Email Publishers Profiting From the Inbox

The oldest form of social media is still the most potent for online publishers.
No, I’m not referring to Friendster.
The first email was sent in 1971, and it definitely didn’t include any “today only” offers on flatscreen TVs or discounted Indian food.
When we think of “social media” we think of faster, sexier platforms like Google +, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or (ahem) Facebook.
But every single minute, some 170 million emails are sent by an estimated 3.3 billion accounts worldwide, and around 100 a day land in your own inbox.
How can this ancient technology possibly drive the profits of a business online?
Let’s take a look …

A responsive email list is a far more valuable asset than a Twitter following

The trick to email marketing that works isn’t a trick at all, it’s the foundation of any proftable content marketing strategy.
It starts with a subscriber, and the one thing that subscriber wants at the moment he or she finds your website.
You see those prominent “sign up” boxes on every smart website for a reason. They are asking for your permission to deepen the conversation about what you’re looking for, and in a much more personalized setting.
Your prospect is what legendary copywriter Robert Collier calls “the man on the speeding train.”
We see something shiny through the window as we speed through the massive clutter of the social media landscape, but we don’t look for long because a new thing is already in our periphery.
Attention alone will get you nowhere. That’s the secret that so many successful email marketers have learned. Keeping your prospect’s attention is where the hard work comes in.
Robert Collier points out:

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

Let’s take a look at 7 successful email publishers who are delivering that kind of content daily …

1. Thrillist

Thrillist is a free daily email that uses a mix of content and commerce to blur the lines of traditional media. They create one-on-one relationships with their audience of 20-something guys to showcase “cool stuff,” localized by city delivery.
Ben Lerer, founder of Thrillist Media Group, which now touts an audience of over 4 million, and revenue of more than $50 million said:

When someone subscribes, they invite you into their inbox on a regular basis …

Their innovative approach to regular daily content seems to be working pretty well for them.

2. HARO

Peter Shankman founded HARO (Help a Reporter Out) as a humble service helping journalists connect to sources.
When HARO outgrew its Facebook home, Shankman took it to a daily email list, which grew to more than 100,000 subscribers and soon began to change the PR industry’s model of how reporters found story sources.
It resonated enough with the changing tides to get acquired in 2010 for what was rumored to be a highly attractive number.

3. Daily Worth

DailyWorth, a daily financial e-newsletter empowering women to “save more + spend smarter,” landed on Forbes Top 100 Websites for Women.
It has raised over $3 million in investor funding on the strength of its 200,000+ subscribers.
Founder Amanda Steinberg says:

E-newsletters are a great business because they follow proven, highly-scalable models, which make it easy to focus.

4. Ideal Bite

Ideal Bite started out as a daily email newsletter that tapped into the growing demand for “eco-conscious” food products and services.
Disney caught on and swooped up the site for around $15 million, likely due to their growing audience of conscious moms in a key demographic.

5. GeekChicDaily

GeekChicDaily became a wildly popular email opt-in list of 425,000 nerds with know-how that attracted big name investors.
They joined forces with Nerdist Industries to create a geekdom-juggernaut that reaches into the millions and was named one of the most influential brands on Twitter by Time Magazine.

6. Red Tricycle

Red Tricycle offers localized content via e-newsletter aimed directly at new parents looking for fun things to do with their kids.
They are growing fast on the strength of their near 400,000 subscribers and recently found some big investors like entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

7. Daily Candy

Daily Candy got the jump on email when they started offering their style-savvy e-newsletter for young women in 2000.
8 years later they were bought by Comcast for a mind-bending $125,000,000 on the strength of their 2.5 million subscribers.

What do all of these email newsletters have in common?

Undeniable value and the permission to deliver.
Psychologist Susan Weinschenk reminds us that our prospects are essentially “hard-wired” to seek out rewarding information and valuable services.
As content marketers, the easier we make it for prospects to get that truly valuable cookie content, the more addicted they become (in a good way) to engaging with you in a value exchange.
In a 2012 survey performed by ExactTarget, 91% of respondents said they checked their email daily, and 77% claimed that email was their preferred channel for “permission-based promotional messages.”
The runner up was direct mail at a whopping 9%.
Good old Facebook clocked-in at 4%.

Higher engagement means higher conversion rates

In the rather blunt phrasing of online marketer Derek Halpern:

If you’re not building your email list, you’re an idiot.

Get started today.

• Study your audience before you ever hit Send. Know your targeted niche and demographic cold.
• Make sure you are offering some kind of value exchange for people’s shrinking amount of free time. We’ve seen how well Groupon commodified the simplicity of email coupons, at least for awhile. Can you innovate in a different way?
• Localize your content to connect more deeply with a smaller audience, as opposed to having shallow relationships with a “catch-all” audience.
• Create email content that is succinct and easy to digest (see: Copywriting 101).
• When you build trust by offering valuable content, you can turn your audience’s precious attention into long-term interest that drives repeat traffic.

In a nutshell: Email marketing is still the most cost-effective and profitable way of delivering true value to an audience that wants it.

8 Common Misconceptions About Email Marketing

8 Common Misconceptions About Email Marketing

1) Trigger Words Land You in the Spam Filter

There are a ton of words that email marketers have been trained to avoid like the plague in their email messages -- particularly the subject line. Words like "Free," "Cash," "Quote," and "Save." These warnings come from the days when email inboxes were inundated by crap messages from email spammers. While the days of email spammers certainly aren't over, spam filters have gotten far more sophisticated at identifying what kinds of messages -- and more importantly, what kinds of email senders -- are legitimate. Spam filters look at way, way, way more than just your email subject line to determine if your message is spam.

2) People on Your Opt-in List Want to Hear From You

You generate all of your email contacts through legitimate opt-ins. Good for you! That means people raised their hand and said, "Hey! You! I want you to email me!"
That's true ... ish. Not everyone that opts in to your emails actually wants to receive your emails. Two scenarios may occur after an opt-in:

• Someone opted in thinking your emails would be something they aren't. As a result, they see your first couple of emails, end up disappointed, but don't necessarily get around to unsubscribing.
• The contact reads your emails for a while, but eventually becomes disengaged. Perhaps they change jobs, move, get busy, abandon that email address, or just plain lose interest in your content. Whatever the reason, they don't bother to unsubscribe from your emails.

In both of these scenarios, you have people on your opt-in list who, at one time or another, thought they wanted your content, but eventually decided they didn't ... and didn't tell you, either. That's why you can't rely on unsubscribes as the only way to tell if your email contacts want to hear from you; you should look at email engagement too. That's why it's important to periodically monitor email engagement, attempt to re-engage those who have become dis-engaged, and then cleanse your list of those who don't respond to your re-engagement campaign.

3) Unsubscribes Are Bad

Unsubscribes are an indication that someone doesn't want to receive email from you. Bad, right?
Not so fast. When people unsubscribe from your emails, it acts as a natural list cleanser. Like we just covered, there are plenty of people on your list who don't really want to hear from you ... they're just not going to the trouble of opening your message and unsubscribing. If you have a healthy unsubscribe rate -- under 1% -- then don't think of unsubscribes as a bad thing. Think of it as natural list cleansing that every email marketer needs to do to keep a healthy list, so you don't end up with frustrated subscribers who huff and puff and, out of frustration, just mark you as spam (when you really aren't).

4) Email Isn't a Lead Generator

Email is a nurturing tool -- it helps to convert leads into marketing qualified leads, but it doesn't actually generate net new leads. Right?
Wrong. Thinking of email as just a nurturing tool is only half the story. First, remember that emails are heavily shared -- to people not already on your email list. That means if you have a lead generating call-to-action in your email, and that email is forwarded to or shared with someone who's not on your list, you have the opportunity to generate a brand new lead. So if you don't already have forward and social sharing buttons in your email messages, add them stat!
The second scenario in which email is a lead generator is kind of a mashup between lead generation and nurturing -- because you're nurturing subscribers (sometimes referred to as prospects, depending on your internal nomenclature) into leads. For instance, if someone subscribes to our blog, they're only subscribing to receive email notifications when we publish new blog posts. They're not signing up to receive, say, invites to our next webinar. But when you send an email alerting these subscribers to a new blog post being published, that email could include a lead generating call-to-action, too. All the sudden, email has helped you upgrade subscribers to a lead in your database!

5) Emails Have to Be Highly Designed

Not at all. In fact, sometimes it's better that your emails are really plain -- like, so plain that they're plain text, even. There are a couple potential benefits to sending plain text, or almost plain text emails:

• The recipient doesn't feel like he or she is being marketed to. A plain text email is what they'd receive from a friend or colleague, and it's free from distracting bells and whistles. You're free to just say what you want to say, and the reader can just ... read it. This may not work for everyone, mind you. We've tested this on certain segments of our email list, and there are still some that response better to HTML messages. Like many email tests, your results will certainly vary, as well.
• It's easier for the email message to render. Emails with tons of design elements -- big images or video, for example -- could experience more hiccups than your basic HTML email with just a logo in the header and a small picture of, say, the product you're promoting. Some of your recipients might have images turned off by default, so your email looks totally whacky when the meaning of the email rests on all of the images displaying. Or perhaps your recipients are reading the message on their mobile devices -- are they really going to wait for that giant email to load? If they do, will it still look as great as it looked when you designed it on your desktop computer? It's a long shot, to be sure.

Just because you have the ability to do some epic design work in your email marketing, doesn't mean you should. Err on the side of simplicity, and test out more sophisticated design elements incrementally to see if they impact your conversion rates.

6) If You Abide by CAN-SPAM Laws, You're Gravy

Nuh uh. If you abide by CAN-SPAM laws, it means you're legally compliant. It doesn't mean you're going to get into inboxes, though. There's simply a greater correlation between people who get into inboxes that are CAN-SPAM compliant because, well, spammers don't get into inboxes as often as legit email marketers, and spammers aren't CAN-SPAM compliant.
If you want to increase the likelihood that you get into inboxes, you have way more to work on -- namely your sender reputation. I'd recommend reviewing this post, "How Marketers Can Avoid Those Dreaded Email Spam Traps" as a start. And, of course, remain CAN-SPAM compliant!

7) Open Rate Is an Important Email Marketing Metric

The email open rate metric many ESPs display is very misleading, because the name implies that it will tell you how much of your list opened your email.
It does not do this.
If you had a reliable open rate metric, email open rate would be an important metric to track. The problem is, email open rates are unreliable for a few reasons:

• All your recipients using Outlook have images blocked by default, which means open rate isn't tracked accurately ... because an email being opened is indicated by an image in that email being downloaded. All images blocked means no opens being recorded.
• This image blocking is becoming more common in other email clients as well. Do you have images blocked by default? I do. Some email marketers out there might think I really hate their emails ... but I don't. Usually.
• Similarly, mobile devices often default to a text format for emails in which images aren't automatically downloaded. Again, this will lead to a decrease in open rate.

Instead of looking at open rates to decide if your email send was successful, look at clickthrough rates on your email's calls-to-action, and the leads generated from that email send. That's what you care most about anyway, right?

8) Open Rate Is a Useless Email Marketing Metric

What the $&#@!? You just said ...
I know, I said email open rate isn't an important metric. But it doesn't mean it doesn't have a use. Email open rates are still useful as a comparative metric. If you're trying to see what subject line people are more likely to open, for instance, you can segment your send and compare the open rates -- assuming they are each being affected relatively similarly by open rate metric "issues." So while open rate isn't a reliable email marketing metric to gauge how many people are opening your emails, it can still be used as an gauge when considered as a comparative metric.

Why Thank-You Emails Are the Untapped Gold Mine of Email Marketing

Transactional emails are the messages you receive from ecommerce sites like Amazon.com that confirm your order and provide shipment information and other details. These messages get triggered by a specific action your contacts have taken and can also be used to inform contacts how to complete that particular action. For instance, if you were to sign up for a webinar, you'd complete a form and then receive a transactional email, which would provide you with the relevant login information in order to join.


So what's the marketer's equivalent to transactional emails? Thank-you emails, or the automated messages triggered when visitors convert on your landing pages!

The Benefits of Thank-You Emails

Recipients anticipate transactional/thank-you emails because they help them complete an action. It's the main reason why recipients open and click on them. And as a marketer, you can easily take advantage of this dynamic by including highly customized calls-to-action in your thank-you emails to leverage the fact that the lead is fresh and already actively engaged with your brand.

Thank-you emails are effective for two main reasons:

1. They place your content directly in the contact's inbox. So even if he or she clicks away from the thank-you page they're redirected to after completing your conversion form, they can still search their inbox and find the information they need to redeem the offer, such as the ebook's download link, webinar login information, etc.   
2. People will often share your content by forwarding it via email, so thank-you emails give you yet another opportunity to extend the reach of your content to a brand new audience.

Thank-You Emails Twice as Engaging as General Marketing Emails

While we can easily theorize that thank-you emails would be beneficial to a company's marketing mix, we at HubSpot wanted to analyze just how engaging they are in practice. To understand how effective thank-you emails are compared to other email sends, we decided to compare them to another type of email we commonly send: dedicated marketing emails, sent on an one-off basis.

For comparison, we then looked at the generic marketing emails we've sent to one group of our buyer personas. The sample used here was larger -- 131 emails -- which, on average, generated a 12% open rate and a 6% CTR. In other words, the simple, automated kickback thank-you emails generated twice the engagement of one-off, dedicated marketing emails. What's even better -- they tend to take half the time to create!

Marketing Takeaways

Now that we've covered some of the fundamentals of thank-you emails and their effectiveness, here are some marketing tips you should start applying to your marketing today.

1) Use Simple Thank-You Emails

Starting with the obvious, if you aren't yet using kickback thank-you emails that get triggered after prospects convert on your landing pages, start implementing them sooner rather than later. To take this a step further, you can even make these emails the first part of a more complex lead nurturing workflow so you can control what other communication that contact receives, continuing to nurture them over time and move them through your sales and marketing funnel.

2) Optimize Your Thank-You Emails

This part is key. Make sure you're also optimizing your kickback emails to encourage secondary conversions. In other words, include calls-to-action (CTAs) for high-value marketing offers that will move your leads further along in the sales cycle, such as a consultation with your sales team or a free trial of your product.
If you're already adding secondary calls-to-action to your thank-you emails (well done!), take your skills to the next level by implementing Smart CTAs that adapt to your individual email recipients. Smart CTAs are dynamic CTAs that automatically change based on the person viewing them, creating much more targeted, segmented, and effective email marketing. To learn more about how to implement Smart CTAs, check out our ultimate guide to using dynamic, personalized CTAs.

3) Make Your Thank-You Emails Social Media-Friendly

As we already mentioned, one of the key benefits of emails is that they get forwarded and shared, helping your content reach a brand new audience. Encourage this sharing of your emails by making it extremely easy for recipients to share your email content with their networks. Include social media sharing buttons/links and language that invites your contacts to forward the message to others.

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HOW TO CRUSH YOUR COMPETITORS ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN 30 DAYS

1. PERFORMING A SOCIAL MEDIA COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

To know how much muscle you’ll need to put behind your social media marketing, you need to gauge how you stack upagainst your competitors. Time to perform a social media competitive analysis! First, grab your list of competitors -- ha, like you even have to write them down. Then visit the following social media sites to determine if your competitors have a presence:

Facebook
Twitter
There may be other social media sites that are important to you -- Google+, Quora, or YouTube, for example. If so, youshould certainly perform an audit on those sites, too. But we’re going to focus on the sites that marketers are utilizingthe most, and have the most questions around in this ebook.
For each social network, you’ll want to note a few key pieces of intel:
Number of fans/followers
Frequency of posting
What kind of content is published (videos, images, blog posts, data, jokes, polls)
How much content is their’s, versus how much is sourced
Fan engagement

You should also browse their homepage and other main pages of their website (particularly their blog!) for social media follow and share buttons to determine how seriously they take social media marketing. Revisit these metrics on a monthly basis to see whether they are making progress, stagnating, or falling behind. Remember, social media requires upkeep, and not every brand is cut out to be a social media marketer for the long haul.

Now you know where you stand, which means you know how far you have to go. And when you revisit these metrics every month, it’ll feel good to watch your number creep up faster and faster, until one day ... you overtake your competitors completely!

2. FIND & CREATE KILLER SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT (QUICKLY )

Now that you’re revved up to crush your competition, you have to get really, really active on social media to grow your reach. And being active on social media means you need one thing: tons of content. No, content isn’t just a tweet or a Facebook post, either; to make your social media activities actually impact your business’ bottom line, you need to create lead generation content that lives on your website.

No, you need lots of content, and you need it fast. It’s time to make lemonade out of lemons, people,
which means we don’t start from scratch. Let’s dig content out of the deepest, darkest recesses of your website, and spin it into social media-ready content in a flash! Let’s get started with how you can whip up some blog posts quickly to feed your social media presence:

Reach out to guest bloggers -- they’ll create your content for you!
Curate content -- round up the best blog posts, data points, info graphics, etc. on various subject matters. Jot down the answer to a common question -- people love a good FAQ.
Publish excerpts from existing content, like ebooks and white papers.
Conduct a quick interview -- either on video or via email -- and let your subject matter expertise blow your audience away for you.

If you’re already an avid blogger, you should also have an arsenal of blog posts at your disposal that you can republish. Only republish your evergreen content -- the content that withstands the test of time. Perform a quick audit of every old blog post that you plan to promote via social media to ensure they all have relevant, up-to-date calls-to-action. Remember, if your social media traffic doesn’t convert into a lead, it isn’t helping your business’ bottom line.

Speaking of lead generation, you’re going to want to publish offer content to social media to get more bang for your buck. Here’s some quick offer content you can churn out in a flash to feel your social presence:

Create a blog bundle -- a kit of sorts that compiles blog posts about one particular subject.
Do a data compilation of all the critical data points someone in your industry might need to know.
Repurpose your presentations -- Power Points can easily be converted into downloadable PDFs!
Relaunch an old offer; just be sure to update anything that’s out of date.
Record an interview or debate -- all you need is a video camera and 15 minutes of two people’s time!
Create templates and checklists -- these require very little writing, too!
Reach out to partners to create co-branded content that eases the content creation burden.

Finally, you’ll need some visual content to keep your social media presence going strong -- particularly on Facebook and Pinterest. Social media fans and followers adore visual content, which means your engagement will soar when you publish it. And more engagement means wider reach -- just what you need to crush your competitors! Take time to curate and create visual content; here are some quick ways:

Create memes -- you can do it quickly on memegenerator.com
Publish infographics -- your own, or others
Publish a chart or graph with data your fans and followers would care about.
Insert an interesting data point into a visual -- simply overlay the data in big, bold text over a relevant image.
Find cartoons about your industry -- people love a laugh.
Take behind-the-scenes pictures of your employees, customers, and office happenings.
Share videos, like case studies, interviews, and quick tips and how-to content.
Now that you have more content than you know what to do with, it’s time to use it to drive some serious social media results.

3. WHAT CONTENT TO POST WHERE

If you’re going to slay your competitors on social media, you need to figure out what kind of content works best for eachsocial network so no efforts are wasted.

Twitter

The best content to publish on Twitter is, obviously, short and sweet. Whatever piece of content you’re linking to in the tweet, find the most compelling part of the story to include in your tweet copy. Pulling a shocking data point from your blog post, for example, is more likely to entice followers to retweet your content and click the link in your tweet than the title of your blog post.

Pinterest

Unsurprisingly, you’ll want to post all that visual content you spent time creating on Pinterest. Pinterest users value quality images, so everything you post should look beautiful to get the most repins and followers. And of course, the descriptions should include a link back to your website to turn that traffic into leads. Try to create boards that are both directly and indirectly related to your brand -- HubSpot, for example, has boards with marketing infographics, and boards that are just
images of fun orange things.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn users have a longer attention span that people on other social networks -- they’re there to do something impactful for their businesses or careers. You should feel comfortable crafting more text-heave status updates, posting more long form lead generation content, and speaking in a more promotional tone about your products and services.

Facebook

Facebook should lead heavily towards visual content, but should always be accompanied by explanatory text to give the visuals context. Visual content has higher engagement on Facebook, and the more engagement your content has, the more positively Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm will favor your posts -- thus expanding your reach! You can also be much more personal with the content you post to Facebook, since it’s where people go to chat with friends ...not coworkers.

4. Quick Wins

To overtake your competitors on social media, you’ll need some tricks up your sleeve that let you squeeze every last ounce of ROI out of your efforts. And to do that, you need to approach your social media marketing with data-backed tips that we’ve uncovered as a result of a lot of social media stalking. Here are the sneaky little tricks that most people don’t know about, but will make your social media efforts far more fruitful (and with no extra effort required!)

Quick Wins on Pinterest

Descriptions about 200 characters long are repinned the most.
Find content spins around words like “quotes,” “products,” “DIY,” “inspiration,” “books,” and “ideas.” These words are the most frequently pinned on Pinterest. Content that is liked gets repinned more often than content with lots of comments -- so replicate your content that gets liked!
Make your images tall! Taller images get more repins.

5. BE MORE EFFICIENT WITH SOCIAL MEDIA UPKEEP

You need to be able to execute all of these social media activities fast, which means you should leverage the power of technology to make you ultra-efficient. You should utilize the following to make social media marketing just a blip on your marketing radar:

Social Media Calendar
Social Media Scheduling Tool
Social Media Monitoring Tool

First, set aside one day a week -- let’s say Friday afternoon -- to craft all of your social media content for the next 7 days. You should take that content arsenal of yours, and select a mix of the blog posts, lead generation offers, and visual content you’d like to post on each social network. Then craft a tweet or update to go along with each piece of content, and denote what day and time that piece of social media content will be posted. This is your social media calendar!

Once you have your weekly calendar created, it’s time to automate the publishing process as much as possible. Use a third-party application to input the content you’ve laid out in your calendar, and schedule the updates to publish automatically.

Finally, set up a monitoring system that lets you go about your daily marketing activities with little interruption from social media. Set up keywords for which you’d like to be pinged -- mentions of your product, for example, so you can jump on a sales opportunity. Otherwise, check in on each network every couple hours to engage with fans and followers, and address any problems that arise.

6. LEVERAGE OTHER MARKETING CHANNELS TO BOOST SOCIAL MEDIA

To squeeze even more juice out of your social media marketing, you need to leverage the power of other marketing channels.

Integrating Social Media and Email

Use your email marketing to increase your social media following by adding social media follow/subscription buttons (e.g. ‘Follow Us on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+!’) so you can touch potential customers through social channels. You should also add social media sharing buttons (i.e. ‘Share on Facebook!’ ‘Tweet This!’ ‘Share on LinkedIn’) to every email you send so recipients are encouraged to share your email content with their personal networks.

Integrating Social Media and Blogging

Make sure every blog post you publish includes social media sharing buttons so readers can easily share your content with their social networks. In addition, feature social media follow buttons on your blog so readers can easily follow your social media accounts. You should also monitor which blog content performs best so those posts get the social media face time they deserve.

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Email Marketing

EMAIL MARKETING


Email marketing is a great, inexpensive way to reach the people on your list. If done correctly, this type of marketing will take your business to the next level and bring a great ROI (Return On Investment), for years to come. Here are the most important things you can do to improve your email marketing.


GET BETTER OPEN RATES


Are your emails getting opened? Before we get there, it might be good to know if you’re even tracking your email open rates. If not, start doing so immediately. Your email marketing provider should have this information available, and you should definitely start paying attention.
Once you determine your open rates, you’ll probably want to improve them. There are several reasons why your emails might not be getting to the inboxes of your prospects and/or not being getting opened.


Avoid Spam words...

If your emails contain a lot of spamrelated words (such as free, cheap, %, work-from-home, click here, discount, coupon, special offer, limited time), chances are slim that your prospects are even getting them. Spam filters are becoming more and more sensitive, and they can remove your email before it even gets to the inbox. Try to avoid words that might sound like spam, even if you think you’ll be safe this time.

Subject Lines and Sender...

Once your email gets through the spam filters, your readers have to decide whether or not to open it. The subject line and “from” address will be big factors in leading them to make that decision.
Make sure that your subject lines are intriguing, but that they don’t overpromise. Consumers have been jaded by companies promising the world and not delivering. Avoid sensational subject lines that claim “800% increase in sales” or “I lost 200 pounds in 1 week.” Besides being unbelievable, these subject lines probably wouldn’t make it past the spam filters. Be real, be convincing, be a little mysterious. Subject lines are only half of the equation. Be sure that the “from” field is full of useful information too. Typically, your company name is a good way to ensure recognition and trust.

Personal names work too, provided that they are recognizable. Don’t insert a name that your prospects or customers won’t recognize. Avoid using “noreply” or “systems” addresses—these are not at all personal and are less likely to be opened.

Send Relevant Content...

When you send an email, make sure the content is of value to your prospects. A valuable email could contain a special offer that appeals to the buyer, useful educational content, entertainment, or content that gives requested information.

Emails should also be sent to current lists. And your marketing isn’t relevant to people who didn’t ask for it. Don’t use outdated lists, purchased lists, or lists that aren’t yours ... that is a sure-fire recipe for
spam complaints and poor open rates.

Frequency...

Sending out too many emails will make you a nuisance that ends up in the trash bin almost immediately. Waiting too long in between emails might cause your prospects to forget you and will also land your “unrecognizable” email in the trash bin. Find a happy medium where you can stay in touch with prospects without bombarding them with daily emails.

But the only way to know how often you should be sending is to ask your contacts. You may be in an industry where they want an email a day. Or maybe once a week is appropriate. Take a survey and find out what your contacts are looking for.

Make Sure Your Emails Are Interesting

Your emails should be interesting. This starts with the subject line, but it also includes the headline, design, and content. It is important to be personal—think of your target audience as if they were sitting in a room with you. Be yourself and be different. You have to differentiate yourself from the other emails sitting in that inbox.

You don’t have to include everything in the email. Build anticipation by offering a brief explanation and then sending them to a landing page, blog post, product page, or other destination that can give them more information.

If you are promoting an event, build anticipation by sending reminder emails or emails that prepare your prospects for the big day. Send a little bit at a time and gain their trust by offering valuable information each time.

To get your contacts looking forward to more emails, try this technique: Tell them you’re sending them a gift in the mail … so keep an eye out. Then when that gift arrives, you can bet your contacts will be looking forward to the next email from you—to see what other surprises you have in store.

Your content should also walk your customers down the path toward a sale. Everything you write should help the prospect get answers, clarify misconceptions, climb over stumbling blocks, and otherwise help them arrive at your product/service, ready to buy.

Use Permission-Based Marketing

Prospects need to opt-in in order to receive email communications from you. This is called permission-based marketing, and it is crucial if you want to do it the right way. When a prospect opts-in to your list, he/she should know what to expect from your future communications. Tell them whether you are going to be sending weekly tips, occasional promotions, or daily offers. Be sure to spell out both the frequency and content matter of your future emails.

It is also important to allow your prospects to easily opt-out of communications when they desire. Allow them to manage their data, including the option to stop receiving all communication.

Create an Email Strategy

Sending one-off emails to friends and family works great, but it doesn’t work well for marketing. Each email you send out should fit into a greater scheme, and they should all work toward a common goal.

For example, you can create an email series that highlights the “3 secrets to success in cold weather gardening.” Each week, you can send out another email packed with data, stories, and links relating to one of the secrets. At the end of the series, you can ask recipients to buy your book, attend your garden show, or come in for a special discount on tulip bulbs. The emails work together, building anticipation along the way, and culminate with a call to action.

You can do the same thing with long-term follow-up sequences, new lead education, or any other marketing campaign. Best of all, you can write, create, and load these emails ahead of time. As you get new leads, you can put them into whichever sequence is most appropriate.

Use Multimedia and Links

Email marketing is a good way to communicate with your list, but it isn’t always the best way to educate, entertain, or sell. Including links to videos, podcasts, entertaining articles, social media campaigns, contests, or surveys, however, is a great way to reinforce your message in a unique way.

Don’t try to say it all in the email … use all of your resources together. Email is just a great way to get the word out. Different prospects respond to different forms of communication, so don’t be
afraid to try different strategies.

Consistent Follow-Up

One of the major reasons small businesses fail is that they don’t follow up with leads and prospects. In general, it takes several communications with a prospect before he/she is ready to buy. But most businesses give up after one or two emails. That won’t get the job done.

Stop leaving money on the table and start following up with all of your prospects. If you can stay in front of them, educating and building trust along the way, they’ll come to you when they are ready to buy.

One of the best ways to have consistent follow-up is through an email sequence. If you put a new-lead campaign, a long-term nurture sequence, and a new-customer campaign into place, you will see dramatic improvement in your conversion rates. The best part? You have to write these campaigns only once.

When you're ready, automate the process and grow. You'll know when it's time, as you'll feel overwhelmed by these daily tasks to the point where you'll have no other choice but to do so.