Email Marketing Strategies 101
September 15, 2009 by John_Newtson
Today let’s go over a few fundamentals of email marketing that often go unexplained… and are the source of many “unexplained” response problems …including …
- Why your “list” may not be as big as you think it is …
- How to increase the volume of sales promotions you put out without ticking off your list …
- Why the ‘blanket blasting’ marketing strategy of so many marketers is costing them money. And the simple alternative making smart marketers rich …
- How to dramatically increase response without better sales copy …
- And whole lot more!
Dear Business Builder,
I’m on a lot of email lists – somewhere in the range of 30-40 over my various email accounts. And the lack of sophistication in email marketing from even some very successful marketers is surprising.
Some of them are train wrecks I can’t look away from.
I actually bought one marketer’s product over two years ago and to this day I still receive bi-weekly promotions prompting me to buy the SAME product.
This guy doesn’t know or care who I am as a customer.
Every bit of personalization that goes into his emails is lost on me because no amount of “Hi John’s,” will explain away that he doesn’t know he already sold me the product he’s trying to sell me now.
As a direct marketer you know “the money is in the list.” You’re building a list so you can promote your products to it more efficiently.
Email is the tool of choice for most communications with your list.
- Email helps you bond and build your relationships with your customers through newsletters, announcing blog posts and delivering valuable content.
- Email is a powerful selling tool. Promotional emails to your house file will produce more sales than almost anything else you’ll do.
- It doesn’t cost you a lot of money to send emails. It’s practically free outside of the basic infrastructure you need to manage your business.
Today we’re going to go over some of the basics of email marketing.
Why the basics? Because without good fundamentals you’ll always leave a lot of money on the table.
So let’s get moving.
First things first: Your list isn’t as big as you think it is
Let’s clear some smoke out of the room and get a real picture of a critical part of your online marketing.
You, or your clients, have a list of email names consisting of two groups of people:
- Prospects: These are names on your list, ezine subscribers or people who’ve requested your free information, who have never bought anything from you.
- Customers: These people have given you money in exchange for your product or service.
A lot of folks brag about how big their list is, even when they’re lumping buyers and prospects together.
The two groups of people represent different things to your business.
Someone who’s one your list for three years but never buys anything from you is just an extra name on your list.
Try this test: Compare the total number of names on your list to the total number of buyers on your list.
I just ruined some one’s day, I just know it. Marketers who see that number for the first time tend to get depressed.
Let’s make it worse, run a list of customers who’ve bought from you in the last three months.
Why? Because the single greatest indicator of whether a customer is going to respond to your next promotion is how recently they bought something from you.
If you know much about direct mail this already makes sense to you.
Because you know “hot-line” names, or the most recent names on a mailing list to respond to a promotion, are the more responsive names you can mail to.
And hot-line names cease to be hot-line names after three months.
People on your list who haven’t bought or responded to you in the last three months are cooling and are less likely to respond to your next promotion.
Once someone joins your list your first goal is to move them from prospect to customer. And then get them to continue the customer relationship by buying more products.
Let see how we can do that better.
Email Marketing Fundamental One:
Give More, Sell More
The more promotional emails you send out, the more money you make.
Send out too many and you’ll beat up your list, everyone will unsubscribe and your business will be a bust.
You have to find the sweet spot.
If you’re only sending out valuable content once a month then sending out one promotional email a month that means you’re 50% content and 50% sales promotions.
So every other time you stop by to say hi, you’re asking me for money.
Sheesh, we’re not even related.
This is a great way to get folks to kick you out of the inbox and their lives.
In order to be able to send out more promotional emails you need to give away more valuable content.
What’s the right mix of promotional to informational emails? There’s no single right answer, generally plan somewhere in the range of 80%/20% - 90%/20% valuable content to sales promotions.
Deliver more valuable content and you can promote more aggressively.
And this is another reason why advertorial promotions are so important. There really shouldn’t be that much of a difference between your editorial copy and your promotional copy.
The goal is to deliver value at every, or nearly every, contact with your prospects and customers.
So your marketing planning should include serious thought about whether you deliver content monthly, weekly or daily. Because it directly effects how much you can sell.
If you don’t want to commit to weekly or daily contact and still want to be able to promote more, you’ll need to plan to deliver a lot of relevant, valuable information as part of your marketing campaigns. That’s another article in itself though.
Email Marketing Fundamental Two:
Segmenting Your List Lets
You Promote More Often
and More Effectively
No list is monolithic.
At the most basic you have a list of prospects and customers. If you have multiple products your customer list breaks down into buyers and non-buyers.
And as we know, plenty of folks are ignoring the rudimentary practice of NOT promoting a product to someone who already bought it.
Still, ‘blanket blasting’ is everywhere. Marketers are blasting the same promotions to every body on their file with no regard for their status as a prospect or customer, or as a buyer and a noon-buyer.
Here’s an example. Say you’re promoting a new high-end product or service. Say the price point is $2,500. On your list you have folks who’ve never spent a nickel with you and you have folks who buy several products from you.
Does it make sense to promote the $2,500 product to everyone? Often it makes more sense to put together two products — the high-end version and a smaller, less robust $200-$300 version.
Then promote the high-end version to the segment of your list most likely to buy it and the smaller version to people who haven’t bought anything yet. You can use the same front end sales copy (headline, deck and sales logic) for both series of promotions and just change the offer copy.
That’s just one way to handle it, but it’s a profitable one.
Targeting your products and offers more precisely to the different groups of people that make up your list is an easy way to increase sales.
Another problem with the blanket blasting approach is that when you’re promoting products and offers that are enticing to one part of your list, you’re basically ignoring another part of your list.
Email Marketing Fundamental Three:
Promoting Landing Pages vs. Email Campaigns
This is something I think is a hold over from direct mail.
It’s like your long copy landing page is your sales letter and your email is your envelope teaser copy. And the whole reason your email exists is to lead people to your workhorse of a landing page.
Consider this: Every time you ask readers to click on a link, you lose up to 90% of your readers. So your brilliant sales letter, with a show stopping headline and sales logic out the wazoo never makes it to 9 out of 10 of your prospects.
What do you think that does to your response rates?
Email is not direct mail. You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an email in front of your list. You just click send.
Side note: Which model converts higher? Blasting a long copy landing page as an email that only gets to 20% of addresses because email filters block it?
Or a short email that gets 99% deliverability and links through to a landing page?
The long copy blast with the lower deliverability tends to convert higher. Because you always lose a significant amount of eyeballs when you ask people to click through. So the long copy blast gets your sales copy in front of more people.
But that’s still not the strongest approach.
Why send only a single promotional email anyway?
A well thought out email campaign of various long-copy blasts tends to out-product a single blast of the long copy landing page by factors of ten.
I’ve written and planned email campaigns that have increased sales of a “tired” product by over 1,450% over previous promotional methods. On one we got close to a 5,500% increase in response (that’s another article).
And these are on sophisticated lists, which were already seeing stellar sales copy. You don’t even need better sales copy to see a significant increase in sales. Applying a more profitable marketing structure will give you enormous increases in response without better copy.
We’ll go in depth into how to plan these kinds of campaigns later in Email Marketing Strategies 201.
Email Marketing Fundamental Four:
Recycling Successful Campaigns to New Prospects
Maximizes Your Time and Sells
The lazy among us will love this one.
If you’re building your list you have new blood coming on all the time. And you have past email campaigns that were very successful these people haven’t seen.
When you want to segment your file and promote to these new names, maybe to capitalize an acquisition campaign you’ve run recently, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
It’s very easy to fall in the trap of creating everything from scratch, all the time. But an email series you ran last year can be adjusted slightly and run this year just as well. Provided you’re not always promoting it to the same people.
In fact, if you’re getting enough traffic you can create a campaign you run every month to your new names. So every one who comes to your through a specific traffic source sees a successful promotional campaign within 30 days of joining you.
Remember, the more often you can promote the more money you’ll make and this lets you promote more often.
Email Marketing Fundamental Five:
Know When to REST Your File
Every one needs a break.
You’re building a relationship with your list. You’re delivering more and more value to them and helping them achieve their goals. This is letting you promote more and more and it’s a win-win situation for everybody.
But you still need to plan periods when you DON’T promote anything. Let your list rest and just deliver value. How long this period should be again depends on how often you deliver valuable content.
If you have a weekly newsletter you’re rest period will be longer than if you have a daily newsletter.
Planning on not promoting to your file is a passive way of resting your file.
You can also take an active role and reinvigorate your file by planning periods where you over-deliver, valuable, unexpected content.
Unexpected gifts, especially things we would be willing to pay for, are great relationship builders. Marketers who realize the power of the phrase, “Surprise and Delight” easily build long-term, profitable customer relationships.
So how’s your email marketing? Can you reexamine some of these fundamentals to improve sales to your file?
- If you want to increase the volume of promotions you send out, increase the volume of valuable content you deliver.
- Get to know and understand the different segments of your list. And plan your marketing with those segments in mind. Think about running multiple campaigns simultaneously to different segments of your list.
- Test running long-copy email campaigns against just promoting a landing page. Talk to your customers in your marketing, their people who are hoping you can help them.
- Use advertorial copy to deliver value in your promotions. More people will read it them and respond.
- Don’t let all your past work go to waste. Find ways to use past campaigns by targeting them towards newer prospects.
- Give your list a break from promotions every so often. Better, give away unexpected, valuable gifts every once in a while to reinvigorate people.
This is not an exhaustive list but it’s probably enough to chew on.
That’s enough information for several of the lists I subscribe to easily double their sales or better.
Hope that helps,
John Newtson
Popular Aricles
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...
Comments
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!