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.
The post Your Complete Holiday Email Marketing Guide appeared first on mailfloss.
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.
The post Email Marketing Psychology Guide to Better Emails appeared first on mailfloss.
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.
