Profitable Email Marketing: Aim For The Heart

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You don’t want to just use email marketing for the sake of email marketing. There’s no point in sending out email just because you thought had to. You get nothing from sending emails at the wrong time, to the wrong audiences, or if you approach email marketing in a way you shouldn’t.

Email marketing does have an ROI of 4300% yes. It still happens to be the best digital marketing channel in the world. It’s sticky, it lasts longer, it helps you nurture your leads in the best way possible, it’s powerful, and it just kicks ass.

Email marketing is super powerful and profitable, but only if you send out email sequences that are loved, appreciated, accepted, and valued by your customers.

Here are a few ways to prepare you to become the kind of business that sends out fantastic, valuable, and ultimately profitable emails:

If nothing, do the basics

All of this is for nothing if you don’t use email marketing at all, right? What’s the point reading this post (or many others like this one) when you won’t send out a single email, ever?).

Skipping this post right now? TL; DR? Don’t want to break your head and dig deeper into email marketing?

Then, do the basics. There’s no excuse for you to not send out an RSS-based email campaign — essentially a digest of all the blog posts you’ve published the previous week.

Setting up simple autoresponders to welcome your subscribers or customers, cart abandonment emails (if you are an ecommerce store), sending out occasional broadcasts with news and information about your business — those campaigns are basics (no-brainers).

If nothing, do just those. You’ll still do better with email marketing than several other businesses.

Stop being boring. Try Likable

Too many businesses (and too many people) are predictable. Being predictable is boring.

Boring won’t help subscribers stick around.

It’s easy to be likeable. Just be yourself. Write to a single person. Talk in a language they relate to. Use “you” instead of “one must ….”

See?

Talking only about your own self, your products or services, the weekend outing that you and your team indulged on, giving away too much in your emails (balance it here again), and sounding “corporate” are all absolute no-nos.

Whatever you do with email, don’t sound like you are talking “down” to your subscribers. Avoid trying to look, sound, feel, and communicate in a way that makes your subscribers feel smaller than you are.

Don’t talk down to your subscribers. Don’t ever write things like

“We are such a huge operation that reaching out to you has been on our mind but we couldn’t really get around to it…so now that we did, you can count your lucky stars”

“Our worldwide operations and 5 million+ customers keep us busy. We don’t usually say much, but now we have something to say…. ”

Don’t. Ever. Do. That.

Don’t vanish. Don’t overdo

Some businesses don’t ever bother sending out a single email in their entire lifetime. Several others overdo their email marketing by sending out more emails than they should.

Here’s the simple truth when it comes to determining the best frequency for email marketing: the more frequent and regular you are, the more profitable email marketing is for you.

Obviously, not sending any emails at all is fatal. It does you no good.

Clearly, over sending emails is disastrous too.

You just have to find the right balance with respect to email marketing frequency.

As Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights writes, points to some research done by companies such as TopTal and others.

For toptal, tests reveal that subscribers receiving only one email a week had made 14% more bookings than those receiving two emails over that three month test period.

When Net-a-porter reduced its weekly emails from 10 to 2, conversion rates increased and email open rates were at a whopping 50% or so.

The only way to know is to conduct long-term tests with respect to emailing frequency when it comes to email marketing and take it from there since every business is different.

Wow Is When Wow Is Due

When an email comes in carrying a simple white paper (on something technical probably), there’s nothing “Wow” about it. But when the email’s subject line itself claims that it’s “Wow” or when a widely known piece of knowledge comes shrouded in the secrecy of a downloaded zip file, there’s a mental disconnect.

Heck, there’s even disappointment.

Hunter Boyle of Aweber, featured on a Kissmetrics blog post, makes this point clearly enough.

As Hunter puts it, there’s nothing “Wow” about a white paper unless the content actually reveals something that its target audience never knew.

Go easy on “World’s best..”, “Wow”, “Hoo haa”, and “Awesome”. Thank you.

Go for the ask, when you should

Just like in traditional sales, you should go for the ask. You aren’t doing email for the sake of it, right? You are doing it for profits.

The right way to ask for the sale is only:

• After you’ve flooded your subscribers with enough value that they’d gladly pay for.
• When you know that your relationship with subscribers is sacred and that you’d never have them do something (even if it’s clicking on a link) that you won’t.
• If you are absolutely sure you know that the timing is just right.

But then, your email marketing won’t work if you don’t ask. Period.

What kind of emails do you send?

Note: Looking top build your email list? I highly recommend using OptinMonster for a confident and and absolutely stunning way to build your own list. If you are looking for the best email marketing provider, go for Mailchimp or Drip.