Email marketing is great – it builds massive amounts of good will, connection and trust with your audience. It generates more sales, more revenue, more profit and a better overall customer or client experience for the receiver of the marketing emails – especially when they are done right.

But how exactly do you leverage a marketing strategy that’s been constantly shown to generate ROIs upwards of 4400%?

Well, that’s what this post is all about.

But first, let’s tackle the 2 WORST marketing approaches that are ruining businesses.

Number 1: The All Giving Approach

Let’s say you have an email list of a 1000 people.

You do what most people do – send them an email once, maybe twice a week. You often attach some form of value to your email, a freebie product, a new free trial, anything to show that hey! You’re a giver! You’re ready to serve.

Maybe you feel like you’ve done enough giving and it’s time to get money back. You move on to

Number 2: The All Taking Approach

You make a hard sell, and you push them into buying something and buying now.

However this approach, almost always falls flat. And you are left wondering what’s going on – Why aren’t people responding? What are my emails lacking? Is it writing? My strategy? My product? My business? Is email marketing even effective at all?

Well, here’s the deal – the All Giving and the All Taking approaches are training your email list to never buy and to become freebie seekers, get offended and unsubscribe the minute you make that hard offer.

The hard sell emails, on the other hand, feel kind of tactless and pushy. Your email list can smell these things from a mile away, because they don’t even open them.

And all of this means that your email list, that marketing asset that you’ve worked so hard to build from scratch, is likely to only bring in a client or a new sale once every few months – if at all.

Which means this gold mine of potential opportunity is wasted. Because the people that liked you enough to subscribe to your email list, end up getting ignored and neglected.

So what happened? What went wrong?

Let’s say you have an email list of a 1000 people and a conservative open rate of 20%. That means that for every email you send, only 20% of your list, or 200 people, are opening it.

80% don’t. Which means, 800 people don’t even see your message.

And if you are only sending one email a week, maybe even longer, it doesn’t take long for those 800 people to forget about you, and move on.

But here’s the thing, it’s not the same 20% of people that open those emails every single time.
So in actuality, your email stats are a little worse.

To make things even harder, the people that are opening those emails – they are busy. Most people check their emails on their phone, and they could be anywhere. They could be checking your email while they are in line at the grocery store, while eating a meal, or waiting for a meeting to start. They could be doing a million things at once, and they got a bunch of other tasks on the go, and a thousand things on their mind. It’s difficult to hook them in.

But fear not – not all hope is lost. I’m going to detail how you can MASTER email marketing, with this five steps that you can easily implement into your email marketing strategy.

One. Segmentation

Segmentation is basically dividing your email subscribers based on a strategic set of criteria that you have determined (eg. location, purchase activity). Segmentation is what helps you send the right person the right message at the right time. What you can do is to create an inbound email experience and conversation means focusing just as much on the context of your message as the content you deliver. Bringing context and content together helps you write great emails and makes sure they connect with your audience.

Two. Personalization

In email, personalization is when you use your subscriber’s data to make your email feel customized for your subscribers, making it more intimate and relevant. Personalization is about creating a contextualized and individual experience. This can be done through behavioural email, which is the practice of sending automated, targeted emails to your customers based on the historical interactions they’ve had with your company.

Three. Data-driven Analysis

In a constantly changing world, data-driven analysis helps you evolve with your customers and not be left behind. By analyzing your emails regularly, and having emails as one of the core parts of your inbound strategy, you will give your customers exactly what they need. To implement data-driven analysis, you need to track the metrics that matter. Then, understand what those metrics indicate about the success of your email. Lastly, apply what you’ve learnt to optimize and improve each email that you send.

Fourth. Frequent Emails

Instead of sending 1 email a week, send 2 or 3. What this does is immediately increase the number of “touch points” and the number of opportunities for connection and communication with your market by 200-300% every single week. This keeps you and your business top of their mind and gives you way more opportunities to remind your list and your subscribers and your potential and current clients just how awesome you and your business are. By bumping up your open rates, and increasing your frequency and crafting all around better emails, you are now reaching 600 to 900 people each week, instead of the original 200.

Fifth. Email Script

Replace the 2 approaches with a strategic email script by using a combination of providing stories, tips and takeaways, and including a call to action in every single email you send. The benefit of having a script like this is that it helps you even if you are not a good writer. And it works even when you are busy as these things can be written and pretty much wrapped up in as little as 10 minutes a day. Using this strategy is an effective way to quickly and easily create email that sells, and helps you build a hyper engaged community and tribe of buyers that love you and support you and follow you and want to buy from you.

If you are starting out, remember that a small list that wants exactly what you’re offering is better than a bigger list that isn’t committed. A large list may appear impressive, but if your subscribers are not engaging with your emails, you may run into problems such as deliverability issues and spam traps. Building a small but strong list allows you to communicate with the customers who actually want to hear from you. More subscribers does not equate to more sales. Focus on having a list of quality email subscribers instead.

Email marketing is a powerful tool, and there is a lot that goes into an impactful email marketing strategy. Try these tips out, and watch it bring in new clients, leads and sales around the clock 24/7, 365 days a year!