as the objective of the ad. Give the ad a name and then click on the "next" tab. Define the target audience for the ad by using a retargeting pixel or targeting the competition's audience in the "detailed targeting" section.
Pixel-based retargeting redisplays the brand's sign-up form and lead magnet to any anonymous visitor to the Facebook page. A neat trick that is facilitated by the Facebook retargeting pixel is the use of custom audiences to create new audiences. All one needs to do is upload the company's current email list to create a custom audience that is similar to the customers on the current email list. Now target this lookalike audience using the custom audiences field and promote the lead magnet to them.
(Remember to exclude the current customers from the ad, so it doesn't reach customers who have already bought the products or services.)
Use the description for the cover photo to insert the URL for the lead magnet onto the Facebook page. Alternatively, place the link to the website's landing page in the cover photo description.
This tab redirects traffic from the Facebook page to the landing page of the brand's website. Using the sign-up text option will link it directly to the squeeze page (landing page) of the website.
Driving list growth with Twitter is pretty straightforward - Twitter as a platform just requires some active management to drive steady traffic. The Twitter "Add your bio" section is a great place to start off.
Place the lead magnet URL in that section along with other details about the brand or individual. As people read this section, they have higher chances of clicking on the URL to see what the brand is about. The bio also shows up on Twitter search results, increasing the chances of being opened by more people. Keep the bio section clear of any hashtags to minimize the chances of leads being distracted from the lead magnet URL.
The more comprehensive approach will need some editorial thought into what to communicate and how frequently before you begin sending out any tweets. Research the keywords to include to generate the kind of leads the brand is looking for.
Once these two preparations are in place, start tweeting, retweeting, and following other brands and individuals in the same space. This may go on for a while as the brand gains a strong following. It is okay to entice people to follow the brand by offering gifts like free courses or ebooks.
Once the fan base has grown sufficiently invite the followers to join the email list to receive more targeted resources. An incentive here doesn't hurt as well. Perhaps a free checklist or worksheet. Besides, it is easier for followers to join the email list because they have built trust in the brand.
At this point, selling them some products or services is considered perfect timing - you’ve hit peak buying interest.
This works very similarly to Facebook Ads, where the brand can target custom audiences with tweets containing links to their lead magnets. To create a custom audience on Twitter, upload the current email list onto the platform's audience manager. Select the email list as a tailored audience and check the small box for targeting similar audiences to the tailored audience.
LinkedIn is the most popular professional social media channel with millions of experts and skilled individuals using the platform for work and business. To grow an email list on the platform, use the publication section which allows users to promote some of their content.
Link directly to the lead magnet like an ebook or to the website's landing page. The more frictionless and step-less this journey is, the higher your conversions will be.
Another useful lead magnet section on LinkedIn is the Projects section of the platform.
To access the publication and project sections go to the Add profile section and click on the drop-down arrow. Click on the accomplishments section to reveal the projects and publication sections.
With LinkedIn, you'll tend to attract a higher caliber of leads because it is a professional platform. The audience is more primed for buying/signing up BUT they demand a higher level of value and are far less susceptible to engaging with fluffy content.
Since visibility is everything in attracting leads, place the lead magnet URL in the contact info. This way, even people who aren't logged on to the platform can still see the URL.
LinkedIn ads target processionals and can land a very upmarket audience for your email list. The platform has made it very easy to configure and run ads by using the campaign manager.
To begin with, open the campaign manager and create an account.
Next, launch a campaign using either sponsored content or text ads. Text ads appear on the side and top of the LinkedIn member's page while sponsored content is naturally inserted in the member's feed. The advantage with sponsored content is that one ad can be creatively tweaked to run in different variations.
For simple ads, the text ads are the way to go. But for more elaborate ads choosing sponsored content would be ideal. The variations for sponsored content ads include showcasing a company page, updating to the company, or creating an entirely new ad.
And there you have it - a dirt simple trifecta of getting off the ground on social media marketing and email marketing. Just remember: done correctly, these 3 channels should funnel into a highly optimized squeeze page and drive predictable revenue - the holy grail of modern businesses.
Oh, and a bonus tip/strategy to help kick off your social-media-email-marketing-melage:
Create a social media challenge and invite members to be a part of it to hold the brand accountable. For example, one can create a 30-day everyday video creation challenge. Create a private Facebook group for participants to post inspiration to each other or hold each other accountable.
Encourage members to share about the challenge with stories of why they are creating personal videos and their journey of creativity. As more people join the challenge, they also get word of the brand and click on the lead magnet to find out more about the company.
These buyers will be particularly interested in keeping tabs on the company, making them the ideal fit to funnel towards an email marketing program/newsletter.
For increased engagement and even more growth of the email list, taking word of the challenge to other social media channels is crucial. Choose a hashtag to help visitors search and find the campaign easier wherever they log on to.
Here is the best part:
To keep a challenge fresh and relevant every day for 30 days, send task or inspirational messages each day of the challenge to participants via an autoresponder. An email marketing automation tool will send the messages every day without any prompting from anyone - your email grows your social, which grows your email, which grows your social, ad infinitum.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Email marketing is not dead as some clickbait headlines would like to make everyone believe (not by a longshot). However, to maximize marketing success it should no longer operate as a stand-alone strategy - it requires a strong social media infrastructure to parry off of.
Hopefully this guide offers a (albeit high-level) primer for building your social-email program. After the fundamentals are set, it becomes a game of numbers and optimization.
Good luck!
